Denver brought back all of its key rotation players minus Bruce Brown Jr., but the same starting five that ran roughshod over the NBA a year ago simply was not as good as Minnesota's top five in the 2024 Western Conference Semifinals. "The better team won," Nuggets coach Michael Malone said after his team was eliminated.

The Nuggets are on the verge of serious trouble and possibly without two of their best players for Game 3 to boot. Let’s take a look at the low down.

As the Denver Nuggets try to figure out what went wrong in their Game 7 loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves in the Western Conference semifinals,

In the NBA arguably more than any other American sports league, the playoffs have a tendency to consume any relevant regular-season context about a team or an individual. That reality has worked to Jamal Murray’s advantage over the last five years of Nuggets runs.