Grading The Week: Anthony Edwards, Minnesota Timberwolves didn’t just beat Nuggets. They broke them

The Timberwolves didn’t just beat the Nuggets.

They broke them.

Did you see Nikola Jokic gesticulating on the bench in San Francisco during a 118-104 loss to the Warriors late Friday night? As they say in Sombor, nije dobro.

If you haven’t, don’t look. It’ll hurt. Like it hurt the guys on the Grading The Week crew who still proudly wear their Robert Pack replica jerseys to work.

For one, it’s a third straight defeat and Denver’s fifth loss in eight games. For another, it’s the second time this season the Nuggets have lost consecutive games immediately after a loss to those Pups from the Great White North. (For hoops masochists, if we lump last year’s Western Conference semifinals with this year’s regular season, the Nuggets are 2-4 in the games immediately following a defeat to Minnesota.)

More pain: The Nuggets, as of Saturday morning, were 6-9 in their last 15 games. They’re not coasting into the postseason. They’re limping.

Nikola Jokic realizing he can’t carry Nuggets alone — D

This isn’t 2023’s April of easy clinching, a nice rest-and-set-your-chess-pieces for the playoffs to come. This feels like a car that’s about to enter the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb with a hole in the floorboards, duct tape on the bumpers and sticky brakes.

Unfortunately, just like in the Race to the Clouds, the tightest curves in the NBA Playoffs usually don’t have guardrails. And this team is giving off all the warning signs of a first-round exit waiting to happen.

Defense is often discussed but rarely realized. When Jamal Murray and Michael Porter Jr. don’t play, nobody can shoot. When they do play, the two often take turns at breaking your heart. This isn’t meant to sound callous, but it’s easy to imagine a postseason opponent daring Russell Westbrook, Christian Braun and Peyton Watson to beat them with jump shots,  and daring, and daring and daring … until one of them, or all three, brick the Nuggets into the ol’ 1-2-3-Cancun.

And on that last point, we’d love nothing more than to be proven wrong. But the Nuggets’ collective failures are compounding like interest now, from the top down.

Champions can be built on the back of one Hall-of-Famer; Dynasties require more than one all-time great. Murray and MPJ, for all their gifts, are too flighty for immortality.

These things have layers. And right now the most damning layer of all might be the empathy Team GTW feels for the Joker. There’s Jokic, isolated on a life raft amid choppy Western Conference seas, a castaway forced to watch a second NBA title drift slowly away.

During the Nuggets’ 0-3 week, the Big Honey sat out one game as a respite, the second night of a back-to-back, after producing one of the best games in NBA history — 61 points, 10 rebounds and 10 assists over a whopping 53 minutes. Over Jokic’s two appearances during this Denver funk, he averaged 45 minutes, 47 points, 11 boards, 9.5 dimes and five 3-pointers.

His teams lost by a combined 15 points anyway.

The Big Honey is 30. Jokic could play at an MVP level for another 10-11 years if he so desired. But to assume that isn’t just unfair and myopic — it’s foolish. Thirty is not 29. Or 27. The best player in the world doesn’t ever get those years back. The Nuggets’ franchise leaders, particularly Calvin Booth, have failed Jokic spectacularly in this regard, despite repeated statements of intent and public vows to never skirt such a sacred responsibility.