Why Aaron Gordon May Be The Key To A Better Denver Nuggets Bench

In the Nikola Jokic era of the Denver Nuggets, one of the team’s perennial afflictions has been a consistently poor performance by their bench relative to the rest of the NBA.

Dating at least as far back as 2019 (over five years ago!) and 2022, I (and many others) have chronicled Denver’s perpetual bench woes, and unfortunately for the Nuggets, the current 2024-25 season is continuing the trend – with a specific asterisk named Aaron Gordon, who we will get to shortly, as he may be the key to improving the team’s second unit performance.

Based on point differential per 100 possessions – roughly how much per game, adjusted for pace, a team is either outscoring or getting outscored by opponents – the Nuggets’ bench has been in the negative in five of the last six seasons (which is to say, losing their bench minutes), and in the bottom third of the NBA in all of the last four, per NBA.com.

Looking at the peak era of three-time MVP and one-time Finals MVP Nikola Jokic, only in the 2020-21 season did the Nuggets manage to muster a net positive bench performance.

To be clear, when the term “bench performance” is used here regarding the Nuggets, it actually more specifically means those precarious minutes which fans (and likely Denver’s coaching staff as well) have come to dread: when Joker is off the court.

In fact, one of the defining characteristics of the Nuggets in the age of Jokic is that for four consecutive seasons he has led the NBA in on- versus off-court differential among all players with at least 1000 minutes, according to Cleaning the Glass.

This season, for example, Jokic tops the league with a jaw-dropping plus 27.1 point differential per 100 possessions when he’s been on the court versus off, followed at a distant second by Chris Paul at plus 17.5, and third by Victor Wembanyama at plus 16.2.

Simply put, the Nuggets’ drop-off when Jokic goes to the bench has been downright enormous.

In most cases, that is. But as mentioned before, there is one exceptional outlier to this overall trend, namely those Denver lineups when Aaron Gordon is on, but Nikola Jokic is off the court.

And in fact, in going through Nuggets lineups where Jokic is off the court but “Nuggets player X” is on, Gordon is the only individual Nuggets player who is in the positive side of the ledger – and impressively so with Denver outscoring opponents by 8.9 points per 100 possessions in those scenarios.

Gordon returned to action on January 12 after a nine-game injury absence, and has been coming off the bench since then as he ramps back up. And it does not seem to be a coincidence that in this recent five-game stretch (with Gordon playing four games and resting for one), the net rating of the Nuggets’ bench has surged to plus 6.0, good for third-best in the league in that span.

Additionally, lineups featuring the two-man frontcourt combination of Gordon with DeAndre Jordan, who has by all indications firmly secured his role as Denver’s backup center, have been even more effective, outscoring opponents by 17,8 points per 100 possessions.

It may be a fortunate silver lining of Gordon’s injury that led to this pairing getting more run together, or perhaps some shrewder problem solving by head coach Michael Malone and his staff (or a mix of both), but it does appear to have been the key to unlock greater success for the Nuggets’ bench.

One major caveat here, as shown in the chart above, is that given the significantly smaller sample sizes of these lineups compared with those which have taken the floor more frequently this season, is that they haven’t been as fully tested over a more significant period of time to demonstrate they will work so well on a consistent, reliable basis.

Also, the looming reality is that Aaron Gordon, who is Denver’s fourth-highest paid player, and received a four-year, $133 million extension last October – not to mention the fact he was a critical, integral part of the Nuggets’ 2023 championship run, is a starter, and not a bench player, and as he returns to full health, all expectations are that he’ll return to the starting lineup, with Russell Westbrook (who has exceeded expectations as a starter in his own right) likely returning to the bench.

But even assuming this return to the status quo is on the horizon, it seems imperative that Malone and the Nuggets coaching staff find creative rotational solutions to stagger Gordon to the bench when Jokic is off the court in order to preserve and continue cultivating Denver’s newfound, but potentially fragile bench success.

And if the Nuggets can even slightly increase Jordan’s share of minutes by making his time on the court more viable through a Gordon pairing, it should have the added benefit of helping them reduce Nikola Jokic’s minutes and workload, something which could be critical for their postseason success.