Waking up to find out that Nikola Jokic avoided a serious knee injury and will be reevaluated in four weeks was an incredible sigh of relief for the Nuggets. The Joker will be back in a month or so, and the team should be good to go long before the postseason begins. But unfortunately, this injury timeline means the front office won’t get much of a look at this rotation at full strength before the trade deadline.
In some ways, this shouldn’t be a big deal. Most of the heavy lifting was done in the offseason anyway. The new co-GMs had a clear vision after the way the last couple of seasons ended, and they wanted to round out the roster with functional depth around the star players.