Aaron Gordon's Basketball Self-Actualization
The Denver Nuggets have an ecosystem that is perfect for letting Aaron Gordon be the best basketball version of himself.
Aaron Gordon was the star of the Denver Nuggets’ NBA Finals Game 4 victory over the Miami Heat. He finished the evening with 27 points, 7 rebounds, and 6 assists, while putting in an insane 73.3% of his shots.
Gordon’s stat line appears to be one of a ball dominant star. Its hard to put up that many points without taking on a leading offensive role. But in actuality Gordon has been something of a star-level role player throughout the year, and that’s exactly how he performed on Friday night.
Denver’s burly wing/forward touched the ball plenty, but nearly everything he did was opportunistic, not scripted. He bullied smaller defenders at the basket (and occassionally as a driver), knocked down open looks from beyond the arc, leveraged his athleticism to push the ball after rebounds, and timed up perfect cuts to get easy buckets when Miami sent extra attention to Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray.
Those two have made life easy on Gordon, who once aspired to be more of an offensive focal point. In his days in Orlando, the Magic had very few players capable of creating even below-average offense. Gordon was the best of a bad set of options. His eyepopping athleticism enabled him to create separation consistently enough that he always held a bit of intrigue as a primary offensive weapon, but his relative lack of panache off the bounce and shaky shooting never translated.
In Denver Gordon has no choice but to cede shots and touches. Jokic is one of the greatest offensive players of all time and Murray is a star-level scorer/shooter who can go supernova in the blink of an eye. Together they are nearly unstoppable.
Gordon complements them perfectly, doing all of the things he showed off in Game 4. He’s a low-volume, high-efficiency scorer who can do a little bit of everything on the court. In a vaccum - or worse in an offensive ecosystem devoid of high end talent - Gordon’s jack of all tradesness isn’t very helpful. In the context of the Nuggets’ unsolvable riddle revolving around Jokic and Murray, being ok-to-good at so many different things is a huge weapon, rather than a detriment.
Playing a less pivotal offensive role also frees Gordon up to play with more verve defensively. He’s arguably the Nuggets best defnder, a massive, mobile chess piece on that end, capable of taking on the best opposing matchups and switching up and down the positional spectrum.
Gordon deserves a massive amount of credit for finding and thriving in his role. He’s always had the tools to be one of the best supplementary talents in the NBA, but embracing that mantel isn’t easy, particularly because his early career was so focused on developing the skills of a traditional on-ball star.
Hundreds of players have failed to accept such a reality. Gordon is on the verge of winning a championship because he has.