Gordon, once miscast as a number one option, has evolved into a turbocharged role player capable of filling in for Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray. “There are only two positions in basketball: on the floor and off the floor,” he states. “And I like being on the floor.”
As Anthony Edwards stood to exit the press conference stage, his eyes drifted down to the box score in front of him, and the full accounting of the Minnesota Timberwolves’ Game 4 loss to the Denver Nuggets. The reigning champions had just carried out a full-scale deconstruction of the best defense in the league. It was ruthless. Systematic. Denver had carved out quality shot after quality shot to make an even series out of near disaster. Yet even as Edwards began to walk away from it all, his neck craned back to the box score.
“Aaron Gordon,” he muttered, shaking his head. Even to one of the league’s most staggering talents, Gordon’s contribution seemed beyond belief. It wasn’t just the 27 points—more than any Timberwolves besides Edwards—but also the near-perfect shooting, the pressure of the occasion, the sheer range of it all. Teams like Minnesota pour so much into their efforts to slow down Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray, and Gordon is often the player who punishes them for it. His best performances break teams. “Nikola’s gonna do what he does: 35, seven, and seven,” Nuggets head coach Michael Malone said post game. “But what Aaron is doing in terms of the offense, the shot making, the playmaking, the physicality, the defense on two All-Stars—so much is being asked of him right now.” And in so many ways, Gordon is delivering.
It’s impossible to pin down Gordon’s exact responsibilities for these Nuggets. Most everything in Denver goes through Jokic. Murray largely plays to his strengths. Michael Porter Jr. and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope are who they are. But Gordon’s role toggles constantly between expansion and contraction—transcending the needs of a matchup to meet the needs of a moment. Sometimes what the Nuggets need is for Gordon to play to the edges of the offense. He does so brilliantly and without complaint. Other times, like in Game 4, what they needed most was to put the ball in Gordon’s hands, trusting the veteran forward to run point so Murray wouldn’t have to. Playoff basketball changes quickly, and Gordon helps the Nuggets keep up.
Such is the benefit of an overqualified, supercharged role player with the enduring capacity to do more. Gordon has spent his career expanding his game while narrowing his role—making him one of Denver’s most dynamic players, a well of potential energy just waiting to be tapped. It’s Gordon who allows the Nuggets to be lateral thinkers. He knows how to run every set in the playbook from every position. He has the ball skills to initiate the offense or simply keep it moving. The fact that he can take on the toughest defensive assignments—including Edwards—makes entire lineups viable.
“There are only two positions in basketball: on the floor and off the floor,” he says. “And I like being on the floor.”
Gordon clearly isn’t the Nuggets’ best player, but in a way, he’s the component that makes their team work. Denver wouldn’t have won the title last season if not for the discovery that it didn’t need to play a dedicated backup center because Gordon could do that job, too, on top of so many others. The latest version of that lineup faced a critical test in Game 4, when the Nuggets began the second quarter without Jokic on the floor, holding tight to a five-point lead.
What followed was a master class: three minutes of the artful, precise basketball that we’ve come to expect of Denver, only without the three-time MVP who typically makes it possible. This time, it was Gordon twirling through the lane and finding a teammate for a layup; power-posting his way inside and spraying out to a shooter for a 3; and taking the mismatch in front of him as an invitation to march all the way to the rim. By the time Jokic returned to the floor, Gordon and his teammates had added nine points to the lead. Denver went on to win by eight, 115-107, in a game that could swing the series.
“I don’t give a shit if I have zero points or a hundred points,” Gordon says. “It doesn’t matter, as long as we win, and I’m out there impacting the game and talking to my team and we’re cohesive.” His teammates will tell you that Gordon, in fact, is what makes the Nuggets cohesive. His complete absence of ego. The way he lifts people up and holds them accountable. His willingness to do less or take on more. Winning a championship effectively requires someone in this mold—a role player too skilled for their job, but not above it. “If we need him to score, he’ll score,” Porter says. “If we need him to pass, he’ll pass.” And then, after doing whatever is required, Gordon will let it all go.
So many NBA players cling to the comforts of routine, of knowing where and how their opportunities will come. Gordon is too adaptable to have that luxury, and frankly, doesn’t want it. Every time he takes the floor is a chance to give the Nuggets exactly what they need. He just has to punch in, get to work, and figure out what that might be.
As the clock wound down on a shambling crunch-time possession, Gordon could feel the pull. It was just his third game with the Nuggets after spending his first six-plus seasons on underwhelming Magic teams, most of which had turned to him in exactly these sorts of situations. Tight margin. Game in the balance. Now, Gordon found himself out on the wing, growing antsier by the second. He almost screened off the ball for Porter, but reconsidered. He started drifting into the corner, but stopped short, shuffling around aimlessly on the wing instead. His instincts grew louder.
“I’m like: I need the ball,” Gordon remembers. “I need the ball to win this game for us.”
But as he mulled about, looking for his place among his new teammates, something unfamiliar happened: Murray shook loose at the top of the floor, got a step on his defender, and rose up for an elbow fadeaway that dropped straight through the net, with no contribution from Gordon at all. “And I was like, ‘Oh. This is a little bit easier,’” Gordon says.
The Nuggets already had their closers. What they wanted from Gordon was everything else: the finishing, the defense, the playmaking. Everything that binds a team together. Denver traded for Gordon in March 2021 to address what general manager Calvin Booth recalls as a “gaping hole” at power forward following Jerami Grant’s departure in a sign-and-trade. When Gordon arrived, Malone and his staff urged the newest Nugget to play his game—to be himself. But who was he? Gordon had played for five different head coaches during his first six seasons in Orlando. He tried so many roles on for size that he was never quite sure what kind of player he was supposed to be.
“One coach would want it done this way, and then halfway through the season the coach would want it done another way,” Gordon says. “Then the next season, we’d have a new coach and then he would want it done another way. And I’m still trying to figure out how to even put the ball in the basket, let alone win.”
In those days, Gordon—a fourth overall pick with incomprehensible athletic gifts on a wayward team—was interested in exploring what all he could be. “Looking back, it’s only natural for him to try to push the limits and see what he can do—if he can be a franchise guy or whatever,” Booth says. “So I feel like at times, maybe even I misunderstood how he played there.” Consider it Gordon’s due diligence. He danced out on the perimeter where others might have preferred that he roll to the rim. He stretched his usage, at one point averaging 15 shots a game. That approach didn’t do much for the Magic, but it’s not as if he was siphoning off attempts from a high-functioning offense. Orlando was searching for a star, and Gordon was searching for himself.
“I think when you’re young, not just in sports, but just in general, you’re chasing something but you don’t know what it is,” says Nuggets assistant David Adelman, who also coached a 21-year-old Gordon as part of Frank Vogel’s staff in Orlando.
Frustrations mounted for Gordon, year over year, as much with his circumstances as himself. And in 2021, amid a wearying season for a Magic team going nowhere, he requested a trade. At that time, the league didn’t quite know what to make of Gordon—as evidenced by the fact that the Magic landed only Gary Harris, R.J. Hampton, and a single first-round pick from Denver in return for him and Gary Clark. Yet there were other options on the table that would have changed the course of Gordon’s career—and the contending fate of the Nuggets as we know them.
bending natural athlete can get away with that for a time. But then he saw the way that Jokic stacked days, turning game readiness into a way of life. Gordon bought in—and he bought an entire warehouse on the east side of Denver to turn into his own personal gym. He installed a regulation half court with a baseline drawn in black-and-blue camouflage, all the better for a lurking dunker to disappear; a full weight room; recovery baths; and a sauna. There are two bedrooms, along with the legal permits for Gordon to literally live in the gym full time.
The other Nuggets now rave about Gordon’s habits in the way that he raves about Jokic’s or Caldwell-Pope’s. “He embodies everything that we’re about,” Reggie Jackson says. When they look at Gordon, they notice what he doesn’t do, or at least what he chooses not to: the restraint of a veteran who goes about his business, never makes a fuss, and sacrifices so many of the on-court vanities of NBA stardom. Gordon isn’t exactly a spot shooter by trade, but he made himself into a respectable threat from the corners to be even more of a factor in Denver’s spacing. Otherwise, he’s content to not shoot—scaling down his offense in deference to the scorers around him.
“You see Jamal use the pick-and-roll, and you’re like: Ah, OK, you’re pretty fucking good at this,” Gordon says. “Or you see Joker in the post and he’s throwing hook shots over the backboard. You see Mike, and Mike is shooting like 70 percent on wide-open 3S. Pope is a 44 percent career 3-point shooter since he’s been in the league on wide opens or something like that. It makes you understand what your role is. I can do all those things, for sure. But they do ’em better.”
The only indulgence you’ll find in Gordon’s game is the occasional flourish on a breakaway dunk, which hardly even qualifies at his altitude. What’s a casual double-pump jam when you have enough hang time to polish your championship ring in midair? Teammates see a star who could demand shots or touches but chooses not to. A game changer who never insists upon himself—dishing off and cutting so Murray can have room to iso instead of attempting to go one-on-one.
“He knows that maybe it’s not a direct scoring correlation, but his impact is felt everywhere,” Christian Braun says. “Whether it’s defensively on the ball, defensively off the ball, sealing and making Michael Porter open in the opposite corner. He does a lot of things that don’t necessarily show in the stat sheet, but they really, really help our system.” Denver, on an organizational level, goes out of its way to celebrate the exact kinds of plays that Gordon comes by naturally. Players are lauded in film sessions for finding their way to the corners quickly. Deflections and 50-50 plays are treated like go-ahead buckets. (Coincidentally, Gordon’s ridiculous, game-saving rebound in the first round against the Lakers turned out to be as good as a go-ahead bucket.) After every game, Malone hands out a giant, gaudy Defensive Player of the Game chain—mostly as an excuse to highlight what might otherwise go unnoticed. After Denver’s Game 4 win, the chain went to Gordon.
“In my experience, it’s almost like a law of the universe where there’s a limit in how much you can do if you’re doing it for yourself,” Gordon says. “But if you do it for somebody outside of yourself—if you do it for the person next to you, if you do for your family, if you do it for your brothers, your teammates—there’s no limit to what you can accomplish.” It’s for reasons like this that Jackson calls Gordon the heart of the team. “We go as he goes,” the veteran guard says. Yet maybe Gordon is more of the soul—an animating spirit with a 40-inch vertical, showing the world the way Nuggets basketball is meant to be played.
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