Nuggets Title Would Make Jokic, Murray 2nd-Most Prolific Championship Duo Behind Lakers Legends

Denver could close out Miami tonight.

The Denver Nuggets could conclude the Miami Heat's season at Ball Arena tonight.

Denver currently leads the Heat 3-1 in its first-ever NBA Finals appearance, having stolen both road contests in Miami last week.

Only one of the 36 NBA clubs to fall to a 1-3 deficit in the history of the Finals has ever rallied all the way back to actually steal a victory, and that of course is now-Los Angeles Lakers All-NBA small forward LeBron James' 2016 Cleveland Cavaliers. Incidentally, one of the starters on that club, power forward Kevin Love (a UCLA alum), is starting for Miami. 

The Nuggets have looked like the better, deeper, bigger team in their three victories against the Heat. All-NBA center Nikola Jokic looks like the best player in the world now, an elite scorer, rebounder and passer who has proven more or less impossible to stop across four playoff rounds now. His co-star, point guard Jamal Murray, has yet to make an All-Star team, but has fully rounded into his 2020 playoff form during this postseason following an uneven scoring 2022-23 regular season.

All this is to say that the Nuggets will most likely win this series, possibly as soon as tonight among their hometown fans. 

If they do, assuming their scoring remains around the same level, that dynamic duo might suddenly enter the all-time pantheon of dynamic playoff scorers... though they will still trail at least one elite Los Angeles Lakers playoff duo.

Per Clutch Points, Jokic (30.1 points per) and Murray (26.7)'s combined offensive output, 56.8 points a game, would rank them as the second highest-scoring playoff tandem in league history, behind just the 2001 vintage of Shaquille O'Neal (30.4 points) and Kobe Bryant (29.4), who are still the elite of the elite when it comes to playoff scoring for a title team, averaging a combined 59.8 points a night.

It would take some Herculean scoring across the rest of this series for Denver to actually surpass O'Neal and Bryant circa '01, though both Jokic and Murray have demonstrated that they're more than capable of getting to that level.

The tandem that the Nuggets vanquished in this year's Western Conference, future Hall of Famers Anthony Davis (27.7 points in 2020) and LeBron James (27.6 points in 2020), ranks fourth all-time for their 2020 championship run, with a combined 55.3 points a night.

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