Will the Nuggets or Jazz flip the switch back to winning ways first?

Will the Denver Nuggets or Utah Jazz revert back to their winning ways first?

Of all the first-round playoff series in the Western Conference, the 3-6 matchup between the Denver Nuggets and Utah Jazz might be the least compelling. It doesn’t feature LeBron James or one of the most atypical 8-seeds in NBA history. It doesn’t include a Clippers powerhouse or Luka Doncic, nor does it have James Harden, Russell Westbrook and Chris Paul facing off against their old teams.

And yet, this Nuggets-Jazz series is intriguing because of the similarities between the two ailing squads. Both teams are missing key players. Both struggled to a 3-5 record in their eight seeding games during the NBA restart. And both have only displayed flashes of themselves at their pre-hiatus best.

The question is, will the Nuggets or the Jazz flip the switch back to their winning ways first?

In the Nuggets’ defense, they played their first four seeding games without Jamal Murray, missed Gary Harris (right hip) and Will Barton (right knee) for all eight and had to resort to this starting lineup when they first arrived in Orlando due to a lack of able bodies:

They have Murray back now, but with Harris and Barton out for at least Game 1, two things become true: Nikola Jokic has to definitively be the best player on the floor in a series featuring Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert, and Denver needs Michael Porter Jr.’s confident play to carry over into the postseason when the games start mattering.

Jokic is the best player in this series, but in a seven-game sample size with so many other wild variables thrown in, if he’s held in check by Utah’s two-time Defensive Player of the Year, the Nuggets could be in serious trouble. The Joker only averaged 17.9 points, 8.3 assists and 6.0 rebounds per game in his eight seeding games, though we should note his playing time was (29.3 minutes per game) was more limited than usual (32.3 minutes per game before the break).

Getting Murray back could be a godsend for Denver’s offense, as he proved with his game-tying and go-ahead baskets in last week’s overtime win over Utah. But if Harris and Barton remain sidelined, the Nuggets will also need Porter to continue to play like the All-Seeding Games Second Team selection he was, when he averaged a team-high 22.0 points and 8.6 rebounds per game on .551/.422/.931 shooting splits.

Of course, offense hasn’t been the problem for Denver in the bubble; defense has. While the Nuggets have sported a top-five offense in Orlando and ranked ninth in offensive rating before the NBA suspended its season, they were a much more respectable defense pre-hiatus. They went from a defensive rating of 108.9 before the pandemic (12th in the NBA) to an atrocious 121.7 in the bubble (dead last out of 22 teams). That’s obviously a small sample size, and the starters were on reduced minutes, but as it turns out, replacing Harris and Barton with MPJ and Torrey Craig didn’t do wonders for the defense.

On the other side of the matchup is Utah, a team that’s just as hard to gauge given the shameless tank job they pulled late in their bubble schedule to keep the 6-seed and avoid facing their playoff nemesis — the Houston Rockets — at all costs. The Jazz got the matchup they wanted, avoiding James Harden and also the dangerous Oklahoma City Thunder, but the Nuggets are no pushovers, especially for a Utah side that didn’t look good in the bubble (they ranked 15th in both offensive and defensive rating in Orlando) and hasn’t looked consistently sound in awhile now.

Utah was streaky leading up to the hiatus, winning five of its last six games but also losing 10 of its last 19 contests overall. Not having Bojan Bogdanovic in the bubble moves Joe Ingles into a more prominent role and costs the Jazz precious playmaking and depth, which was already scarce before they lost Ed Davis to a knee injury and Mike Conley for at least 2-3 games after he left the bubble for the birth of his son.

Can Utah really rely on Mr. 15.8-Points-Per-Game-On-Sub-40-Percent-Shooting Jordan Clarkson to carry the scoring load for the second unit? Are Georges Niang, Emmanuel Mudiay, Tony Bradley, Rayjon Tucker and Jawun Morgan ready for meaningful minutes in a playoff series? And would you have been able to name even three of those five guys if I hadn’t just listed them out?

Bench depth is in short supply in Orlando, especially until Conley passes through his mandatory quarantine and returns to the court, so the Jazz need to win the minutes with Mitchell, Gobert and the rest of the starters on the floor, decisively — perhaps by an even larger margin than the 30 points Utah’s starters outscored opponents by in eight seeding games. That’s a tall order for a team that’s been tanking for the past two weeks, trying to repair the relationship between its two stars for the past four months and will now need to flip a switch that hasn’t been flipped in five months.

In short, Donovan Mitchell has to be the guard taking over late in games, not Jamal Murray, and Rudy Gobert has to be the most impactful center with his defense, not Nikola Jokic with his offense. That last part is key, especially since the Joker put up 29.3 points, 12.0 rebounds and 9.0 assists per game with a perfect 3-0 record against Gobert and the Jazz this season.

Overcoming adversity and surviving the grueling postseason grind with some injury luck is key for any playoff run. The Nuggets and Jazz are already off to bad starts on both fronts, so the key to this series may transcend X’s and O’s, ultimately boiling down to whichever team can scrounge up enough depth to cobble together healthier, more functional rotations. The switch may not be fully flipped, but even a half-flip could turn enough power back on to move past a vulnerable opponent.