Game Of The Year is a designation that inevitably gets handed out several times a year, and not always with good reason. Recency bias can be a malign influence, it can be hard to stay objective in the moment, and the season moves so fast that it's difficult to remember what happened even a few weeks ago. But at 1:48 a.m. ET on Friday, as I finally laid my head on the pillow after watching the Denver Nuggets defeat the Minnesota Timberwolves 142-138 in overtime, only one thought was in my head: That was the Game Of The Year. The thought was still there when I woke up a few hours later, and you know what? I'm leaving it there. Game Of The Year!
The box score leaves little room for argument in the other direction. It's hard to craft a better basketball game than one that features one star (Nikola Jokic) putting up a 56-15-16, another (Anthony Edwards) punching back with 44 points, and both teams combining to score 50 points in a five-minute overtime period. More importantly, this game had what every potential Game Of The Year needs, which is minutes-long stretches of pure mania.
It took a little while for things to get going. The first three-and-half quarters of this game were good fun and featured plenty of high-level basketball, but for most of the game it looked like the Nuggets, even missing three starters to injury, were going to cruise to a relatively comfortable victory. Jokic was crafting one of his typically absurd box scores—doomed to be forgotten as soon as the next one arrives in a few days—Edwards was struggling to get much going with a sore shoulder, and the Nuggets were maintaining a double-digit lead. With 5:35 left to play, the Nuggets were up 106-91 and Edwards had 20 points. Denver would get outscored 24-9 the rest of the way, with Edwards scoring 13 of those points, including a game-tying three-pointer from the corner with one second left:
It's a whole thing whenever the Nuggets play the Timberwolves. Despite coming into the game having won both of their previous meetings, every game against Minnesota feels predetermined to end in cruelty and heartbreak. The blown 20-point lead in Game 7 of the 2023 playoffs led straight into a four-game losing streak during which the Nuggets were humiliated in new and fascinating ways. Given all that context, Edwards's shot carried zero shock value. It was just the guillotine falling again, as it's designed to do.
The Nuggets were dead on their feet, and Edwards knew it. He started the overtime period with a two-pointer off the glass, bullied his way to the line for two free throws on the next possession, and then followed two made free throws by Donte DiVincenzo with a pull-up three to give him 40 points. The Nuggets couldn't do a single thing on offense while this was happening, and found themselves down nine points while suffering through a 33-9 run. It's hard to imagine a team looking more defeated than the Nuggets did at that precise moment.
The thing about games featuring generational superstars, however, is that salvation is never that far behind damnation. I've seen enough of these Anthony Edwards runs to know how demoralizing they are—hell is that five- to six-minute stretch where you just know that every audacious pull-up three he launches is going in, and every drive to the rim is ending in a layup or a foul—but I've also seen enough of Nikola Jokic to know that no game is ever really out of his considerable reach.
With just under three minutes left to play, Jokic came off a pindown and hit a three. That started a three-minute run of basketball in which the Nuggets as a team went 5-of-5 from the field and outscored the Timberwolves 27 to 14. Jokic hit two threes, made a floater in the lane, and nailed 10 of 11 shots at the free-throw line.
What are you supposed to say about a game like this, a player like this? Maybe it's best to just follow Jokic's lead, and keep it simple. "I had a good game, of course," he said when asked during his press conference if there was anything he appreciated most about how he played. There's the entire story of Nikola Jokic, told in seven words. He had a good game. Of course he did.
