In the Denver Nuggets’ practice gym, a backpack was on the line. A designer backpack with a speaker built into it. An NBA star player’s backpack.
Four of Jamal Murray’s high school friends and basketball teammates were visiting him in Denver. It was still early in his NBA career, and he was showing them his office. They had made plans to play pick-up together, like old times, so Murray upped the stakes by suggesting they play king of the court for the backpack. “Say less,” Josiah Riley told him. “I’m with it.”
Standard rules. Rotating one-on-one matchups. If you get a stop, you get the ball. He who scores gets to stay on offense while a new defender replaces the previous one. Everyone else waits their turn to get back on the court. First to 11 buckets wins.
Murray was the only NBA player in the group. But he was struggling to make shots. One of Murray’s friends — one who stands 6-foot-10 — got to 10 points while Murray had only seven.
What happened next?
“It was the wildest thing I’ve seen,” Riley said.
Downstairs on the main court, and a few years later on Monday night, Murray was “spazzing,” as one Nuggets teammate described him. The 27-year-old with an ironclad playoff reputation was trapped in the middle of the worst playoff performance of his career. The Nuggets weren’t getting blown out by the Lakers in Game 2 of the first-round series. Not anymore, anyway. Nikola Jokic and company had sliced a 20-point deficit to 10 in spite of Murray. There was no choice but to play through the nightmare. Everyone in Denver was brimming with momentum. Except Murray.
He was 3 for 16 from the field for six points. A man of unshakable confidence, shaken.
“I don’t want to see ‘Spazzing Out Jamal’ again,” Murray said later that night.
Because what happened next? It was as wild as anything Nuggets fans have ever seen.
Murray shot 6 for 8 in the fourth quarter, scoring 14 unforgettable points in the last 10 minutes to pull off a 101-99 win over the Lakers that might be remembered years from now as a defining moment of his career. He tied Los Angeles at 97 by getting to the foul line with 58 seconds remaining. He stepped back for a long 2-pointer with 29 seconds left to bring Game 2 to a deadlock again, this time at 99. And he drained the shot of his life over Anthony Davis as time expired to complete a six-point final minute and hand the Nuggets a 2-0 series lead.
He never saw his buzzer beater go in.
“I jumped pretty high,” Murray said. “I faded a lot. And I just lost balance and fell. And I just saw the ball over the rim. I think A.D. was in my way. Or somebody was in my way. And I just heard everybody scream, and that’s how I knew it went in. That was a pretty cool moment.”
In order to understand Murray’s brain, start with the backpack. Needing four consecutive points just to keep his own property, he picked up the ball and pointed to his friends.
As Riley remembers it, “he literally counted us off. He looked at the four of us, and he said, ‘Eight. Nine. Ten. Game.’ And all four of us stood there like, ‘What? That’s disrespectful. Check it up. Let’s go.’”
Murray told his first challenger exactly what he was going to do: take two dribbles to the left, turn his back to the defender, then make a turnaround jump shot. “Sure enough, he took the ball up top,” Riley said. “Jamal took one, two dribbles. He turned his back to him. And he turned around, shot the ball, and it went in. We were all like, ‘Oh my goodness.’” That’s eight.
The next guy stepped up. “For you, I’m gonna do the same thing,” Murray told him. He checked it up and went straight into his move to the left. The shot was automatic this time. Conjuring bravado out of nowhere had turned the game around. “And now,” Riley remembers, “we’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is getting serious.’” Murray was the king of the court now. That’s nine.
The Lakers’ lead was 68-48 exactly two minutes after halftime Monday. Six minutes later, it was 74-61, and Denver was running in transition. The ball found Murray. He clanked an open 3-pointer.
It was during that third quarter when Murray reached his brief low-point, the nadir known as “Spazzing Out Jamal.” He started telling Jokic, “On pick and roll, I’m looking for you.” He repeated the same sentiment to other teammates: that he was going to stop pulling the trigger and start facilitating more for them. It was met with adamant objection. On the bench, even two-way guard Collin Gillespie, who’s ineligible to play in the playoffs, told Murray he was going to make a clutch shot.
“I just remind him who he is. He’s Jamal (freaking) Murray,” DeAndre Jordan told The Denver Post. “Regardless of how he feels he played, we still need him to be aggressive.”
“If it wasn’t for my teammates, then it could have been a different game,” Murray said. “I appreciate every single one of them. Every single one of them told me to keep shooting. You should have been in the huddles, hearing the amount of ‘keep shooting’ I was getting. I was kind of getting frustrated with them, because I just wanted them to be quiet.”
By the time a third friend was trying to stop Murray one-on-one, his confidence was completely revived. “He’s like, ‘For you, we’ll do something a little different. Instead of turning my back to you, I’m gonna do a half-turn step-back,’” Riley said. Murray did the move. He made the shot. That’s 10.
Malone only waited two minutes and 18 seconds after the fourth quarter started to sub Jokic back into the action. It was a clear indication of Denver’s desperation to avoid a split at home. Murray hadn’t attempted a shot during the bench minutes. But with his longtime partner back, he received a dribble handoff and finished a nifty reverse layup on the drive. It clipped the deficit to 82-75.
Malone likes to say all Murray needs is to see the ball go in once. Mission accomplished.
“That’s Jamal Murray right there,” Malone said afterward.
When LeBron James missed an open three and Michael Porter Jr. reeled in the rebound, the Nuggets had an opportunity to call a timeout and set up their last play. Fourteen seconds remained. Malone let it play out instead. “Why let (the Lakers) get set?” he said.
Even so, Denver’s coach noticed the Lakers were matching themselves up intuitively. James on Murray. Anthony Davis on Jokic. That way, they could switch against the pick-and-roll. Jokic noticed it too and tried to bring Kentavious Caldwell-Pope into the action, “just to make them play coverage.” He didn’t want it to be as simple as a switch that Los Angeles would feel comfortable making. But it didn’t work. Davis switched onto Murray. Caldwell-Pope cleared out to the left side with Denver’s other shooters.
Murray dribbled to his spot on the right baseline, left his feet for the mid-range jumper and fell backward into the bench that had been yelling at him to keep shooting.
“Everybody knew that I was gonna make it when it counted,” he said.
“At the bottom of the pile, man, he was just laughing,” Christian Braun told The Post. “Literally laughing the whole time. Because he doesn’t ever struggle like this. He’s one of the best players in the world.”
Davis, trying to contest the shot, lost balance and tumbled into the Nuggets’ bench adjacent to the pile of celebrating Nuggets. When he was asked for his perspective on the play, Davis dropped the microphone and walked out of his postgame news conference after a brief answer: “Jamal Murray made a shot.”
Murray’s last challenger on the practice court was Kyle Alexander, the friend sitting on 10 points already. The friend who’s 6-10. Naturally, Murray revealed his boldest shot yet. He would take one dribble backward, one dribble forward, then shoot a 3-pointer in Alexander’s face. Riley was thinking, “Kyle, please, get the stop. Even if I don’t win, I don’t care. At least get the stop so you can score on one of us and get the backpack.”
But it was too late. No wingspan was stopping Murray.
“The ball went in,” Riley said, “and nobody got the backpack.”
