Denver swapped Michael Porter Jr. for Johnson this offseason, and so far it's looking like the wrong call.
“Just feeling a little stuck.”
That's what Cam Johnson said after going 0-for-6 against Minnesota on Sunday. Zero points. Twenty-three minutes. He's posting the third-lowest scoring output of his career — worse than his first two seasons, when he was still finding his footing in the league. This isn't the player Denver envisioned when it traded Michael Porter Jr. last summer. And right now, there's no clean explanation for why.
Here's the thing that keeps jumping out at me: the Nikola Jokić connection just isn't there. Jokić runs one of the most efficient dribble-handoff operations in basketball history. His partners feast off that action when the best player on the planet is gift-wrapping them buckets. And yet the Johnson-Jokić combo is producing just 0.84 points per handoff, worst on the team.
Those handoff numbers include every possible outcome, such as Jokić getting the ball back, Johnson kicking it to a teammate, or Johnson shooting it himself. When Johnson actually pulls the trigger off a Jokić handoff, he’s posting a dismal 26.6 effective field goal percentage out of that action. By comparison, MPJ shot 58.8% last season.
And here's where it gets really weird. Johnson is actually shooting 40.6% from 3 on the season. That's a perfectly fine number. He's taking a career-low 4.5 3s per game, but he's not broken. Dig into the splits and something strange is happening: When Jokić passes him the ball, Johnson is hitting just 35.7% of his 3s. When anyone else on the roster finds him? 43.4%. How does that even happen? He shoots better off passes from Tim Hardaway Jr. than off passes from the three-time MVP. Jokić is out here making everyone on earth better except the one guy Denver traded for specifically to get better.
The most logical explanation? Cam Johnson is completely in his own head. He sure looked and sounded like it during his postgame presser. Think about what it must feel like to be him. Every time Jokić looks his way, there's a $94 million contract hanging over him, the ghost of MPJ floating somewhere in the background, and Jokić’s scary brothers groaning in the crowd. That's a lot of baggage to carry into a catch-and-shoot 3.
"It's on me and I'm the one that got myself in it, so I got to be the one to get myself out of it," Johnson said. “Every time that I felt down, just feel like you just keep letting yourself down, letting your teammates down — every time that's happened, I've been able to turn it around some way, somehow.”
He's been there before and found his way out. That part you believe. The problem is Denver doesn't have time to wait for “some way, somehow.” The playoffs are coming and the Nuggets need answers now. Aaron Gordon and Peyton Watson are both out with hamstring injuries, and hamstrings have a way of lingering. If Denver limps into the playoffs shorthanded, Johnson can't be a passenger. And even if Gordon and Watson come back healthy, Johnson still needs to be a real half-court scoring option for this team to go anywhere. There's no version of a deep Nuggets playoff run where Cam Johnson is as invisible as he was against Minnesota.
The MPJ-for-Johnson trade wasn't just about replacing one forward with another. Denver used the cap space to add other pieces around Jokić. So it's not entirely fair to put this all on Johnson. He wasn't supposed to be MPJ. He was supposed to be a shooter who made everyone else's life easier.
But so far, acquiring Johnson is looking like the wrong call. Because in Denver, the MVP can give you the ball, but he can’t give you the confidence to shoot it.
Category: General Sports
