It was pretty weird of the Denver Nuggets to fire head coach Michael Malone, with just three games left in the regular season. I said as much, last week, when the basketball world was still processing the shocking decision. That digestion is still ongoing. But we have since seen a three-game winning streak from the Nuggets, featuring some of the most connected team defense they’ve had all season. This trio of victories also featured the return of Jamal Murray, who spent the last two games of the season both knocking off rust and killing the Memphis Grizzlies during crunch time.

It’s given us an emboldened Nikola Jokic, too. In his case, that means having the ball less often and taking fewer shots; a truer demonstration of his basketball philosophy than the higher-usage, statistically overwhelming fare Jokic has produced for the majority of the season. This shift toward a more Jokic-centric offense was a matter of necessity, at times, with Murray and Aaron Gordon missing a combined 46 games. But as more and more information comes out about Malone’s dismissal, it seems that the over-emphasis of the team’s MVP may have also been a matter of design.

If Jokic wants to be just one ball of gravity in the broader Nuggets orbit, his new head coach certainly isn’t going to oppose him. David Adelman, one of Malone’s top assistants for the past eight years, looks ready to let Nikola orchestrate as he sees fit. He applauded the big man for grabbing the white board during a timeout, and showing his teammates just where he thought they needed to stand and move to, amidst a road victory over the Sacramento Kings. “If he wants to coach the team,” Adelman said a couple of days later, “all good. He’s our best player.”

Adelman will likely need to do more than just let his star take charge, in the Nuggets’ first-round playoff series with the Los Angeles Clippers. He’ll be up against one of the sharpest coaches in the league, Ty Lue; who, a decade ago, also took over mid-season, for a team that also featured the best player in the game. Lue is one of the only men alive who understands Adelman’s strange predicament, but I doubt he’ll be offering him any wisdom until after this series has finished. And so the Nuggets’ head coach will need to start his new job by solving some of the sport’s most complex problems on the fly.

Those issues include a resurgent Kawhi Leonard, a James Harden who plays more clinically and selflessly than ever, one of the only centers who even sort of bothers Jokic in Ivica Zubac—lots of emphasis on "sort of," here; Jokic dropped 41 on him this season—the dynamite-lobbing third scoring option, Norm Powell, and two of the most potent perimeter defenders working today in Derrick Jones Jr. and Kris Dunn. Lue’s got all these guys to use against Adelman, and he’s got Jeff Van Gundy on his bench, too; a man who, in 17 years away from the sidelines, has never stopped longing for the basketball war he’s about to step back into.

The Clippers have looked quit ready for that battle, lately, finishing their season winning 15 of their last 17 games, while the Nuggets sputtered through most of the homestretch, offering only a brief glimpse of championship basketball at the very end of the year. But both teams, in a larger sense, are at organizational crossroads. Though the Clippers have had the more feel-good season, what with their surprising success after quitting on Paul George, and the happy tidings of a new stadium and crisp new uniforms (an abundantly welcome change; the angular ones they left behind were some of the worst in the NBA’s history), they still ended up exactly where Denver did, at 50-32 over the season. The difference in how people appraise these two teams is largely a matter of expectations—surpassed, in the Clippers’ case; not met, for Denver.

A week off for both teams should reset those feelings, and they’ll go into Game 1 on Saturday as the equal opponents that their No. 4 and No. 5 seeds typically connote. For Jokic, Murray, Lue, Leonard, Zubac, and Michael Porter Jr., the rest days might also be cause for reflection. Those six men are the vestiges of the last big Nuggets/Clippers showdown, five years ago in Orlando’s Covid-made postseason “bubble” format. No crowds, barely any media, and a fake liminal dorm-like society to live in, between the games. Basketball in a vacuum.

What will kick off this Saturday is anything but that: Nuggets/Clippers, 2025, is basketball overloaded with context and narrative. The Nuggets are no longer rising talents, but beleaguered champions, potentially on the verge of more change; the Clippers are no longer a microwaved super-contender, but a quirky brew of born-again role players filling in around one star who’s lost most of the past five years to injury, and another who keeps tweaking his game to fit the times, bucking notions of himself as a statistically inflated party animal, destined to age poorly (perhaps, in Harden’s graceful mid-thirties, there is a blueprint for Luka Doncic).

This is, in other words, a death match between grown ass men. Both have been around long enough to accumulate things they would be heartbroken to lose. Two dads with good jobs and mortgages to pay, rolling their sleeves up and risking it all. Jokic and the Nuggets might have to win this series, at minimum, to keep their title core together. Kawhi and Harden, victims of progressively cursed postseason probabilities, can’t go into this bracket thinking they’ll get another chance this juicy. The nature of the sport is fundamentally like this. You’ve only got so much time near the top of things, before decay sets in. It’s rare, however, that two teams fight so directly to be the group that gets to continue existing there, right up by the apex, and with such parallel paths to this unbearably stakes-rich place: a bookend series, with control over how an era ends on the line for both teams.