TORONTO — The new year couldn’t arrive soon enough for the Nuggets.
Already down four starters, including three-time NBA MVP Nikola Jokic, they were hanging on for dear life to a third-quarter lead Wednesday in Toronto. Then, as the final hours of 2025 ticked away, one more cursed injury beat the buzzer. As spontaneously as if he was struck by lightning, Jonas Valanciunas pulled up with a sudden limp between possessions and reached for his right leg — a non-contact calf strain.
Jokic’s replacement was done before he could finish a stellar performance in his first start of the season, and the Nuggets were missing more than half of their usual rotation for the last 16 minutes of game time at Scotiabank Arena. What followed was a New Year’s Eve miracle under the circumstances: a 106-103 win over the Raptors despite shooting 28.2% as a team in the second half.
Bruce Brown missed a pair of free throws with three seconds left when making just one would have clinched the game. Toronto didn’t have a timeout, but Scottie Barnes seized the rebound and fired ahead to Brandon Ingram — “absolutely unbelievable pass,” Nuggets coach David Adelman said afterward — who then buried an off-balance 3-pointer at the buzzer to force overtime. Multiple Nuggets players thought Ingram got the shot off as they watched the play in real time.
It would have stretched them even thinner for an extra five minutes. Instead, the review process revealed the ball was still on Ingram’s fingers when the clock struck midnight.
“I was really close to telling Spencer (Jones) to get back to match up with him,” Adelman said, “and then the other part of me thought, Bruce just missed one, am I really gonna wait 15 more seconds for Bruce to shoot it? … I knew it was really close. Right away, guys behind the bench said it wasn’t good, so that did calm me down a little bit.”
“I really wasn’t thinking too much about whether he got it off in time or not. Just gotta think about the next minutes, prepare for that,” Jones told The Denver Post. “But we got the win either way. We deserved the win. We fought our (butts) off. We’ll go out and celebrate and have a good new year.”
The Nuggets (23-10) missed 12 of their last 15 field goal attempts but escaped Canada with a messy win in their first game without Jokic, only at the cost of another center. DaRon Holmes II finished the game as Denver’s healthiest remaining option at the five.
“I don’t know how serious it is. We’re just getting used to this,” an exasperated Adelman said. “It just seems like every night, somebody has something. The cool thing about it is there’s somebody else to get an opportunity from it. And that’s how you have to look at it. Hopefully Jonas heals up correctly. Hopefully it’s not serious, just like I’ve said the other 19 times this month.”
Face-guarded, double-teamed and full-court pressed throughout the night, Murray patched together 21 points, seven rebounds and six assists in his home country. Watson was the team’s leading scorer with 24 points, hunting shots with the sort of reckless abandon his team needed.
Valanciunas amassed 17 points (on six field goal attempts), nine rebounds, four assists and three blocks before he limped off as the latest casualty of the highly contagious injury bug going through Denver’s locker room. He left the arena in a boot, but early indications were that he didn’t suffer an Achilles injury.
“He was great. … He’s been sick,” Adelman said. “I saw a much different energy from him tonight. … If he ends up playing the 32 minutes I thought I was going to play him, you’re probably looking at 25 (points) and 12 (rebounds). That’s what he can do, especially when teams have small-ball lineups like they do.”
The Nuggets needed contributions from everyone in Adelman’s makeshift eight-man rotation just to carry a 63-54 lead into halftime, and that was before Valanciunas went down. Jalen Pickett started at shooting guard, while Tim Hardaway Jr. slid back to the bench to create the illusion of reinforcements. Four starters were in double figures at the break, and the fifth (Spencer Jones) was a team-best plus-10 despite scoring. He played more minutes than anyone for either side.
Valanciunas set the tone by scoring Denver’s first four points and was impactful across the board in his first nine-minute stint, which ended when he picked up his second foul. As he took his seat, he had already supplied eight points, six boards, two assists, a steal and a block. He was replaced by DaRon Holmes II, who joined forces with Jones in the frontcourt for the next seven minutes.
It was a rag-tag duo — one player on a two-way contract, another who’s on a standard rookie deal but has spent most of his season developing in the G League. Yet they made it work together, winning their first-half minutes together by three. Denver’s limited sources of shot creation when Murray isn’t on the court will be a major topic for the next month, so Holmes’ confidence driving and kicking multiple times — including once to assist a Pickett 3-pointer — was an important variable.
Holmes also knocked down a corner three of his own and delivered a bruising screen to free up Bruce Brown for a floater, a play that kick-started a 5-0 mini-run without Murray or Valanciunas in the game. Those small surges of momentum will be crucial for a team trying to survive without so much talent. After Brown’s floater, Jones forced a live-ball turnover and found Hardaway in transition for a side-step three, forcing a Toronto timeout.
The Raptors made runs throughout the night but couldn’t find consistent rhythm. Denver survived a 13-1 push to start the second half and a 9-0 run early in the fourth quarter, both of which gave Toronto brief leads.
Holmes struggled on the glass during the latter run, giving up a pair of offensive rebounds on free throws, but that was after he made an instant impact with his energy upon replacing Valanciunas late in the third. He finished with 11 points, three boards and a block.
The Nuggets went ice cold in the fourth. But so did their hosts. Toronto missed 15 of its last 17 shots from the field. The highlight, game-saving plays for Denver were of the hustle variety, such as Watson’s diving loose-ball rebound to draw a foul on the ground with 1:46 to go.
Watson missed a dunk, and Holmes was off-target on a 3-pointer that would have given the Nuggets a two-possession lead in the last minute, but after the Raptors cut it to 102-101, Jones knocked down a pair of high-pressure free throws with 19.5 seconds left. Then the Nuggets inbounded the ball over the top to Murray for a lead-extending layup with 13.7 seconds to go, eventually setting up Ingram’s close-but-no-cigar heave.
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