Nuggets’ Cam Johnson returns at fortuitous time for Denver roster ravaged by injuries

Cam Johnson has experienced first-hand what an injury epidemic can do to a championship-contending team. He understands that it can dilute results and steer decision-making.

By his fourth season in the NBA, the Suns had established themselves as heavyweights in the West. They were two years removed from the NBA Finals, and one year removed from a No. 1 seed after 64 wins. They picked up where they left off in 2022-23, starting 6-1. Then Chris Paul went down with an injury. Johnson tore his meniscus. Soon, Devin Booker was out for a month.

“Six of our top seven missed significant time,” Johnson remembers. “Everybody but Mikal (Bridges) missed significant time. I had knee surgery, and then everybody else had something else going on. We suffered from it record-wise. But when we had our whole team, we were rolling. We had just got back to rolling before the trade.”

Johnson didn’t survive long enough in Phoenix to see how the story might’ve ended. The trade, of course, was the ill-fated blockbuster for Kevin Durant. Johnson and Bridges were shipped off to Brooklyn. The Suns were eliminated in the second round of the playoffs by the eventual champion Denver Nuggets. Whether they could have persevered through the injury bug as originally constructed, Johnson will never know.

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This time, he'll get to see it through. Johnson returned from a 23-game absence last Saturday in Chicago, two days after the NBA trade deadline passed with no wholesale changes to the Nuggets. Their season has been similarly ravaged by injuries, but for now, they still have hope of entering the playoffs at full strength -- with the roster that started 9-2 before ankles, hamstrings, shoulders, knees and toes became the theme of the season.

"I've got a lot of confidence in this team and the guys that we have. In some sense, you can take some positives away from it, too. It's a process," Johnson told The Denver Post. "Sometimes in the process, you don't want to peak too early and hit kind of the downslope of it. So if these injuries happen now, it's better than them happening in April. And who knows what the future holds, but hopefully we get to the other side of this and kind of ride that positive wave. ... Being out always kind of gives you that hunger to come back, especially with a team like ours where we're poised to do something special."

Johnson's reassimilation to the lineup was fairly smooth in his first two games back from a bruised knee (the same injury that caused Nikola Jokic to miss a month). He scored in double figures efficiently on both nights. He made smart reads offensively, whether on or off the ball. He recorded three steals against Cleveland on Monday.

"The flow of our offense with him out there is totally different," coach David Adelman said. "It's not the numbers he puts up. It's the way he cuts, he moves. The uniqueness of just making the right play for your teammate all the time. Shoot it when you're open. Another ball-handler that can attack and create 2-on-1s, 3-on-2s. He's just a really good basketball player. ... Of course, when Cam came back, we lost Peyton. But it's just been one of those things. I feel like guys are just tagging on the way out like a wrestling match."

The timing of Johnson's return was fortuitous for the Nuggets, who've been depleted at the forward position recently between Aaron Gordon's recurring injury, Spencer Jones' concussion and Watson's new hamstring strain. Adelman has adapted by using Johnson at the four next to Jokic in a variety of lineups, including one where they're the only two starters on the floor, in a second-unit stagger together.

Johnson started the season in a two-week slump -- "two horrible weeks, man," he told The Post on Saturday — but gained confidence when Adelman started playing him with that bench unit. It placed the ball in Johnson's hands for a larger fraction of his minutes, enabling him to run actions and find his shooting rhythm. From Nov. 17 through Dec. 23, he shot 52.3% from downtown over a 17-game stretch.

Then he landed awkwardly on a rebound in Dallas and hyperextended his right knee.

"It's just how it goes, man. I felt great. Physically, I didn't feel like I needed a break or anything," Johnson told The Post. "I thought I was gonna play 81 (games) up to that moment. I was like, I'm fine. I don't feel like I'm wearing down. ... Life has a funny way of telling you otherwise. But you just control what you can control and get back to it and finish the season strong."

"When we had the full complement of players, he was really good with the second unit," said Adelman in Chicago. "It allowed him to take more responsibility as opposed to the first unit, where it is a Nikola-Jamal (Murray) show. And when Aaron's healthier, that's an initiator of our offense as well. So it allowed me to use Cam in a lot of different ways. ... I think in the second part of the season as we get (back) after the All-Star break, get guys back (from other injuries), the vision that we had, when we kind of figured it out as we went, was to let Cam kind of command that second unit. And I think we'll get back to that."

The interesting wrinkle when that time comes will be Watson, who broke out as a shot creator from the small forward position while Johnson was hurt. Now they've traded places, and Watson is unlikely to return until mid-March at the earliest. Adelman has acknowledged that if and when the Nuggets are fully healthy, he doesn't want to completely scale back Watson's role and ignore what they've discovered with him as a ball-handler. By the same token, Watson is well aware he'll inherently have fewer touches than he did in January.

Perhaps by the playoffs, he and Johnson will be splitting those ball-in-hand responsibilities with the second unit to give Denver some offensive punch in the notorious non-Jokic minutes. But there's still an element of mystery as to how that combination might mesh. Watson and Johnson have barely played together in lineups without the MVP center -- 22 minutes, to be exact. They've only played nine overlapping minutes with neither Jokic nor Murray on the court to drive the offense.

Those rotation decisions will require toggling, and Adelman might not have a lot of games to figure out what works best. In the meantime, Johnson is easing back in on a minutes restriction. Rebounding is where he feels most nervous testing his knee, in part because the "psychological aspect" of having suffered the injury on a rebound.

Generally, though, the 29-year-old wing felt encouraged by his return last weekend.

"It's been a lot of time spent trying to get conditioning back up to where it is, and we track a lot of stuff over the course of (the recovery) to be able to come back and play in the mid to high 20s minutes, instead of having to be a lot lower," Johnson said. "Obviously, with any situation, you come back and just try to feel your best. Sometimes, it's not all the way 100. But I feel good enough to definitely go out there and compete."

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