It was a completely inconsequential sequence, in the blink of an eye, in a game already won.
Alex Caruso, the Thunder’s Chihuahua yapping up the Nuggets’ trees, pestered Aaron Gordon in search of a desperation turnover. The ball squibbed loose. Gordon stuck his foot out at it.
And yet a kicked-ball violation in the final minutes of Denver’s Game 6 win could make or break Game 7, because their closer came up grabbing at his left hamstring.
Gordon, postgame, didn’t quite know what happened. What happened, externally, is that the Nuggets forward appeared to barely be able to run. He hobbled up the floor for a couple of possessions, until David Adelman subbed him for Peyton Watson 30 seconds of clock later.
“At this point, I have no idea,” Adelman said postgame when asked about the concern level for Gordon’s injury. “It would be high, obviously. Aaron is one of our guys — he’s the reason why we’ve won games, and won series, and have a banner hanging up in there.”
“Concern for Aaron is so high,” the Nuggets’ interim head coach finished slightly later in a response. “He’s played through a lot through this whole season.”
The Nuggets forward was later diagnosed with a strained left hamstring strain on Friday, a source told The Denver Post, confirming a report by ESPN’s Shams Charania. That puts his status for Sunday’s game at Oklahoma City up in the air.
Gordon’s 2024-25 has been an emotional slingshot between physical highs and lows — a page-turning shooting breakout followed by nagging injury, followed by moments of franchise heroism. He strained his right calf early in November. He returned in December. He strained the calf again on Christmas. He ramped back up in January, before spraining his ankle and missing more time in March. Even his crunch-time playoff endeavors have been propelled by legs still nagging with pain.
A few postgame comments in the Nuggets locker room left neither optimism nor despair. Gordon certainly didn’t shrug off the tweak.
“We’ll see,” Gordon said late Thursday when asked how he felt about Game 7. “See how I feel tomorrow morning.”
His absence would leave Denver without a pivotal piece in this Oklahoma City series. Gordon has frequently run off attempts from Thunder second banana Jalen Williams, who’s struggled mightily in shooting 24% from the floor the last three games.
There is a saving grace, however, from the scheduling gods of the NBA: After playing “really hard games” on back-to-back days for the entirety of the Thunder series, as Nikola Jokic put it postgame, Denver has two days of rest before playing Game 7 in Oklahoma City on Sunday. Adelman breathed a verbal sigh of relief at the extended break postgame, driving the point home: This series has been a marathon.
The extra day could boost Gordon’s chances of availability for Game 7. It should also provide a slight reprieve for an ailing Michael Porter Jr. and sick Jamal Murray, who Adelman said didn’t want to get the ball multiple times on a couple of possessions because he was “so gassed.”
“The guys in there,” Adelman said postgame, “looked like they were happier that they have tomorrow off than they were going to a Game 7.”
The Post’s Bennett Durando contributed to this report.
