edAny series between the Denver Nuggets and Minnesota Timberwolves, who have steadily grown as Western Conference Rivals in recent seasons, promises to have tension, but Jaden McDaniels took it upon himself to kick that tension up a notch into full-on animosity. 

He's done it in a number of ways: pestering the Nuggets on defense and inciting a brawl after Game 4 when he decided to score in the final seconds of the Timberwolves' win rather than dribble the ball out, but the first step in his villain role came after Game 2, which the Timberwolves won 119-114. 

McDaniels went on the attack and called out the Nuggets for poor defense. He even called out several Nuggets players by name as "bad defenders," including Nikola Jokic, Jamal Murray, Aaron Gordon, Tim Hardaway Jr. and Cameron Johnson. 

The Nuggets didn't take kindly to that, but for a while they couldn't back it up with wins. That was until Game 5 when the Nuggets staved off elimination with a 125-113 victory in Denver where they notably played some their best defense of the series. 

Johnson especially had a great defensive game, but he maintained that anything that McDaniels said about him didn't have any effect on how much effort he put in or how much he improved in Game 5. 

"He [McDaniels] can say whatever he wants. Nobody really reads into it. Just talk," Johnson said (via Nuggets). "We're gonna play our game. It's not gonna cause any emotional uproars. We're professionals and we're going to keep playing our game... It's not about no personal vendettas of any sort. It's about winning basketball games."

A playoff series is high stakes already, add the survival mode that the Nuggets have entered and it's shaping up to be a battle in potentially the final two games of the series. 

Even with Johnson remaining ambivalent about McDaniel's comments, there's still something to be said about the kind of fire that can light inside of a player, or an entire team.

Whether Johnson's enhanced play in Game 5 was due to external motivation or not, it's a great sign for Nuggets fans to see and with him performing at a high level, Denver's chances at success have drastically shot up. 

The Nuggets may be a team defined by their star power with Jokic leading the way, but they still need solid performances from their roster of typically dependable role layers like Johnson to keep their season alive.