Denver finally landed the experienced voice it had been hunting for all summer, and the fit next to David Adelman makes more sense the closer anyone looks.
The Nuggets made the quietest important move of their offseason this week, when ESPN's Shams Charania reported that longtime NBA coach Dave Joerger has agreed to become the lead assistant on David Adelman's staff.
A bench hire is never the headline a fan base wants in July, so it is fair to ask whether one can really move the needle for a contender.
This one can, because it fixes the exact weakness the organization spent the spring worrying about, and it is the sort of move that tends to look small in July and enormous in May.
The Experience Denver Was Missing
Adelman went 54-28 in his first full season and Denver finished third in the Western Conference, then lost in six games to Minnesota in the first round.
That exit stung because of how thin the bench looked in the biggest moments.
Denver Stiffs pointed out in May that the person on Denver's bench with the most NBA head coaching experience was Adelman himself, with three regular season games before his promotion.
The front office heard the same thing, since The Stein Line reported back in June that Denver was actively looking to add a former head coach as a top assistant to give Adelman an injection of experience.
Joerger is that hire.
He was a head coach for six seasons, going 147-99 with three straight playoff trips in Memphis and 98-148 across three rebuilding years in Sacramento, and those two very different jobs left him with a career record of 245-247.
He has been an NBA assistant or head coach since 2007 and spent the last two seasons on Doc Rivers' staff in Milwaukee after a stint in Philadelphia.
What Joerger Brings on the Floor
The substance behind the resume is defense.
Joerger's first Memphis team had the league's eighth-ranked defense and his second jumped to second-best.
Those grit-and-grind Grizzlies won with structure and toughness, which is the identity Denver has struggled to hold for 48 minutes around Nikola Jokic.
A staff that now runs through Joerger, Jared Dudley and JJ Barea gives Adelman the sounding board for timeouts, matchups and playoff adjustments that did not exist a year ago, and it frees the younger assistants to keep developing players like Julian Strawther, whose path to a bigger role is one of the swing factors of next season.
A Big Hire in a Quiet Summer
The context makes the move bigger than it looks.
Denver has been criticized for falling behind in the West with a quiet offseason, and the front office is still navigating Nikola Jokic's contract situation while the roster stays largely the same.
When a team cannot outspend the competition, it has to out-coach it, and pairing Adelman with a veteran who has lived through six seasons of head coaching problems is about the cheapest upgrade on the market.
Joerger will not score a point, but he raises the floor of every close game Denver plays, and close games are where last season ended.
