Forget the Bubble; it’s 'Playoff Jamal Murray' from here on out

It’s not often that an NBA player catches the world off guard. The league has become massively popular, so internationally recognized, and so heavily scrutinized by fans and media alike that every play, every action, and every athlete is seemingly known to the world at large.

We put athletes in a box from a very young age, assuming we know everything about them — and at the very least how good they are in relation to their peers — after having watched hours upon hours of film, listening to expert podcasts, reading long-form features, and discussing them with our friends. It’s very rare that a player proves that we actually got it all wrong — that the public consensus of them does not match their actual ability and, in this case, may not even come close. And it’s even more rare for that to happen in the NBA Finals.

But for Kitchener, ON., native Jamal Murray, the 2023 NBA Finals were his coming out party. After failing to be named an NBA All-Star during his first seven seasons in the league, Murray showed the world that he is not just a sidekick to two-time MVP Nikola Jokic, but one of the very best point guards in the NBA. Murray proved that he is more than capable of willing the Denver Nuggets to their first NBA Championship in franchise history after beating the Miami Heat in five games and averaging 21-6-10 on .45/.39/.93 shooting in the series.

Over the course of the playoffs, which the Nuggets dominated with a 16-4 record — the best for any team since the 2016-17 Golden State Warriors — Murray averaged 26-6-7 on .47/.40/.93 shooting splits. For his second straight playoffs, Murray averaged over six points per game more than he did in the regular season, proving to be a big game player who shows up when the stakes are raised.

Here are a few of Murray’s most impressive stats from the Nuggets championship run:

• He became just the sixth player in NBA History to average 25-5-5 through a minimum 50 career playoff games, joining Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Jerry West, Stephen Curry, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Nikola Jokic.

• He became just the fourth player in an NBA Finals series to average 20 points and 10 assists, joining Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan and LeBron James.

• He became the first player with 10+ assists in his first four career Finals games, including a 12 assist, 0 turnover effort in Game 4 that was just the third time a player had done that in the Finals.

• In Game 3, Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray became the first teammates to both record triple-doubles in the same Finals game and the only teammates to each record 30-point triple-doubles in any game.

• In Game 3, Murray scored the most points by a Canadian in an NBA Finals game after dropping 34 points.

Murray re-wrote the script on his NBA career, which is rare for a 26-year-old to do in the NBA Finals. After all, we have plenty of examples of young players breaking out on the biggest stage, like a 21-year-old Kobe Bryant dropping 28 points for the Lakers in Game 4 of the 2000 NBA Finals after Shaquille O’Neal fouled out. But it’s not often that someone who is rarely talked about as one of the best players in the league waits until his seventh year before having a playoff run that changes how they are viewed.

However, given Murray’s nontraditional career path to date, it maybe shouldn’t have come as such a surprise that this would be the playoffs that everything fell into place for the young sharpshooter.

Murray averaged 20 points per game during his lone season at the University of Kentucky in 2015-16, but he also threw more turnovers than he had assists for coach John Calipari’s team, and fell to the Nuggets at No. 7 in the 2016 NBA Draft. In fact, Murray didn’t crack an assist to turnover ratio of at least 2-to-1 until his third season in the league in 2018-19, which was also the first time the Nuggets made the playoffs since 2013.

A 22-year-old Murray was good but not great in his playoff debut, averaging slightly better than the 18-4-5 on .48/.37/.85 shooting he averaged in the regular season during the Nuggets 14-game run that ended in a seven-game loss to the Portland Trail Blazers in the Western Conference semifinal. Nevertheless, the Nuggets showed faith in their young point guard by immediately signing him to a five-year, $158 million contract the following offseason instead of waiting a year to let him test unrestricted free agency. It was a controversial decision at the time for a guard that hadn’t proved himself to be a max-level player, with questions about his playmaking and defense looming.

The next season, Murray seemed to hit a wall, averaging almost the exact same numbers across the board that he did the previous season. The Nuggets finished No. 3 in the Western Conference before the COVID-19 pandemic caused the league to shut down its operations for four months until the NBA bubble was enacted near Orlando, Florida.

The bubble was his breakout, as Murray averaged 26-5-7 on .51/.45/.90 shooting in the 2019-20 playoffs, leading the Nuggets to their first conference finals appearance since 2009. It started with an opening round victory over the Utah Jazz, when the Nuggets stormed back from a 3-1 deficit to win the series after Murray scored 50 points in games 4 and 6 of the series and averaged 31.6 points per game. He became the first player ever to record 40 points in three elimination games in the same postseason and first player to post three-straight 40-point games since Michael Jordan did in 1993. After defeating the Los Angeles Clippers in the next round, the Nuggets ended up losing to the eventual champion Los Angeles Lakers in five games in the Western Conference final.

That’s when the idea of “Bubble Murray” was born, with many people associating Murray’s greatness in his second career playoff run — where he averaged eight more points per game than he had in the regular season — with the uniqueness of the NBA Bubble, which included having no fans in the arena, no travel, and therefore dramatically better conditions for shooters. But instead of getting to prove to the NBA community that he was, in fact, a big game player and had been his entire life, the “Bubble Murray” moniker stuck with him for a long time because Murray didn’t get another chance to prove his playoff bonafides until now, three years later.

Fifty four games into the following season, Murray suffered a torn ACL in his left knee following a non-contact injury in the final seconds of a loss to the Golden State Warriors. The Nuggets had recently traded for Aaron Gordon to fill a hole at their power forward position and had won 17 of 20 games before dropping their past two. Just when they were looking like a juggernaut, Murray went down and would be forced to miss a year and a half, including two ultimately disappointing postseason runs for the Nuggets.

Instead of rushing his way back onto the court, Murray took his time recovering from one of the most serious injuries an athlete can suffer. He wanted to make sure he was close to 100% before making his way back, going through an extensive rehabilitation process in which he was forced to reckon with the mental side of overcoming a serious non-contact injury as well as the physical side. In fact, Murray felt lost on the basketball as recently as last October when he made his return to the court in the 2022-23 season opener against the Jazz, saying:

“If you go back to the first game in Utah, I picked up the ball in the paint like five times. I could count. I was so lost. I had never felt being that lost on the court before. I just didn’t want to go in the paint or jump or land or feel contact,” Murray said after winning the championship.

“I still have different moments where I’m tentative, best word for me to put it, to do certain actions, rebounding among everybody or — but I’ve just gotten so much better at that and just putting that behind me."

But that didn’t discourage him from following through on the same dream to win a NBA Championship that he had since childhood and that was fueled even more when he witnessed his childhood team, the Toronto Raptors, win in 2019. Murray showed his mental toughness and resilience throughout the entire process, not only getting back to the player he was but actually surpassing it, playing the best basketball of his career during the 2023 playoffs. Not only was he at his best, but Murray was at his most entertaining, too: a big, crafty 6-foot-4 point guard who has the ball on a string everywhere he goes on the court but combines his elite handle with the size, strength, and footwork to bully smaller players in the post before getting into a rhythm and starting to knock down tough three-point shots. In the finals alone, Murray hit big shot after big shot, including a side-step three that silenced the Heat crowd in Game 3 and a flurry of big shots and passes in the fourth quarter of Game 4 after Jokic was forced to sit with foul trouble.

“There’s more to come from me,” Murray said after becoming the ninth Canadian player to win an NBA Championship on Monday night. “I know if I can do this fresh off an ACL, still having sore days and everything like that, we can do this again.”

While it feels like Canadian NBA players are breaking each other's records left and right these days, what Murray did in the 2023 playoffs might not be surpassed for a very long time. Murray scored the most points by a Canadian in an NBA Finals game after dropping 34 points in Game 3 and he averaged the most points per game by a Canadian in a playoff run after averaging 26.1, overcoming Andrew Wiggins’ 16.5 points per game during the Warriors title run last season. In fact, Murray now holds the top two spots for most points by a Canadian player in a playoff run with 522 in 2023 and 504 in the 2020 Bubble.

This was inarguably the best playoff run by a Canadian player in NBA history, as Murray shouldered a bigger load than any Canadian had before him while leading his team to glory. He finished the playoffs with a usage of 27.9%, an assist percentage of 28.1, and a true shooting percentage of 58.6 — all better than his regular season marks. In fact, all of Murray’s numbers shot up in the playoffs, including his points, shooting percentages, assists, rebounds, free-throws, and steals, while only his fouls and turnovers decreased. Plus, Murray’s 8.1 points per game increase in playoff scoring average is the largest in NBA history among players with at least 30 playoff games.

Along the way, Murray laid every doubt about him to rest. When people wondered if the Nuggets overpaid him in 2019 in order to keep their young point guard in house because they drafted him and were desperate to retain talent in a small market, he proved to be on one of the most team-friendly deals in the league. When people asked if he would hold up on defense in the playoffs when teams would inevitably pick on him as the smallest defender in the Nuggets starting lineup, Murray held his own against LeBron James and Jimmy Butler in back-to-back series. And when they asked if he could provide the type of support that Jokic needed in order to win a championship after failing twice with Murray out due to injury, Murray averaged 26 points and seven assists while scoring at least 21.4 points per game in every single series during the playoff run.

Most importantly, the idea that Murray had one magical and yet unrepeatable playoff run in the NBA Bubble has been put to rest indefinitely. “Bubble Murray” is no more. It’s “Playoff Murray” from here on out.