Will stars align for Nuggets, Cam Johnson to win NBA title?

Cam Johnson wakened on Wednesday morning immersed in his personal ideas, questioning the place within the cosmos they may take him. Four days earlier than the NBA playoffs, it could be simple to let work flood his mind as he lay in mattress. The buzz of anticipation for his most significant basketball in three years surrounded him.

But Johnson is aware of himself effectively. He is aware of that indulging his curiosity helps him discover peace. So he indulged.

Today’s subject was time dilation.

“So gravity, time and speed, they work together,” he defined a number of hours later, wiping the sweat from his brow after the Nuggets completed apply. “So the faster an object goes, the slower time is perceived. To my little extent of knowledge, there’s like a meter. And at the speed of light, at the top of the meter, there’s no space for time in there. Time basically comes to a stop. So a particle of light that’s traveling at the speed of light, it doesn’t really feel time. If light takes eight minutes to get from the sun to us, that’s from our perspective. Everything’s about perspective. For that particle of light, it’s instantaneous because of its speed.”

Johnson was off and operating. He referenced the 2014 science fiction film “Interstellar,” through which Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway age 7 years for each hour that passes on a distinct planet. He tied it to a extra microscopic real-life instance — that “an astronaut who worked in the International Space Station for X amount of time might age a couple of milliseconds slower than a human on Earth.” He marveled on the brilliance and creativeness of Albert Einstein and different early Twentieth-century physicists who studied relativity earlier than it was accepted as a idea. “You’re thinking, how did they figure that out?” he mentioned.

The 30-year-old Nuggets wing is a half-decade faraway from an NBA Finals run with Phoenix. He hasn’t had a style of the playoffs since 2023, when his Brooklyn Nets had been swept within the first spherical. As Denver’s beginning small ahead alongside the star duo of Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray, he’ll be an X-factor for a crew with championship ambitions this 12 months. He’s extensively considered one of many smartest gamers within the NBA, an avid pupil and instructor of the sport whose comprehension of the chessboard made him look like an ideal match for Jokic when Denver traded for him last summer. His thoughts is one in all his biggest strengths — and generally his adversary. “I’m probably an overthinker on a lot of things,” he instructed The Denver Post.

The Nuggets sacrificed a first-round decide and a longtime staple of their beginning lineup, Michael Porter Jr., to purchase Johnson in a transaction that also enabled other additions. It was their most important roster transfer in 4 years, a transparent sign from Denver’s new entrance workplace that change was wanted to return to championship type. The previous core wasn’t working anymore.

Nine months later, the commerce has aged higher for the Nuggets within the summary than it has on the stat sheet. They anticipated that. Porter and Johnson flipped roles. Porter’s expanded. Johnson’s contracted. His season has been a rollercoaster at instances, interrupted by accidents and taking pictures slumps and the general adjustment course of to taking part in in Jokic’s orbit. His teammates and coaches have implored him to be aggressive, not to cut back an excessive amount of.

“Cam is a really cerebral player,” coach David Adelman mentioned. “And I think cerebral people sometimes can get in their own way. … It’s my job to make sure he’s getting touches, that he’s part of what we’re trying to accomplish. And it’s his job to just play. Let it happen. He’s too good of a basketball player not to.”

Johnson nonetheless completed the 12 months a career-best 43% from 3-point vary, rating eighth within the league. He’s coming in sizzling to the playoffs, the place Porter struggled lately. The coming weeks will present the true verdict on Denver’s 2025 offseason strikes. Johnson isn’t any stranger to the surroundings and the stress. He has his personal manner of navigating all of it, of harnessing his tendency to overthink as a recalibration methodology. A reset button.

When he wants house away from basketball, he places his thoughts to work on one other topic that brings him as a lot pleasure and wonderment. He goes to house.

“I just try to learn things and learn about the world around me,” he mentioned. “When we talk about astronomy and physics in general, as an overthinker, it kind of gets you outside of yourself. You get caught up in your own problems sometimes and the world feels like it’s this big and everything feels so heavy, and then you go and you learn about some things, and you’re like man, we are really just on a little tiny rock in a very vast abyss.”

Johnson is entranced by physics. By historical past. By the historical past of physics. He takes books on the highway with him — postgame studying for the tireless hours the Nuggets spend airborne, touring from NBA metropolis to metropolis.

It has served him effectively all through this season and his seven-year NBA profession. It will proceed to supply him a type of respite throughout the playoffs, which start Saturday (1:30 p.m. MT) when Denver hosts the Timberwolves in Game 1.

“My whole world sometimes revolves around what happens in this rectangle,” he mentioned. “So I need the opposite.”

One of the brightest minds within the basketball universe

It doesn’t at all times present, however Johnson is pushed by a competitiveness that matches his mind. Growing up outdoors of Pittsburgh, he watched his older brother turn out to be a highschool valedictorian.

“He always said that he was gonna catch Aaron,” his dad, Gil Johnson, mentioned. That made life easy: Cam acquired good grades as a result of he had no different alternative.

He additionally utilized his smarts to each sport he performed. As a quarterback in soccer, he didn’t want to put on a wrist sleeve with performs listed, Gil mentioned. He had a knack for realizing the place his receivers had been going, the place he wanted to place the ball. As a baseball participant, he as soon as pitched a powerful sport for his seventh-grade crew, then stunned his dad by explaining precisely how he did it. He didn’t have an elite arsenal of pitches — he was a center schooler, in any case — however he discovered which areas of the strike zone had been weaknesses for every hitter all through the sport. “I had no idea that he thought baseball like that,” Gil mentioned.

And as a hooper, Johnson was at all times attempting to establish the subsequent move his teammates might make, after he handed it to them.

“You saw the leadership. You saw him telling guys where to be,” mentioned Nick Luchini, one in all his highschool associates and teammates. “You could tell that guys were feeding off how smart he was.”

In a parallel universe, Johnson may’ve been an engineer. He may’ve studied astronomy, or historical past, or legislation. But he determined when he was younger that he would make it to the NBA. While taking part in up a few years in second grade, he impressed an opponent as soon as and earned a postgame praise: “You might be a professional basketball player someday.”

Johnson didn’t take it that manner.

“He came over with a scowl on his face,” Gil mentioned. Cam was offended by the “might be” a part of the remark.

“I remember it like it was yesterday,” Cam mentioned. “… I feel like a lot of kids think that, you know? And it didn’t always work out for me. You say that to me in ninth grade, I’m like, ‘Yeah, we’ll see.’ Of course, I have confidence in myself, but as a 5-8 freshman, it’s like, I’m also studying. I’m into books too. … By the time high school got to late junior, early senior years, I unloaded some of my APs intentionally. And kind of spent just a little bit more time in the gym, took a little bit of that (schoolwork) off my plate. So that was probably the first time I made a decision where school was a little bit more on the back burner.”

After all, Cam had already misplaced the battle to his brother. He would find yourself a measly salutatorian.

“He got me,” Cam mentioned. “His GPA was higher than mine. He took more APs. He did better on AP tests. He did better on the ACT. He did better on the SAT. I couldn’t catch him. He’s too smart. … He’s just smarter than me, point blank. Period.”

By the time he hit a progress spurt and have become a recruiting goal for Division I school basketball applications, Johnson was already explaining physics terminology to his highschool associates to assist them perceive a difficult class.

“If I’m being honest, Cam taught me a lot,” his good friend Santino Platt mentioned, “dumbing it down for me.”

But Johnson mentioned it wasn’t till a sophomore astronomy course on the University of Pittsburgh that he developed an insatiable curiosity concerning the mysteries of the universe. And the miracles of scientific discovery inside that universe. Amateur astronomy turned a pastime as he was drafted into the NBA.

“We have such a mathematical approach to solving so much of what we cannot see,” Johnson mentioned. “It’s really cool how we use these equations and constants to deduce how far a planet is from a star that’s 50 light years away, you know what I mean? We can’t see it for nothing. But by measuring how much light it takes away from a star and how big that star is, we can figure out a lot. When you read about the history of it and how long we’ve been around as humans in the past thousands of years, and how rapidly it’s changing, it makes you think, ‘Well, what do we have wrong now?’ So I just like reading. Reading what people have thought in the past, reading what people think now. We have some really smart scientists in the world, and some are really really good at explaining.”

He got here face to face with one in all them in 2023, when the Nets helped organize for him to meet astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. After a protracted dialog, Johnson and Tyson recorded a “space draft” video for social media through which they took turns deciding on celestial ideas and occasions. Johnson’s “team” included the carbonate-silicate cycle, Pluto and a neutron star with the primary general decide. “That’s a good pick,” he instructed The Post, doubling down.

He beamed on the show of public curiosity in NASA’s latest mission to the moon. He questioned to himself if the miracles of science are taken for granted by most individuals as he watched, in awe of the flight path’s precision. (“We go around the earth, loop to catch the moon, loop the moon, come back to the immediate, right where we want to be, drop them right in the ocean right where we thought they would end up. That’s what math can do for us. … Not a stationary earth. Not a stationary moon.”)

His favourite reads over time have included “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson and “The Planet Factory: Exoplanets and the Search for a Second Earth” by Elizabeth J. Tasker. Recently after some Nuggets video games, he’s been working his manner by way of “The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality” by Brian Greene, which dives into the weeds of theoretical physics.

“It’s sometimes a little heavy to read after a game,” Johnson mentioned. “Like, you’ve gotta really sit there and think on a couple pages. It’s not, like, a light read. But that’s the whole point. Sitting there and thinking. It’s pretty cool if you ask me.”

He has his different methods of unwinding from basketball, too, after all. He’s an avid golfer. He’s a lifelong sneakerhead, his dad says. And he’s a working towards Christian — however he doesn’t view his non secular and scientific convictions as being at odds with one another.

“I think we choose as humans to put them in opposition to each other,” he mentioned. “… If everybody always thought, like, ‘God is in control of everything, I don’t need to worry about it,’ I don’t think we would have as much scientific (discovery). You can look throughout time, and history tells us this. … I really think the two can mesh. And that’s the perspective I look at it from. I just look at it as creation and the laws of nature are God’s language, and we are slowly trying to uncover it in a way that we can understand. It’s like translating languages.”

While in search of out texts that make the advanced really feel digestible, Johnson has concurrently established himself as a purveyor of intricate ideas. He hosts “The Old Man and the Three,” a distinguished basketball podcast that was initially hosted by JJ Redick. Redick left the present when he took over as head coach of the Lakers. Johnson has been his successor, having numerous Nuggets teammates be part of him for episodes all through this season.

The dialog doesn’t often get round to astronomy. Johnson is cautious of boring his associates to loss of life with it — although he has discovered not less than one house good friend with the Nuggets in crew physician Steve Short.

“I’ll sit here and explain it, and some of my friends have no interest in it. And they’re nodding their head, nodding their head. I’m rambling. And then — eye-roll,” Johnson mentioned, laughing. “… I’ll get a lot of eye-rolls for sure, like, ‘Here he goes. He don’t even know what he’s talking about.’ … I wonder how many other NBA players think about this stuff.”

Finding his mojo in Denver

Johnson acquired off to a rocky begin in Denver.

He started the season in a nasty droop. A 39% profession 3-point shooter, he was 21% after 11 video games, good for solely 7.2 factors per night time. Not ultimate for a participant who had averaged an environment friendly 18.8 the earlier 12 months in Brooklyn.

But the Nuggets had been profitable. Johnson’s struggles didn’t get in the way in which of their general offensive success. Adelman urged persistence from followers and media as Johnson navigated his new photo voltaic system, one through which Jokic is the solar. The first-year coach defended Johnson once more throughout one other rut in early March, after he missed a potential game-winning 3-pointer in Oklahoma City. It weighed closely on him.

“He puts a lot of pressure on himself — not sometimes, but all the time,” Gil mentioned. “He holds himself up to a high standard.”

But for many of the season, Johnson has been a quietly efficient function participant, defending higher than Porter and conserving defenses trustworthy along with his floor-spacing, even when he hasn’t scored. He discovered his mojo once more over the previous few weeks, highlighted by a barrage of clutch 3s in a press release win over San Antonio. Johnson hardly ever celebrates or will get animated on the courtroom, however that day, he shared a cathartic second with sharpshooting teammate Tim Hardaway Jr. after draining an enormous shot in extra time. It was the emotional apex of a 12-game win streak to end the common season.

Since these first 11 video games, Johnson is 46.8% from deep. The Nuggets have a 9.5 web ranking with him on the ground.

“We’re all telling him to shoot,” Hardaway mentioned this week. “It would be different if we were telling him to pass, right? So we’re telling him to do what he does best, man. Be that Brooklyn Net Cam that you were out there, averaging 17, 18 a game. Playing freely, playing fun. That’s what you were brought here to do. Knock down your shots when open and be confident. Don’t be passive.”

The ball will discover him in high-stakes conditions over the approaching weeks. The gravitational pull of the Jokic-Murray two-man sport is simply too intense, like a planet the place time is dilated. Defenders shall be sucked in from the perimeter. Johnson will get open photographs.

When he’s in these moments, nothing else issues to him — no different galaxy or photo voltaic system or planet. His universe contracts into an 18-inch cylinder.