They called it Boomer. Two guards meet on the wing for a dribble handoff exchange, initiating the offense. The second player swings the ball across the top of the key to the second side. “Already, three people have touched it” in a short time, David Adelman says. That’s what the Nuggets loved about it: “Everybody touches the ball.” Soon, a fourth player does — usually Nikola Jokic, flashing to the second-side elbow and catching an entry pass, or stepping up to screen.
Now the ball is popping, movement away from it is flowing, and Jokic is orchestrating from a comfortable spot on the floor.
Uncomfortable spots don’t seem to exist for Denver’s anomaly of a center, though. So the Nuggets imagined other versions of Boomer, with Jokic playing unorthodox roles. He could bring the ball up and give the initial handoff. Aaron Gordon or Jamal Murray could catch at the elbow. “Now Nikola is part of an off-the-ball scheme,” Adelman said. “He can be a catch-and-shoot player.”
Every offseason, Denver’s coaching staff takes on film projects, searching for new inspiration in unexpected places. One of the ideas that emerged was Boomer, an appropriately named set because it was implemented after coaches studied the Australian national team in 2022. “They had a (freaking) squad,” recalled Adelman, the Nuggets’ longtime offensive coordinator.
By then, Jokic had already evolved beyond the limits of the traditional NBA center. But the goal was to keep expanding those boundaries anyway.
“Basically, for the last eight years, we have been watching the best players in our league that are not centers, and we’re saying that our guy can do everything they can do,” Adelman told The Denver Post in an early April interview. “Plus what a big guy does.”
This has been the creative burden of the Nuggets’ coaching staff for years, spanning Michael Malone’s tenure and Jokic’s unprecedented development from a second-round pick into a three-time MVP. It’s a responsibility Adelman has shared since he joined the team in 2017. Now it’s one he carries on as interim head coach entering the 2025 playoffs, nearly two weeks after the stunning dismissal of Malone.
Boomer was a hit at training camp that summer and a staple of the Nuggets’ offense during their championship run the next season. “We’d been together for a long time, and when we put that in, there was like a sense of energy,” Adelman said. “The guys felt like, ‘OK, here’s something new we can play with, play out of.’” It was part of what he described as an unofficial third stage of evolution for Jokic. Designing offense around him has been a process of keeping pace with that meteoric rise.
“You’re trying to be innovative every year,” Adelman said.
The first iteration of Jokic, from Adelman’s point of view, was the emergence of a modern post-up maestro. He made his first All-NBA team in 2019, the same year he went to the playoffs for the first time. “He realized in the playoffs that, yes, you can be a pass-first player,” Adelman said, “but to win in those games, you have to score.”
Adelman’s focus was two-fold but fairly conventional: find ways to reliably get Jokic the ball on the block or at the elbow, and optimize the spacing around his post-ups. To be a prolific scorer, he needed to be able to punish teams for making him a passer. The Nuggets would run split action — a player makes an entry pass to Jokic, then sets a screen to get another teammate open, rotating toward the ball — and they quickly identified how lethal Jokic could be with a shooter in the opposite corner of the floor.
“If you bring that third defender over from the weak side to kind of shadow and help, we have this unicorn passer making these decisions from the elbow,” Adelman said. Jokic’s passing dazzled the league. His scoring output quietly increased by five points per game from the regular season to the playoffs in 2019.
The next stage was the crystallization of Jokic’s shooting. As coaches watched his willingness to launch 3-pointers increase, they realized they could run him off screens to get him open. This eventually progressed to Boomer, which Denver could use to set up a variety of play-calls for Jokic or his teammates. Having a guard set a pin-down for Jokic has remained effective for years now. Opposing big men aren’t skilled screen navigators.
“We got really creative and started to look at the best catch-and-shoot players in the league,” Adelman said, “which is weird because you’re looking at them to try to manufacture shots for your center.”
That evolved into using Jokic as a pick-and-roll ball handler. Adelman and the Nuggets studied old film of DeMar DeRozan hunting mismatches against them. They identified the best locations on the floor to set ball screens for Jokic, who was occupying a role usually reserved for smaller, quicker athletes. They taught their guards to roll like a big man. Jamal Murray, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Christian Braun all excelled at it.
The latest development: examining film of isolation specialists last summer to work on setting up Jokic to play one-on-one from the foul line.
Adelman was thinking Dirk Nowitzki. He was thinking Kawhi Leonard, the Clippers star wing Denver is facing in the first round.
“He’ll come back (for training camp), and we’ll try things, and he’ll just do it,” Adelman said of Jokic. “I think he wants to just do it so he can feel it out. … You can tell if he likes something, because from the get-go, when we’re doing 5-on-0 script, the ball is just popping, and you can tell he really likes to feel of it, the spacing of it.”
“He’s gonna keep it real,” Jokic said. “He’s gonna tell you what he wants in probably the most simple way possible. ‘Do this.’ And he’s gonna probably show you, too, in probably some smart-(aleck) way. But maybe that’s the way.”
The talent Jokic’s coaches are working with comes with high-octane pressure. High expectations. The kind of expectations that can get a head coach fired two years after winning a championship, in the last week of a third consecutive 50-win season. Adelman credits Malone for fostering a schematic open-mindedness within Denver’s staff, which plays out in those offseason projects.
Adelman has overseen the projects on the offensive side of the ball, getting help from other assistants such as Ryan Bowen and Andrew Munson. “We’ll kind of brainstorm what projects sound interesting to us, then disperse them. … Some guys just watch the Olympics or just watch the FIBA tournament,” Adelman said. “We’ll have guys just watch NBA from last year, just tons and tons of film, and then we’ll also do EuroLeague. There’s no reason not to watch this stuff and look for things that can make you better.”
Adelman has nerded out over everything from Division II film — “they run these wild, crazy offenses because they have a bunch of 5-10 guys that can all shoot” — to the French women’s national team. Last year, he was eager to dig into the Indiana State men’s team, which featured a center named Robbie Avila, who was nicknamed “College Jokic,” only to realize that “they were just running all of our stuff.”
When the staff gets back together later in the summer, a coach will present an edit of clips — anywhere from 50 to 400, Adelman says. From there, an open discussion ensues about what to add.
“It’s the best kind of stress,” Adelman said. “I’d rather be challenged to find ways to help (Jokic), our staff, than trying to figure out how to get to 100 points with a really bad team.”
He has long approached his job with balance in mind: creativity in the exploration of all possibilities, but awareness of how to rein that creativity in. He’ll insist a thousand times that, as exotic as a concept might be, it still reduces to simple spacing principles — the shooter in the weak-side corner for Jokic to find with a pass.
“You have to do it with fairness to who you have. … What do our guys do well, and what’s in their comfort zone?” Adelman said. “Because you can have all the ideas in the world, but it has to translate to the players and they have to feel good about it for it to work. Nikola, individually, you can watch anything you want and go, ‘I think we can do this with him.’ But in order to do that, the other four people have to complement your idea.”
If that balance is going to be the dogma of Denver’s next head coach — Adelman says he doesn’t view these playoffs as a full-time job audition — it will have been passed down to him, a personal touch reminiscent of what Malone absorbed from his father.
Like Malone, Adelman is from a family of coaches, most notably his dad, Naismith Hall of Famer Rick Adelman. “I learned really young, you get a notebook and you make up five kinds of players — not real people,” David said. “Just make up five players and what their attributes are, and now create an offense. You have to take a look at people’s weaknesses and strengths.”
He would envision and sketch out the types of motion he might run for his imaginary offense based on those archetypes. He might start with a point guard who can’t shoot. Add a 3-and-D shooting guard who’s great off the catch but struggles to dribble. A slashing wing. A good defensive power forward.
“I usually would have a post-up center,” he remembered.
He had wanted to keep it conventional. Realistic.
The type of center he would someday coach didn’t really exist yet.
The Nuggets’ offensive evolution
The Denver Nuggets have been no worse than one of the top seven offenses in the NBA during David Adelman’s eight seasons in the Mile High City. And in the last three, they’ve been top five as Nikola Jokic has continued to grow into an all-around offensive master. Here’s a look at the numbers:
| Season | Offensive Rating | NBA rank | Offensive rating with Jokic |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-18 | 111.4 | 6th | 114.0 |
| 2018-19 | 112.1 | 7th | 113.3 |
| 2019-20 | 112.6 | 5th | 113.4 |
| 2020-21 | 116.3 | 6th | 120.2 |
| 2021-22 | 113.8 | 6th | 117.3 |
| 2022-23 | 116.8 | 5th | 124.2 |
| 2023-24 | 117.8 | 5th | 122.4 |
| 2024-25 | 118.9 | 4th | 125.6 |
(Click here to view chart in mobile.)
Source: Basketball-Reference.com
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Originally Published: April 18, 2025 at 5:45 AM MDT
