{"id":413979,"date":"2025-11-30T00:48:17","date_gmt":"2025-11-30T00:48:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/413979\/"},"modified":"2025-11-30T00:48:17","modified_gmt":"2025-11-30T00:48:17","slug":"nuggets-jamal-murray-sure-looks-like-nba-all-star-so-far","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/413979\/","title":{"rendered":"Nuggets’ Jamal Murray sure looks like NBA All-Star so far"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s Jamal Murray\u2019s Team World.<\/a> The rest of us are just living in it.<\/p>\n

Or rather, living in the glow of what might be the Nuggets guard\u2019s best-ever start to a regular season \u2014 best statistical start, at any rate.<\/a><\/p>\n

While the Nuggets themselves are coming off a schizophrenic and inconsistent week, to put it kindly, after home losses to Sacramento and San Antonio, the Blue Arrow has quietly been tying a bow around his most productive November ever.<\/p>\n

Friday night\u2019s 37-point performance against the Spurs at Ball Arena pushed No. 27\u2019s scoring average over his first 12 games of the month to 23.2 per contest \u2014 easily his best clip for the month of November since the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n

Jamal Murray: budding All-Star \u2014 A-minus.<\/p>\n

From Nov. 1-Nov. 28, Murray was connecting on 48% of his attempts from the floor and 40.4% from beyond the arc. As of Saturday morning, his November averages were 23.2 points, 7.3 assists and 3.0 treys per tilt.<\/p>\n

If that sounds like a healthy jump from a year ago at this time, that\u2019s because it is. Murray in November 2024 averaged 17.8 points, 6.7 dimes and 2.2 3-point makes over 10 games. In November 2023, Maple Curry averaged 12.5 points, 6.3 assists and 1.5 treys over just four appearances.<\/p>\n

Given that Murray is a historically slow-(ish) starter, Team Grading The Week (GTW) wanted to pause form stuffing our respective faces with turkey sandwiches and tip some collective caps in the Blue Arrow\u2019s direction.<\/p>\n

For one, Murray promised that a dedicated summer of good health plus a intense workout schedule would lead to a better opening two months of the regular season.<\/a> He\u2019s been true to that word \u2014 so far, so good.<\/p>\n

For another, here\u2019s hoping that yet another tweak in the NBA\u2019s All-Star game format opens up a window for Murray to finally make the cut at age 28.<\/p>\n

Instead of conference-vs.-conference matchups, the main competition on ASG weekend will be a Team USA vs. Team World tourney. Only instead of two teams, there will be three teams comprised of eight players, with no positional restrictions, who will face off in a round-robin format.<\/p>\n

With Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (32.6 points, 6.6 assist per game as of this past Friday) almost a lock to take up at least one Team World backcourt spot, Murray is going to have to keep this pace up to join his fellow Canadian at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, Calif., come mid-February. But with each passing week, Murray gets that much closer to crossing the threshold from almost to All-Star.<\/p>\n

Tad Boyle\u2019s still got it \u2014 A.<\/p>\n

New DU men\u2019s hoops coach Tim Bergstraser sure got the GTW crew\u2019s attention earlier this month by beating CSU Rams and Ali Farokhmanesh in FoCo. Steve Smiley\u2019s UNC Bears men\u2019s basketball team improved to 6-1 this past Wednesday with a victory at Air Force. Thanksgiving weekend means we\u2019re going to finally get some meaty inter-conference matchups on the hoops front, and no local men\u2019s team has stepped up over the past few days the way GTW\u2019s old pal Tad Boyle has with CU.<\/p>\n

Between Nov. 21-28, the Buffs (7-0) knocked off UC Davis at home by 16, then went to Palm Desert, Calif., for a holiday tourney \u2014 taking out a good San Francisco team by 10 and following that up with an 81-68 victory over Washington on Friday thanks to Bangot Dak\u2019s 15 points and 11 boards.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s too early to draw deep conclusions on the men\u2019s hoops front locally, but not too early to dream. As of late Friday night, CU\u2019s good week had moved the Buffs up to No. 65 on KenPom.com\u2019s computer rankings,<\/a> just ahead of CSU at No. 68. With both rivals needing a \u201cname\u201d win on their respective resumes before Christmas, the Rocky Mountain Showdown at Moby Arena on Dec. 6 figures to be, to paraphrase Russell Wilson, awfully spicy.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Jamal Murray\u2019s Team World. The rest of us are just living in it. Or rather, living in…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":413980,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[14183,32524,1339,10809,1369,7823,77946,194386,3134,88627,3373,1370,17660,1260,7198,194387,194388,12116,2750,88628,3371,62,2632,194389,44599,194390,194391,67,132,68,2058],"class_list":{"0":"post-413979","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-air-force","9":"tag-ball-arena","10":"tag-basketball","11":"tag-bears","12":"tag-college-sports","13":"tag-covid","14":"tag-csu","15":"tag-csu-rams","16":"tag-denver-nuggets","17":"tag-grading-the-week","18":"tag-jamal-murray","19":"tag-latest-headlines","20":"tag-more-nuggets-news","21":"tag-nba","22":"tag-nuggets","23":"tag-nuggets-takes","24":"tag-rocky-mountain-showdown","25":"tag-russell-wilson","26":"tag-san-francisco","27":"tag-sean-keeler","28":"tag-shai-gilgeous-alexander","29":"tag-sports","30":"tag-sports-columnists","31":"tag-tad-boyle","32":"tag-thanksgiving","33":"tag-tim-bergstraser","34":"tag-unc-bears","35":"tag-united-states","36":"tag-unitedstates","37":"tag-us","38":"tag-washington"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115635899958009940","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413979\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/413980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}