Aaron Gordon trade between Nuggets and Magic, revisited 5 years later

Before it was arguably the best trade in Nuggets history, it broke Nikola Jokic’s heart.

It was March 25, 2021, and he was stuck on a bus at the Tampa Bay airport with his teammates. One of his favorites, Gary Harris, was getting traded, and Jokic didn’t have it in him to start thinking about the return yet. “I remember saying goodbye to Gary,” he said, “and I cried because I was so sad. We had a little bit (of a) good connection, and we played really good.”

The scene feels straight out of a time capsule now, as if it were specifically designed to document an unusual moment in NBA lore. For one, Tampa doesn’t have a team. It never has. But it did have a tenant for one season. Travel regulations between the U.S. and Canada related to COVID-19 had rendered it a logistical nightmare for the Raptors to go back and forth across the border. The Toronto franchise was setting up shop in Florida to wait out the pandemic.

Then there was the timing. The NBA trade deadline is typically in early February, but the 2020-21 season was running on a different schedule. It started around Christmas. It ended at 72 games, not the usual 82. And it featured a late-March cutoff for swapping players. Down was up, left was right.

Enough for Aaron Gordon to forget his five-year anniversary.

“This week?” he reacted last Friday when approached for an interview about it. “Was it really?”

Gordon was home in Orlando in 2021, waiting for news. He had requested a trade from the Magic after playing more than six years for the team that drafted him fourth overall. He knew he was about to have a new home. He just didn’t know where it would be. He had no idea he would find basketball nirvana in Denver, downsizing his game and joining forces with Jokic to deliver a city its first NBA championship.

“All Aaron ever did was win,” said his agent, Calvin Andrews, who has known Gordon for most of his life. “That’s all he did. So I know how important winning was to him. So when we had the conversation about Denver, the conversation was like, ‘Don’t you want to get back to winning?’ … OK. Then you might have to play a certain role with this organization in order for them to win. He’s like, ‘I get it. I’m all in for that.’ And that’s what happened.”

‘Who can defend the monsters of the league?’

Five years later, Denver’s acquisition of Gordon has aged like wine, even if Gordon himself has aged into his 30s with rickety hamstrings and calves. For a franchise that has made several consequential blockbuster trades in its 60-year existence — most recently the infamous Carmelo Anthony saga in 2011 — it’s this smaller-scale deal that catapulted the Nuggets to new heights.

Their net rating this season is 11 points better per 100 possessions when Gordon is on the court than when he’s off it. Nobody else on the roster has an on-off impact exceeding five points on both offense and defense. Over the years, he’s shape-shifted from power forward to point guard to backup center as needed, while solidifying himself as a fan favorite at Ball Arena. Few in the NBA have occupied the liminal space between stardom and role player-dom as gracefully as him. He’s too good to be considered a supporting cast member, if not decorated enough to have his name on the marquee most nights.

The Nuggets got him by sending Orlando a package headlined by Harris, a locker room cornerstone who had started 325 games over seven seasons. It also included rookie guard RJ Hampton and Denver’s 2025 first-round draft pick, which was conveyed as the 25th selection last summer. Gary Clark accompanied Gordon to Colorado.

“I was kicking it with my homies,” Gordon recalled to The Denver Post about the day he was traded. “And Denver wasn’t really on my radar. Well, it was on my radar, but it was like Houston, Boston and Denver. … Got the call from Denver, and one of my homies was like, ‘Bro, you guys are gonna win a championship.’ I was like, ‘What? For real? You think so?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, you’re about to fit in.’ I said, ‘OK, cool.’”

He wasn’t sure whether to buy it. He hadn’t given as much thought to the Nuggets as he had to the Celtics. He was more familiar with Boston as an opponent. He was intrigued by the potential fit there. But both teams had lost in the conference finals in 2020. Both were pursuing a win-now move to bolster their cores.

The Nuggets’ search for a glue guy who could raise their defensive ceiling dated back to the previous trade deadline, when they came close to acquiring Jrue Holiday from New Orleans, according to league sources. Their interest in Holiday, a lockdown 6-foot-4 guard, was partially driven by the idea that Steph Curry was still the league’s preeminent offensive threat. Even as Curry recovered from a broken hand during a gap year for Golden State, rival teams felt scarred by the dynasty that had dominated the last half-decade. If the Nuggets were going to take the throne out West, they wondered whether they would need to prioritize adding someone who could chase Curry around screens.

“But more often than not, you were gonna face the guys who were 6-6 to 6-9 who could handle, pass, shoot from three levels,” said current Nuggets co-general manager Jon Wallace, who was a lower-level front office employee under Tim Connelly and Calvin Booth at the time. “That’s what you were gonna see more on a night-to-night basis.”

Holiday never got across the finish line in 2020. He went to Milwaukee in the offseason instead, providing the finishing touches on a championship Bucks team. Jerami Grant left the Nuggets in free agency, wanting a more prominent role offensively than they could promise him. Their focus had shifted more singularly toward bigger wing defenders by the 2021 deadline. The front office canvassed the league for trade candidates on expiring contracts or rookie-scale deals. Someone who could keep Denver young.

“We kept saying, ‘Who can defend the monsters of the league?’ The Kawhis, the LeBrons, the Paul Georges, so forth,” Wallace said. “Luka (Doncic) was first coming into his own. … It was like, who can thread that needle of that size, that strength, but still having the mobility to move laterally to cut guys off?”

Internal metrics gathered by then-vice president of analytics Tommy Balcetis and the front office suggested Gordon could be the answer. Purely from a basketball standpoint, he made perfect sense. But as the Nuggets closed in on him as a top target, they also dwelled on one wild-card variable. The loss of Grant had left behind a residual sting.

Would Gordon embrace a smaller role after functioning as the Magic’s primary scoring option? “It seemed like they were always fighting for, ‘Who’s the man? Who’s gonna be the man in Orlando?’” former Nuggets assistant coach Popeye Jones told The Post last season. “Everybody wanted the ball.” Those concerns became the focal point of Denver’s internal debates.

A dirty-work job for a star

Meanwhile, as Gordon weighed whether or not he wanted to request a trade, he told his agent that he felt like the prime of his career was slipping away in Orlando. That was the red flag to Andrews that it was time for Gordon to go.

“It wasn’t about, ‘Can I score 20 points a game?’ We tried that, and that didn’t work,” Andrews said. “And he was tired of kind of being a hamster, you know? And just spinning and spinning and trying to make things work, and it’s just not working. So maybe we’ve gotta do something a little different. Maybe you’ve gotta play a little differently.”

The Nuggets, in particular, would demand a stylistic adjustment. They made that clear to Gordon’s camp during the process. There would be less dribbling, less pick-and-roll. More read-and-react offense, more split action, more movement without the ball. It was decided by then: Jokic was Denver’s system. He was about to win his first MVP trophy. He needed a lob threat in the dunker spot and a frontcourt partner who could cover for his deficiencies as a defender. This would be a dirty-work job. “We went back and forth a million times on, ‘Is this the right move?’” Wallace remembers. “‘Is he going to buy in?’”

“I was extremely excited … just from knowing him in Orlando and knowing what he could bring to our team,” said coach David Adelman, who had overlapped with Gordon as a Magic assistant. “But you never know if someone’s gonna fit in, leaving a situation where the Magic had kind of given him basically a ball-handling, star role.”

The Magic had a deal in place with Houston leading up to the trade deadline, a league source told The Post, but the Rockets didn’t get a sense that Gordon would sign a contract extension with them. That caused the deal to fizzle out — another crossroads that could have altered the course of multiple franchises, like Denver’s pursuit of Holiday. Instead, Houston’s withdrawal from the sweepstakes left the Nuggets and Celtics as Gordon’s main suitors in the end.

It all led to that bus in Tampa, where the Nuggets anxiously waited more than 30 minutes in front of the plane to find out who wouldn’t be boarding their flight to New Orleans. They had lost a blowout to Toronto the night before.

“We were all yelling up to the front of the bus, like, ‘Yo, Tim, who’s getting traded? Tell us!’” Hampton told The Post in 2021. Harris recounted later that he and Hampton “kind of looked at each other, like, ‘I think some (stuff) is going down.’”

Before the Nuggets finalized the deal with Orlando, Booth called Andrews seeking reassurance.

“I’ve got to ask you this one more time, man,” Andrews remembers him saying. “If we trade for AG, is he gonna buy in?’”

Andrews gave his word. He felt strongly that Gordon was the piece Denver was missing.

Connelly went to the back of the bus to give Harris and Hampton the news.

“They held the buses just in case the trade actually happened, out of respect. And when the trade did happen, it was actually the best situation,” Adelman said. “We got to say goodbye to some important people. Gary was an enormous part of what we did here. So it was pretty emotional.”

The ‘perfect match’ for Joker

Ninety minutes away in Orlando, Gordon didn’t know what to expect from his new team — especially from playing next to Jokic, who was an enigma to him and many other players outside of Denver at that time.

“He’s so quiet, you know?” Gordon told The Post. “So like, around the league, he wasn’t the guy you were looking at as the best in the league, because he was so quiet. He was such a silent killer. And when we played him, same thing. He wouldn’t say a word. And he’d dominate the game, and you’d look up and say, ‘This guy is just really killing us.’ So I didn’t know he was as good as he was when I got here. Then I started watching him in practice, in games, the way he was passing the ball, and I was like, this guy is amazing.”

Their chemistry was instantaneous. Gordon debuted on March 28 with 13 points in 20 minutes. The Nuggets won their first seven games with him in the lineup.

“Once I got here and started playing with these guys, the energy that they played with, the talent that was around you, it was incredible,” Gordon said.

“It just was clicking,” Andrews said. “I’ve never seen anything click like this so fast. It just clicked. They were flying all over the court. Joker was throwing lobs. I mean, it was crazy.”

Then Murray went down. The Nuggets had looked the part of a serious championship contender for two weeks, only for their star guard to suffer a torn ACL during Gordon’s ninth game with the team.

Plans were delayed two years. Gordon passed the time by reexamining his game, simplifying it to mesh with Jokic’s surgical style. He trimmed the fat out, the occasional proclivity for poor shot selection. He mastered the short corner. He turned a Denver warehouse into a personal gym and refined his 3-point shot. By the time Murray returned and the stars aligned for a championship run in 2023, he was a carefully crafted blend of athleticism, skill and creativity. He swears by Jokic now. He has journeyed to Serbia in the offseason to experience the big man’s lifestyle. He recruited Jokic to 361, the company that now makes Jokic’s signature sneakers. He has bought Jokic gifts out of gratitude over the years, from a customized saddle to a car.

He has also signed two contract extensions with Denver. The only uncertainty that looms over his current deal is his soft-tissue health, which keeps resurfacing as an irritant after more than a decade of highlight dunks. The Nuggets are holding their breath as another playoff run nears. They’ve long since recognized he is their championship X-factor.

“It just turned out to be the perfect match for (Jokic and Murray), and it has been for all these years,” Adelman said. “Obviously, it led to the ultimate success, winning a championship. So Aaron’s been incredible from that trade, and Gary’s time here was so impactful as well. So that was pretty crazy to have Gary, what he did, and then get Aaron on the back end.”

Harris’s playing time and production dropped in Orlando, where he spent four full seasons before signing with the Bucks in 2025. Hampton played 145 more games in the NBA. He’s out of the league now, playing in China. Orlando used the 2025 pick on Michigan State’s Jase Richardson, who’s averaging 11 minutes this season in the early stages of his development. The Magic hasn’t won a playoff series since 2010.