OKLAHOMA CITY — Aaron Gordon will always answer a teammate’s phone call.
So when Christian Braun woke him up with a FaceTime notification last year, he rolled out of bed and accepted. Gordon was in China. Braun was in Missouri, seeing his mom’s sister one last time. She had been a quadriplegic for years and had only a few hours to live. Braun wanted to see her smile.
She long had a fondness for one of the Nuggets. Call it a crush.
So Braun tried to surprise his aunt, not knowing Gordon was on the other side of the world.
“He was literally sleeping in China,” he told The Denver Post. “He didn’t have to answer the phone. But he picked up in the middle of the night. … He turned on his lights, got out of bed, showed her his new tattoo.”
Gordon stayed on the phone with Braun’s family for about 10 minutes, chatting with his biggest admirer. “I love you,” she said to Braun, setting herself up for a punchline that made the whole room laugh, “but Aaron’s my favorite player.”
It was a difficult day. Braun’s aunt died about four hours later. But for a few minutes, she beamed.
“She was kind of coming in and out of (consciousness) a little bit,” Braun remembered. “And I showed her Aaron so she could see, and her eyes lit up, man.”
Gordon’s selflessness is the stuff of legend in Denver. He famously trimmed and tailored his game to fit a reduced role after being traded in 2021 from Orlando, where he was the first option, the ball-in-hand star. He embraced dirty work and a cerebral reexamination of basketball, tutored by Nikola Jokic. His gratitude for that enlightenment was so immense that he once bought Jokic a massive customized saddle, decorated with the MVP’s name and the Serbian flag to commemorate his love of horse-racing. And a car. Gordon also bought Jokic a car.
“He is a Denver Nugget, man,” interim coach David Adelman said. “He is the soul of our team.”
On a team that features an inner-circle Hall of Famer at center and a generational playoff riser at point guard, Gordon’s many talents have often been tertiary. Teammates, coaches and front-office staff proudly point out that’s not a relegation but a willing sacrifice. The power forward has learned to appreciate his freedom from the limelight.
So as the Nuggets see it, nobody is more deserving of it.
They’ll say it’s an act of karma that Gordon is now responsible for two playoff game-winning buckets in as many weeks, even though the ball doesn’t go through him with games on the line. He is Denver’s hero who doesn’t reach for the cape. It just keeps finding him.
It found him in Los Angeles, where Jokic’s airball floated left of the rim before time expired in Game 4 of the first round. And it found him again at the end of an instant classic Game 1 in Oklahoma City, where Russell Westbrook couldn’t see any daylight in the paint during a last-gasp transition attack. Gordon spotted up on the left wing, collected Westbrook’s pass and knocked down a 3-pointer with 2.8 seconds remaining.
Trailing by 13 with 6:30 to go, the Nuggets stunned the 68-win Thunder on its home court with a 121-119 win, two days after surviving a fierce seven-game series with the Clippers.
As Gordon overheard one teammate sing his praises in the locker room afterward, he said to himself, “Aw, shucks.”
“I think everybody by now knows AG is a salt-of-the-earth person,’” Peyton Watson told The Post. “I never understand why he’s never up for Teammate of the Year (in the NBA). I never understand it. He’s one of the best teammates I’ve ever had at any level of basketball.”
The examples are endless. When Gordon became eligible for a contract extension last offseason, he had a 2025 player option worth $22.8 million looming on his active contract. He was due for a raise and incentivized to decline the option. Instead, he compromised by signing a deal that included an opt-in on his 2025-26 salary, league sources said, providing the hamstrung Nuggets with significant luxury tax relief for next season.
While Gordon charmed and comforted Braun’s family, he has also been mourning his own loss. His older brother, Drew, died in a car crash last May. Gordon started taking care of Drew’s two sons, who accompanied him to the media room for his postgame interview Monday.
“Stick with it,” he told his nephews at the podium. “Be a demonstration of resiliency.”
Gordon once had a basketball court built into his Denver warehouse home. Grief-stricken last offseason, he poured hours into improving his 3-point shot. He was 32.3% in his career and 29% last season. He wanted to get rid of the hitch in his form.
He emerged from the warehouse with a career-best 43.6% season. The shot that completed Denver’s miracle in Oklahoma wouldn’t have been a reliable look for high-leverage moments a year ago.
“I’ve worked on my jumper a lot — a lot — throughout the years,” he said. “You guys have seen the maturation of it. So it’s nice to have it all culminate in a game-winner.”
“He is so fluid right now with his shot,” Adelman said. “It’s very different. Over the years, it’s slowly gotten better. There’s less of a hitch. There’s almost no hitch now. It’s just a very fluid, up-and-down shot. His knees release when his elbow does. All the things they tell you when you’re 10 years old at camp, it looks that way right now.”
As Adelman noted, Gordon’s impact on the margins Monday won’t be as canonized as his game-winning shot. He grabbed 14 rebounds. He threw himself on the floor to obtain a loose ball in the last two minutes, securing a stop for the rallying Nuggets. He held Jalen Williams, an All-Star this season, to a 5-for-19 shooting night that prevented the Thunder from pulling away. This was 48 hours after defending Kawhi Leonard exceptionally in a Game 7.
In essence, Adelman meant the traces left on a game by Gordon that aren’t directly attributed to him in a box score. The dirty work that he embraced when Denver acquired him from Orlando.
“It seemed like they were always fighting for, ‘Who’s the man? Who’s gonna be the man in Orlando?’ Everybody wanted the ball,” Nuggets assistant coach Popeye Jones told The Post. “Everybody wanted to be the man. … He understands. A lot of people don’t like to play the role that he plays, in terms of, ‘Oh, I’m just kind of getting out of the way and letting Joker and Jamal (Murray) do their thing.’”
Jones made a point of getting his hands on the game ball after Denver’s unforgettable series-opening win. He dangled it in front of Gordon. “I told him, I’m not gonna give you this ball right now because it’s just 1-0,” Jones said. “But I’ll make sure it gets back to Denver.”
That, too, was a sacrifice Gordon was willing to make.
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