Nine misses in Oklahoma City, one season after Jamal Murray's $46.4M bought the NBA's seventh-highest production
How many missed shots does it take to become a column? For Jamal Murray, two games' worth, six months apart.
In the Denver Nuggets' 2026-27 opener at Paycom Center in Oklahoma City on October 22, Murray took 11 shots against the Thunder and missed nine, including his only three-point attempt. Mark Keeler's column, as carried by headtopics, pairs that night with the last game Murray played that counted.
That was Game 6 of last season's first-round loss to Minnesota. Murray took 17 shots and missed 13, missed both threes and scored 12 points, and Denver scored 98.
Keeler's argument is that the Nuggets can't shoot their way back to the NBA Finals with Murray shooting like this. His headline promises several problems, but the copy I could reach cuts off mid-sentence about that missed three, so I can only vouch for the one.
The material also stops short of the opener's final score, whether Denver won and how many points Murray scored, and there's no word from Murray, the coach or the team. So before anyone files this under slump, know that we're working from one playoff elimination and one opening night. The more useful question is what the money did in between, across the 82 games of 2025-26.
Murray earned $46.4M last season, 21st-highest of the 435 rated players.
For it he returned the league's seventh-highest production total, played 75 games and supplied 18% of everything Denver produced.
Per WAGE, that came to a 79 WAGE Score for 2025-26, Smart Money. I read contracts as bets that pay out over several seasons, and this one had been paying on a climb: a big jump on 2024-25, the fourth straight rise, and well above his career WAGE Score of 59.
It wasn't a bargain-bin season, to be clear. By cost per unit of production he was 234th cheapest of the 399 rated players who produced anything last season. What made the return good was the volume, not a discount.
The Game 6 that opens Keeler's column was also one night of six. Over that series Murray accounted for 19% of Denver's playoff production, about the share he'd carried all season. That says his load didn't shrink in the playoffs; it doesn't say how the other nights went, and the material doesn't either.
So what does this season ask of him? I can't tell you his 2026-27 salary or how many seasons his deal runs, because the contract terms aren't in the reporting, and I'm not going to guess at them to make the math dramatic.
What last season does establish is how a salary at that level earned its keep: Murray played most of the games, stacked up near-top-of-the-league production and carried a big slice of his team's output. If the shots keep missing the way they did in Oklahoma City, that volume is the part that gives.
But one game in, nothing has been graded. Nine misses go in a box score; the salary gets judged over a season, and the last one he ran up was the top of a four-season climb.