(Transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Accompanying audio is Louisa and my entire rangy chat)
Katie: I don't even know how to start this because it's not a podcast.
Louisa: It's actually, I mean, yeah. How do we start this? I don't want to start in the middle of the conversation that we were having because you're going to do a transcript.
Katie: I mean, well, first Louisa — Louisa Thomas, thank you for joining me. This is of course, your ‘Exits’. This is your audio version of ‘Exits’ and you picked the Denver Nuggets. So we're here to unpack what happened to that team.
Louisa: I feel like the Denver Nuggets picked me, frankly.
Louisa: I went out to see the Nuggets early on in the season and they had just actually lost very badly to the Timberwolves. They had raced out and they'd beaten the Lakers, opened the season. They were looking very good.
Jokic, who has historically taken a little while to warm up, had actually scored some points during the preseason and was already kind of looking in mid-season form and then they got, like, absolutely smacked in Minnesota. And Jokic had a very bad night. He couldn't shoot.
And obviously that was a kind of a different team than the team they ended up playing in some respects. But it was kind of — I remember texting with a friend and she was like, This team is like actually going to cause them real problems down the road. And we were reflecting on how they already had caused them some problems during the playoffs, the previous playoffs.
One of the things that was sort of interesting to me about this team as I was writing about it was that they seemed, particularly coming out of the All-Star break, they're so good. Their ceiling was so high. The best starting five in the league and you felt this sense of inevitability about them — but of course that turned out not to be true at all.
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