The Denver Nuggets have a payroll problem, and it’s not the kind you solve by skipping dessert.
A debate that surfaced among NBA fans this week zeroed in on a question that stings worse than a blind-side screen: Has any team ever carried three individual contracts as simultaneously unappetizing as the ones Denver is chewing on right now?
Start with the main course. Zeke Nnaji signed a four-year, $32 million extension in October 2023 — a deal former GM Calvin Booth handed out despite Nnaji having proven, in the politest terms, very little at the NBA level. According to Spotrac, the 6-foot-9 forward is owed $7.5 million this season and holds a player option for $7.5 million the year after, which he will almost certainly exercise because no other franchise is cutting that check for a bench warmer. Last season Nnaji appeared in 52 games, averaging 3.7 points and 2.6 rebounds in 12 minutes per night. He played in two of Denver’s six first-round playoff games against Minnesota — a series the Nuggets lost in stunning fashion.
The organization knows it. HoopsHype’s Michael Scotto reported that Denver has “signaled a willingness to discuss Nnaji and the No. 26 pick as a trade package,” which is front-office code for: please, take this off our hands, we’ll throw in a first-rounder to sweeten the deal.
Then there’s Christian Braun, who agreed to a five-year, $125 million rookie extension in October 2025, per ESPN’s Shams Charania. The contract is fully guaranteed, Spotrac confirms, with an average annual salary of $25 million that escalates to $28.4 million by 2030-31. Braun earned the deal off a breakout 2024-25 campaign — 15.4 points per game on 58% shooting, 39.7% from three, and the kind of defensive tenacity that made him indispensable after Kentavious Caldwell-Pope departed.
But the 2025-26 season has been a different dish entirely. Braun has appeared in only 44 games, battling ankle injuries that cost him 22 games in one stretch alone. His scoring dropped to 12.0 points per game, and his three-point percentage cratered from 39.7% to 30.1%. Whether $25 million annually is a bargain or an anchor depends entirely on which version of Braun shows up over the next five years — and ankles have a way of not cooperating.
The third leg of the stool is Jonas Valanciunas, whose contract Denver could decline to avoid second-apron penalties, according to Denver Sports. The Nuggets’ new front-office duo of Ben Tenzer and Jonathan Wallace faces a “tight rope walk” to stay under that restrictive salary barrier, the same report noted, with Braun’s extension all but guaranteeing second-apron status in 2026-27 unless significant roster moves follow.
The second apron is where teams lose access to key roster-building tools — no mid-level exceptions, restrictions on trades, limited ability to sign free agents. For a franchise built around Nikola Jokić, the best player on the planet, every dollar trapped in unproductive contracts is a dollar that can’t surround him with help.
Denver’s starting five — Jokić, Jamal Murray, Aaron Gordon, Braun, and Cameron Johnson — is locked in through 2027. That’s the foundation. The problem is everything underneath it, where Nnaji’s dead money, Braun’s escalating cap hits, and Valanciunas’s deal form a triple stack of financial indigestion that limits the bench, the flexibility, and the margin for error.
The Nuggets traded into the first round of this week’s draft, but the broader question — whether three contracts this heavy have ever sat on one team’s books at once — doesn’t have a clean answer. Bad deals are common. Three of them at the same time, on a contender, with the best player in the world already maxed out? That’s a rarer and more uncomfortable feat.
Sources:
- Denver Sports — Nuggets ink Christian Braun to long-term extension
- Spotrac — Christian Braun contract details
- Spotrac — Zeke Nnaji contract details
- Denver Sports — Report: Nuggets could unload bad Zeke Nnaji contract and No. 26 pick