INGLEWOOD, Calif. — Aaron Gordon was a high school basketball get-out-of-jail-free card. His athleticism was stress medicine for trapped teammates. His dexterity, a mulligan for inaccurate passes.

At Archbishop Mitty in the Bay Area, the varsity team believed in an unofficial doctrine.

“If you were ever in trouble — if I’m on the wing and I’m getting doubled — the failsafe is just: Throw it in the air,” Brandon Abajelo said, “and Aaron will go get it.”

One decade later, Gordon’s teammates still abide by that code. Even the consensus best basketball player in the world.

As Nikola Jokic backed himself into a proverbial corner Saturday by dribbling away from the basket, the Nuggets’ season was sinking into deep trouble. They had coughed up a 22-point lead in the fourth quarter. Their legs were cooked, like the stuffed chicken nuggets being used as props to heckle them at Intuit Dome. Overtime almost certainly would mean defeat in Game 4 of a first-round series they already trailed 2-1 to the Clippers.

Jokic hoisted a desperate shot — his signature “Sombor Shuffle” fade-away — thinking to himself, “this is going to be bad.” He was resigned to an overtime fate.

“I mean, to be honest, I didn’t want to give them enough time to shoot the ball,” he said. “So in my mind, I just wanted to wait (until) the last second and just jack it. So I did a couple dribbles. And that was a mistake.”

But Jokic has a failsafe for his mistakes. Throw it in the air. Gordon will go get it.

With the first walk-off dunk in NBA playoff history, Gordon might’ve saved the Nuggets’ season. For a few days at least, he instilled new hope and fended off the existential dread of a 3-1 series deficit. All he needed to do was correct the crooked parabola of Jokic’s shot. Elevating and snatching the ball above the rim, Denver’s power forward transformed an airball into a glorious rainbow. He plunked it in the pot of gold at the buzzer.

Nuggets 101, Clippers 99.

“AG was in the right spot,” Jokic said. “Like he always is.”

But did he arrive there too late? While Gordon navigated through chest bumps and embraces from teammates on an ecstatic beeline toward the locker room, scrutiny was already underway. By rule, the ball must be fully out of the shooter’s hands before the buzzer, or else the shot doesn’t count. In this unusual case, Gordon’s fingertips were attached when the ball was almost halfway through the net.

The replay-review process at Intuit Dome was its own spectacle. Every angle seemed to reveal a new truth and elicit a different reaction. Nuggets and Clippers players gazed up at the jumbotron together and tried to litigate the nanoseconds.

“We were debating back and forth about it,” Peyton Watson told The Denver Post.

Confidence on the Denver sideline depended on the individual.

“I knew it was good,” Watson said.

“I thought the game was over,” Gordon said, “so I was just trying to get off the court.”

“A lot of doubt,” Michael Porter Jr. said with a laugh. “It was like somewhere between the 0.1 (seconds) and 0.0 range.”

“I was walking off the court like, ‘I don’t think so,’” Christian Braun said, chalking it up to his tendency to assume the worst.

“I didn’t want to have excitement and then go down,” Jokic said. “I thought that it was close, but it was really, really close.”

That’s how the Nuggets do business in the playoffs these days. Twice last year, they needed dramatic shots from Jamal Murray to break the Lakers’ hearts. They suffered a 20-point collapse in a wild Game 7 loss to Minnesota. Their two wins in this series have been decided in overtime or at the buzzer. That 22-point lead was too simple.

Gordon has a heroic playoff moment worthy of his importance to Denver now. And it was the most fitting type of play — dirty work in the dunker position. He once claimed to have the “best hands in the business.” Mostly, they serve Jokic’s fondness for trying adventurous no-look passes at close proximity. But this time, Gordon bailed out an unpredictable heave that had zero intention of being an assist.

“One of the best things about him was the way he gets rebounds,” Gordon’s high school coach, Tim Kennedy, remembered. “His ability just to get a feel for where the ball is coming and get his hands on it. That competitive nature of his.”

Denver’s locker room was buzzing in the afterglow of the dunk. The next playoff game was on the television in the middle of the room. At halftime, ESPN relived the buzzer-beater from every conceivable camera angle. A small handful of Nuggets crowded around, teasing Gordon with fake amazement that he was on TV. Gordon remained seated at his stall across the room. He responded with a bashful smile.

His final stat line in Game 4 was productive but fairly modest, at least compared to the box-score contributions of Jokic and a couple of other starters — 14 points, six rebounds and five assists.

If those numbers don’t exactly jump off the page, maybe that’s the most fitting aspect of an instant classic.

“Aaron doesn’t care if it’s 12, 8 and 4 … as long as we win,” said Nuggets interim coach David Adelman, who also coached Gordon in Orlando. “And some nights, it’s 22, 12 and 6. If we lose, he doesn’t care. He wants to win.

“There are certain people in our league that I would define as championship pieces. I think we say that too much. He is one of those people. He is the definition of that, and he always has been, since he got to us.”

Originally Published: April 27, 2025 at 7:50 AM MDT