Denver, CO
Joker's tricks are taking down the waning and complaining Warriors dynasty
“If you’re going to shoot the king, don’t miss,” Niccolo Machiavelli wrote in The Prince.
On Thursday night, Steve Kerr went at the king of the NBA, missed and ended up only ticking him off.
With just over five minutes left in what looked like a lost ballgame Denver Nuggets star center Nikola Jokic knew Golden State Warriors rookie Brandin Podziemski was playing one of the Joker’s tricks. The high-effort guard was bleeding the clock off an inbound after Denver stormed to a 7-0 run. Nikola knew the Nuggets needed every second so the center tried to pick up the guard full court in hopes of saving some time. Podziemski worked to the midway line, and Kerr got a timeout. After Kerr whistled the play dead, the broadcast captured Kerr shaking his head and shouting at Jokic.
Look at Steve Kerr pic.twitter.com/bsyeq7vLPk
— Swipa (@SwipaCam) January 5, 2024
Kerr could’ve made an effective adjustment, changed things up or done practically anything differently, but instead, he wasted valuable time talking at the league’s two-time MVP god knows what. What ensued was a mishmash of Warriors lineups as the team struggled down the stretch.
As fate would have it, Jokic and the Nuggets needed every single one of those extra seconds that the center tried to save. Denver ballooned the 7-0 run before the timeout into an 18-4 run after the stoppage, making for a 25-4 run in total to end the game. The last points? A legendary half-court buzzer-beater from Jokic as the Nuggets beat the Warriors 130-127.
Not only did the Nuggets need the 39-footer from Jokic to fall to win and those extra ticks, but they needed his double team of former MVP Steph Curry to force a Jamal Murray steal with five seconds left to even get the ball. The ensuing chaos led to the inbounds in a tie game being at 3/4 court after a Denver timeout instead of in Warriors territory as is customary late in an NBA game.
“We had to take it out three-quarter court and the first look was going to be Jamal Murray up the sideline. The second look was going to be KCP coming off with Nikola. And then obviously lastly Nikola flashing back to the ball. And then I said, ‘I want you to take two dribbles, overhead and shoot a three’ and he executed the play to perfection,” Nuggets boss Michael Malone joked. “Great players make great plays. Him making something happen there was incredible.”
The win surged the Nuggets to the best in the West and dropped the Warriors out of the play-in and to 16-18 on the campaign. While it was a battle of the league’s past two champions, the last few minutes of the game showed the metal of one team and the lack thereof from the other. Thursday was the manifestation of the dynasty’s last breaths as the new leaders again stormed the castle.
Denver has now won six straight contests against Golden State since the shorthanded version of their crew dropped in five games to the Dubs in the 2022 playoffs. Reloaded and resupplied in part to specifically defeat the Warriors, Denver has done just that. Perimeter-stopper Kentavious Caldwell-Pope has never let Steph Curry best him while representing pickaxes. While Thursday was star guard Jamal Murray’s return to the battle scene of his grave knee injury, which doomed Denver for two years, he scored 25 while adding six helpers.
The immoral acts of punching teammates and illegal screens run amuck have been replaced by the pure horse lover, his blue arrow-slinging partner and the rest of the crew. Ever the Machiavellian, Kerr, cunned postgame about the officials after the teams’ last battle against another. Upset by the calls King Joker got, he wanted to reform the league’s officiating in a way that would better suit his faded dynasty. The league seemed to side with Kerr, giving Jokic a peasants’ whistle once more, as refs gifted Nikola just three free throws in the three Nuggets games following Christmas.
Once again, the Warriors strategy in the sequel was to muscle Jokic with undersized players one-on-one. He only got to the line seven times compared to the 18 trips last time, showing Kerr’s words did work. Though the big man finished his night with the game-winner—and has now made 39 of his last 44 shots over the past four games, the best shooting efficiency in a quartet of matches since the merger.
The most credit Kerr could muster after the game was about how Nuggets rookie Peyton Watson actually hit the biggest shot of the night.
Watson, who starred with Jokic in a hotel commercial that debuted last month, has helped the Nuggets to six road wins in a row. Denver has now rattled off 13 victories in their 15 contests as they are rolling behind the reigning NBA Finals MVP and a mostly full healthy deck of artillery around him.
“We are chasing the Denver Nuggets too, we want to be better than last year,” Jokic said about being the champs on Thursday.
After the Nuggets warred through the postseason to a 16-4 record and title last season, many have made the mistake of thinking Jokic’s celebration and focus on the family meant he did not care about basketball. His lifestyle, the translation of the Serbian culture to America and his ability to compartmentalize have been confused for a lack of care.
“Nikola lives for those moments and it’s great and joyful to watch a player of his talent go out there and make the plays that he makes,” Malone said.
Maybe this is the Nuggets best weapon—not only the confusion of how Jokic acts but the fact that their star has a champion mentality and the ability to separate himself from it. He can hit the clutch shot and be a good teammate unlike, Michael Jordan who famously punched teammate Steve Kerr in the face during the Bulls reign. Jokic has been and continues to be a man of the proletariat, and on Thursday he took it to the bemoaning bourgeoisie to the tune of 34 points, 10 rebounds, nine assists, two steals and a block.
In a way, all of this makes Jokic as great of a man as any, something that coincides with the play to coexist as possibly the greatest player in the history of basketball. At the very least, the peak of Jokic is as great or greater than any. And you know, there’s only one map of Rome that we all remember, it’s the peak of their reign.
‘An assist makes two people happy; a basket only makes one person happy,’ Jokic has famously said. Nikola only has to look at his teammates’ faces late Thursday night to know his own rule may be untrue but only when applied to the king himself.
Rocky Mountain sandhill cranes battle warmer conditions due to drought
Wildlife biologist Jenny Nehring and farmer Rob Jones talk about Sandhill cranes and their impact on the San Luis Valley.
DENVER — Zoos are of necessity big gulpers of water, a fact that has some zookeepers in the drying American West working to rapidly upgrade efficiency and reduce unnecessary irrigation or leaks.
Denver Zoo, formally known as the Denver Zoo Conservation Alliance, has rapidly reduced its demands on threatened and declining water sources, including the Colorado River.
Among the upgrades is a sea lion water filtration system that allows most of the water to be cleaned and reused each time the pool is drained. That’s saving more than 8 million gallons a year, zoo sustainability director Blair Neelands said. “You can get in there, scrub it with a toothbrush and refill it with the same water,” she said.
Similar upgrades to an African penguin showcase reduced its water use by 95% by largely eliminating what’s sent down the drain. (Like a backyard swimming pool, though, these tanks sometimes still need to be drained and refreshed with new water to reduce mineral buildup.)
“The biggest thing for us is swapping from dump-and-fill pools to life-support systems,” Neeland said.
Another biggie is replacement of a 50-year-old water main with funding of about $3 million from the city. There’s no way of knowing how much that pipe had leaked over the years, but Neeland suspected it was more than a million gallons a year. The savings should become apparent as the zoo tracks its water use over the next few years.
Creating hippo-sized water savings
When The Arizona Republic visited in 2025, the zoo was on the cusp of eclipsing a goal to reduce its water use by half of what it had been in 2018. The zoo had used 80 million gallons in 2024, or about 219,000 a day, a 45% reduction in just a handful of years. Much of the savings had come in the form of smarter irrigation practices and use of drought-tolerant native plants where possible. The landscaping also pivoted to recycled “purple pipe” water from the city, which owns the zoo’s land, restricting potable water to areas where animals really need it.
“When people hear ‘recycled water,’ they get worried about cleanliness and hygiene,” zoo spokesman Jake Kubié said. “But it’s safe for the animals, and it’s not their drinking water.”
Getting past the water conservation goal would mean draining the pool where Mahali the hippo spent most hours lurking with just his eyes, ears and snout visible to visitors. Because he spent so much time in the pool, the water needed daily changes. It amounted to 21 million gallons a year, not to mention water heater bills that drove the cost to $200,000 a year, according to zoo officials. They estimated that Mahali used as much water as 350,000 four-person households.
“This facility is outdated,” Kubié said. “Some day this will become a huge saver of water.”
That day came before year’s end, and it indeed brought a tremendous savings. The zoo shipped Mahali to a new home (and a potential mate) at a wildlife preserve in Texas and drained the pool one last time. Ending the daily change-outs shaved more than a quarter of the zoo’s entire water usage from the previous year. It put the zoo significantly beyond its goal.
Denver Zoo’s water savings are part of a broader waste- and pollution-prevention effort aimed at being a good neighbor in uncertain times, Neeland said.
“Water savings and drought is top of mind for anyone who lives in the Western United States,” she said.
In Phoenix, a different mix of animals
That’s true of the Phoenix Zoo, as well, where zookeepers must maintain landscaping and animal exhibits in a city that baked under 100-degree-plus high temperatures for a third of the days last year. The zoo creates a “respite in the desert,” spokeswoman Linda Hardwick said, but has no hippos, penguins, grizzly bears or many of the other species that would require big water investments for outdoor swimming or cooling.
“We really specialize in animals that will thrive in the temperatures here,” Hardwick said.
The Phoenix Zoo uses most of its water on landscaping. After a consultant’s 2023 irrigation assessment, the staff centralized irrigation scheduling under a single trained technician and employed technologies including weather-based controllers and smart meters. Salt River Project awarded $70,000 in grant funds for the upgrades and several thousand more for training.
The zoo uses about 189,000 gallons a day, she said. That represents a 17% reduction from 2023, or 20% when adjusted for the year’s particular weather and evapotranspiration demand.
Brandon Loomis covers environmental and climate issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Reach him at brandon.loomis@arizonarepublic.com.
Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.
Follow The Republic environmental reporting team at environment.azcentral.com and @azcenvironment on Facebook and Instagram.
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A Frontier Airlines plane has hit and killed a person at Denver’s international airport, prompting the evacuation of passengers. Authorities say the man jumped a perimeter fence and ran in front of the plane as it was taking off to Los Angeles.
Published On 10 May 2026
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