Aaron Gordon was running a fade route, straight downfield, but the ball wasn’t lofted up for him to chase. It was thrown on a line, about head height. As he turned to make a catch, multiple defenders were converging on the space between him and the trajectory of the ball.
“It’s not a great pass,” Gordon’s high school coach, Tim Kennedy, recalled.
But Gordon was already mastering a rather niche art: ensnaring the unpredictable and the unwieldy.
The Archbishop Mitty sophomore extended his left arm while in stride, trying to get the first touch on the ball before his opponent. He tipped the pass up and over the traffic — over his shoulders, too — and collected it in his right hand.
“It could have been a pick-six going the other way, a change in momentum,” Kennedy said. “But he was able to absorb a bad pass and not have it cost us.”
The play occurred in a high school basketball game, not a football game. Gordon flushed it in transition. But Kennedy’s word choice was appropriate. With athletic reflexes and reliable hands that would make NFL quarterbacks jealous, Gordon’s receiving skills have become an underrated cornerstone of the Denver Nuggets’ offense, often turning dangerous risks into thrilling highlights.
“He’s always in the right spots, and he’s a strong guy,” Nikola Jokic told The Denver Post. “So whenever we pass it to him, even if it’s a bad pass, he’s gonna catch it and finish.”
No other quarterback in the NBA thrives on the thrill of passing quite like Jokic. Nobody else stoically delights at slinging it through improbable windows: between the raised hands of an opposing center in guarding position, or bouncing over a defender’s outstretched leg into an empty space he expects his receiver to occupy. Behind his own back. Over his head. Over entire unsuspecting defenses.
Someone has to be capable of keeping up with his inventive style for it to work. Gordon is a natural at it. The Nuggets collectively are well-accustomed to handling Jokic’s unpredictable dimes, but Gordon bears the brunt of that responsibility in the dunker spot.
“That’s the best passer in the business,” he told The Post. “I’ve got the best hands in the business.”
If he sounds cocky, it’s because his hands have always been that good. When he played football as a kid, he started at running back but eventually switched to tight end as he grew into a standout athlete in the Bay Area. He was done with football by high school, as much as his school tried to convince him otherwise. His dexterity was clear. He simply brought it to the basketball court instead.
Gordon’s talent and potential were a formula for him to be more of an on-ball player at the time, even though he wasn’t an especially adept ball-handler. His size relative to other teenagers made scheming easy at first: Throw it to him in the post and let him go to work.
“But we would have to challenge him in practices, just to make it tough. Send doubles and triple-teams, because that’s what he was seeing in games,” Kennedy said. “So his ability to catch in traffic was something he got used to almost immediately as a freshman.”
Brandon Abajelo had just moved from Las Vegas when he met Gordon by matching up against him in an eighth-grade rec game. Gordon was already huge for his age (hands included, Abajelo noticed). The new kid pulled off an upset by swatting the ball away from Gordon the first time Gordon went at him one-on-one. Gordon’s competitive fire was ignited. Abajelo didn’t have much luck the rest of the game, but they became close friends and won two state titles together in high school.
From that first interaction alone, Abajelo learned an important truth: If Gordon wanted the ball in his hands, he would get it. Triple-teams be damned.
“A lot of times if I was ever in trouble — if I’m on the wing and I’m getting doubled — the fail-safe is just, throw it in the air and Aaron will go get it,” Abajelo said. “… You try to make a good pass. That doesn’t always happen. But there was a big room for error in terms of where you throw it.”
Understanding that margin of error might have made Gordon’s teammates a little complacent in their precision occasionally, but it also trained Gordon as a receiver even more.
“We weren’t always the best passing team,” Kennedy said bluntly.
By the time Gordon was a senior, he was playing a variety of positions, even running point. Opposing teams were hyper-aware of his high-flying dunk potential, so they scouted and denied any plays designed to end in an alley-oop to Gordon. Kennedy had to tell his other players not to hunt the lob and force bad passes. Gordon was developing as a receiver, sure, but not by catching a ton of 50-50 balls at the rim.
Instead, it was a matter of versatility. Opponents tried to defend him with a physicality that bordered on excessive — he was experiencing the eventual Jokic treatment — so Kennedy would try to send Gordon through multiple screening actions. “He was used to coming at different angles and catching it at different spots, whether it’s that short corner, the high post, low post, even at the wing,” Kennedy said.
The dunker spot in Denver’s ball movement-oriented offense has become Gordon’s baby. He observed Jokic’s masterful court vision and learned to space the floor and cut with pin-point timing that complements the two-time MVP. He has always been a gifted rim-runner. When Jokic saw through multiple Golden State defenders during a fast break in January, Gordon noticed and accelerated. He knew where the bounce pass would end up.
As for actually gathering and controlling the advanced-level passes, Gordon benefitted from a combination of his adolescent experience and naturally athletic hands.
“You just have a coach throw a ball at you as hard as he possibly can, over and over, until you catch it,” he told The Post after snagging and finishing one of Jokic’s recent no-look assists.
The one in question was a cheat code. Denver drew up an after-timeout play in which Gordon slipped behind the defense along the baseline while Jokic and Jamal Murray ran a pick-and-roll. It was supposed to end with Jokic passing, Gordon finishing. It wasn’t supposed to end with Jokic blindly going over the back of his head.
It was as if Jokic simply had to keep Gordon on his toes, even at the possible expense of accuracy.
“He makes me look good,” Jokic said.
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