Cam Johnson woke up Wednesday morning thinking about where his thoughts might take him, and a few hours later he was still there. After Nuggets practice, the Denver forward talked reporters through gravity, time and speed, then tried to make sense of light, perspective and how the universe bends around them.
Johnson said gravity, time and speed work together. At the speed of light, he said, there is no space for time, and light taking eight minutes to travel from the sun to Earth is only true from our perspective. For the particle itself, he said, it is instantaneous because of its speed. He tied the idea to the 2014 film Interstellar and to an astronaut on the International Space Station aging a couple of milliseconds slower than someone on Earth.
The conversation fit Johnson, who is 30 and has spent much of this season adjusting to a bigger role in Denver’s orbit around Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray. The Nuggets traded for him last summer, sending Michael Porter Jr. and a first-round pick in what the team viewed as its most significant roster move in four years. It also opened the door for other additions and served as a signal from the new front office that change was needed if Denver wanted to get back to championship form.
That is the backdrop for a player who was a half-decade removed from an NBA Finals run with Phoenix and last appeared in the playoffs in 2023, when his Brooklyn Nets were swept in the first round. His season in Denver has been interrupted by injuries, shooting slumps and the challenge of fitting into Jokic’s world, where touches are earned and timing matters on every possession.
Teammates and coaches have urged Johnson to be aggressive, and coach David Adelman said the forward’s mind can work against him. Adelman called him “a really cerebral player” and said cerebral people sometimes get in their own way. “It’s my job to make sure he’s getting touches, that he’s part of what we’re trying to accomplish,” Adelman said.
Johnson, for his part, joked only that he is probably “an overthinker on a lot of things.” That may be why he reached for Einstein, the physicist he described as brilliant and imaginative along with other early 20th-century thinkers. It also may explain why a routine postpractice chat turned into a small seminar on relativity. The real question for Denver is less about cosmology than fit: whether Johnson’s mind, and his game, can settle into the role the Nuggets traded so much to create for him.