Already an NBA champion, former UK star Jamal Murray has plenty to play for in 2023-24

Video games don’t necessarily function as a means to decompress, the way Jamal Murray plays them.

Occasionally the Denver Nuggets point guard and some old friends from youth basketball still hop online together from their respective PlayStations to hang out remotely. The games vary: Fortnite, Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty.

Regardless of the choice, an unusual trend developed at one point.

“We’ll all say, ‘Yo, download this game,’“ said Josiah Riley, one of Murray’s former AAU and prep teammates. “Cool. He’ll play it the first day and he’ll be terrible. And then the next day we’ll play, and all of a sudden he’s beating everybody. We’re like, ‘What have you been doing?’“

Once, Riley was visiting Murray in Denver when he says he walked downstairs to find Murray, controller in hand, using the PlayStation. Riley checked the PlayStation app on his phone. According to that, Murray’s account wasn’t currently in use. He wasn’t playing video games. Except he was.

“Caught him in the act,” Riley said, laughing, adding that other friends have as well. “He doesn’t tell anybody this. He’ll take his PlayStation and he’ll put it on offline mode, so it doesn’t show that he’s online playing any games. And he’ll be playing that game to get better.”

Murray wants to beat his friends. He just doesn’t want them to know how much he wants to.

So when the former University of Kentucky basketball star communicated bashful unawareness when asked about his contract extension candidacy this season, it wasn’t so much an indictment on his understanding of the stakes as it was an accurate illustration of his standard operating procedure.

In forgoing an opportunity to sign a three-year, $145 million extension this offseason, Murray, whose 2023-24 salary is $33.8 million, can earn supermax contract eligibility if he makes the All-NBA team this season.

A supermax deal would value him at 35% of the salary cap and keep him in Denver through 2030. It would also have notable ramifications on the Nuggets’ pursuit of a dynasty, as Murray would join Nikola Jokic as the second supermax player on the roster.

The Nuggets are prepared to pay Murray and then cross that bridge of consequences when they get there. The only box still unchecked is his All-NBA status. It’s an accolade the 26-year-old has not achieved yet in his career.

Aside from the financial bonus on the line, now would be the moment that makes the most sense for Murray to reach individual milestones: He’s never been more highly regarded after a transcendent postseason helped lift the Nuggets to their first championship.

“I don’t really know how all that stuff works,” Murray said on media day about the contract, perhaps playing coy for the cameras. In a more straightforward tone, he emphasized his top priority is repeating as NBA champions.

On offline mode, the point guard’s recent leadership and preparation show a player motivated by both prizes.

Rookies always have to pay their proverbial dues, but that’s especially true when they aren’t lottery picks on a rebuilding team. So after getting selected 29th in last summer’s draft, Julian Strawther arrived in Denver alert of the championship core already in place and not wanting to disrespect that synergy while on the court.

But without a little push from one of those core players, Strawther might not have become a breakout star prospect so quickly this preseason.

“You don’t want to step on nobody’s toes,” Strawther told The Denver Post. “You’re the young guy, you’ve just come out of college. No one knows you on the team, and they just won a championship. So it’s like, I’m not gonna be the reason (things get worse) around here.”

The difference in personal proclivities between Murray and Jokic is well-documented. Jokic trains in relative solitude during the offseason while spending time with family in small-town Serbia. Murray visited a UFC fighter at one point this summer, and he was in Denver earlier, playing pick-up with the younger Nuggets.

After the first day of pick-up basketball together, he confronted Strawther, a 3-point sniper who etched his name in Gonzaga history this March with an NBA-range game-winner in the Sweet 16.

“He had said he watched film (of the pick-up game) and said I was passing up too many shots,” Strawther told The Post. “I wasn’t thinking I’ve gotta shoot more.”

But the 21-year-old was egged on by Murray, so he let it fly. Their back-and-forth extended into training camp, and then into the Nuggets’ preseason exhibitions. “He’ll come up to me when a drill’s over, he’ll slap me right on my chest and tell me to stop passing up that shot,” Strawther said. He ended up shooting 14 for 31 on 3s in preseason play.

“If he’s telling me to shoot the ball, I’m gonna shoot the ball,” Strawther said. “It means the world to me. As a rookie, you can’t ask for much more than your All-Star point guard telling you to shoot the ball.”

But of course, Murray is not an All-Star. Never has been. He acknowledged this month that it would be nice to finally achieve that honor — not to be mistaken with All-NBA — but all in the context of stressing his team-oriented goals.

The two seem intrinsically connected. As the top tier of the NBA surrounding Denver upgraded this summer, the only way for the Nuggets to do the same is by getting more from their returning players. It’s questionable whether there’s any more room for Jokic to go up. But for Murray, a fully healthy offseason isn’t a luxury he’s had in recent years.

“He’s much better. Much better. Not even close,” Jokic said. “… Mature, experienced. … I think it maybe sounds stupid, but the injury helped him.”

Assistant coach David Adelman, who was interim head coach while Michael Malone was out, marvels at the progression of Murray’s pocket passing and can hardly believe the lack of offseason decline in his game since the Finals. Murray’s backup, Reggie Jackson, has noticed just since arriving in Denver last season an improvement in Murray’s leadership.

“You follow your quarterback. You follow your point guard,” Jackson told The Post. “… He’s very even-keeled for us. Great games, stayed level-headed. When he was down on himself at times, or not even down, just didn’t play his best games, he stayed level-headed. Positive. … His whole thing (in the playoffs) was like, he was gonna be good, so he was making sure we’re good. At that age, it’s great to see.”

On that second day, after he’s done practicing his craft offline, the only way to contain Murray on the PlayStation is to gang up.

In Fortnite, a last-man-standing survival computer game, his friends will coordinate ways to attack him from all sides. It becomes a four-on-one sport. Sometimes, Murray still emerges. “He’ll pick us off one after the other after the other,” Riley said. Because catching him red-handed doesn’t change the reality that Murray has a knack for accomplishing anything he wants.

“When he has an interest in something, he will do it until he masters it,” Riley said.

All this salary cap business adds a bit of heft to 82 games that might otherwise be considered trivial in Denver, where players just got a taste of the endurance required to make it out of a playoff marathon as the last team standing.

Those who know Murray have witnessed his talent for self-motivation, even when he has to invent provocations or prizes. He once challenged his friends to a king-of-the-court game to 11, in which the winner would get his designer backpack with a speaker in it. He won.

Whenever it grows too tiringly easy for him to win various video games, he might teach Riley a trick, something just enough to increase the challenge for himself but not enough for Riley to surpass Murray again.

“Whether it was shooting free throws, whether it was running sprints — it can be video games, it can be chess, it can be badminton,” his former coach Larry Blunt said. “It just took one person to say anything, as competitive as he was. … Sometimes someone might hit a shot (against him) and not even say anything. He can figure out ways to motivate himself based on what may have happened.”

So a contract bonus incentive to keep him motivated during the grueling regular season after a championship? Murray doesn’t need to admit to that fueling him at all. He can switch to offline mode.

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