Julian Strawther playing through injured ankle at Summer League, and leading Nuggets: “He obviously has a gift”

LAS VEGAS — If Julian Strawther was narrating his own life, the play-by-play would probably include a sardonic remark at his own expense after his last 3-point shot clanked off the rim late Sunday night.

His sense of humor seems to be enigmatic. His friends have trouble describing it, at least. He’s tremendously funny, they insist, but in that “you have to know him” kind of way. He delivers a churn of “non-stop jokes all day,” Jalen Pickett said, but “some of those jokes we can’t say out loud.”

“He’s just super sarcastic,” Peyton Watson said Sunday night while watching Strawther at NBA Summer League. “He’s got almost like a pessimistic humor.”

Strawther’s miss from the left wing hammered the final nail in an 84-81 Nuggets loss to the Toronto Raptors. His dissection of the sideline out-of-bounds play afterward wasn’t played for laughs, but it might’ve offered a small glimpse into what Watson means. “That was a great call,” Strawther said, complimenting Summer League coach Andrew Munson for noticing Toronto wasn’t switching off-ball screens. “I mean, that’s about as good as it gets for a guy that’s got it going. I’ve just gotta make it next time.”

That would be a reductive summary of Denver’s second consecutive Summer League loss. Strawther was the star of the show again in Las Vegas, amassing 32 points and five assists on 10-of-21 shooting. He was 6 for 11 from 3-point range before the final play, and one of those misses could be chalked up to Strawther receiving the ball late in the 24-second clock with no choice but to hoist. It was an immediate uptick in efficiency from his first Summer League game Friday when he was still Denver’s best offensive player.

And he was playing on a bothersome right ankle.

“I rolled it during the training camp in Denver,” he said while the ankle was wrapped up. “Took a couple days off. Just rehabbed it as much as I could. Came out here. Obviously felt good enough to play in these first two games. It’s there. I’m good.”

Minutes into the game, Strawther reached down to massage the ankle, wincing. Nuggets coach Michael Malone got up from his court-side seat to check on Strawther during the Nuggets’ huddle at the first timeout. Playing through injury during Summer League is a serious risk in a relatively low-stakes environment, after all. And Strawther might’ve felt more inclined to exercise caution after watching rookie teammate DaRon Holmes II tear his right Achilles in the fourth quarter Friday.

But as he rationalized while riding a freight elevator downstairs for his postgame interview Sunday, he didn’t come to Vegas to sit and watch.

So Strawther attacked.

The coaching staff’s mission to showcase his ball-in-hand offense has been carried out thoroughly, if not always effectively. That’s kind of the point of Summer League.

Strawther is evidently unafraid of contact, for instance, even if he’s not consistent at finishing through it. His drives are experiments. And testaments to his toughness in the face of that injury.

“I’m playing my role, and whatever role is given to me,” he said. “At Gonzaga, I didn’t have that many opportunities to get downhill. I was a shooter. In a space like this, in an environment like this where I’m able to get downhill and guys are super amped up, playing super hard, it’s good to kind of get in there and draw some fouls.”

To be clear: Unlocking other skill sets doesn’t mean fully inhabiting another position, in Strawther’s mind.

“At the end of the day, I’m not a true point guard,” he said Sunday. “That’ll never be my true position.”

Other fundamental elements to his game may warrant equal or more attention, most importantly the catch-and-shoot bedrock of his 2023 draft profile. He was only 29.7% beyond the arc as a rookie despite occasional displays of heat-check potential. Just before Summer League, Strawther spent some time at Aaron Gordon’s warehouse-turned-basketball court, getting up shots. His entire development depends on that 3-point percentage.

“He obviously has a gift shooting the rock,” Watson told The Post. “He’s a big-time shooter. That’s gonna be big for us this coming year. I’m super excited for him. He already showed flashes of what he can do this season, and he’s had some big games for us already. So I expect him to have plenty more, and I can’t wait to play a lot more with him.”

Encasing all these layers to who or what Strawther can be in the NBA is his grasp of pace. After he injured his knee in January and was resigned to the end of the bench, Malone often gave him tasks before the Nuggets’ games. On any given night, Strawther might have been instructed to focus entirely on Jamal Murray. “Or whether it’s a guy on the other team that might have a similar archetype to me,” Strawther explained. “Just getting me to think the game instead of just play it.”

“I feel like when I first got into the league, everything was moving a lot faster than I anticipated, just because when you watch the game on TV, just like the average fan, you think guys aren’t playing that hard. They’re playing hard,” he said. “They’re moving, and they’re strong and quick.

“At first, it’ll catch you by surprise, and it’s easy to get sped up, especially by a vet that knows you’re a younger guy that hasn’t experienced much. So (it helped) just being able to go through the year and kind of slow my game down, not only just physically with speed but also mentally, just processing things. Being able to see things before they happen a little bit.”

If that abstract area of improvement is the source of Strawther’s Summer League success, maybe it’s because observational tasks are perfectly suited for him.

After all, the closest Watson could get to pinpointing Strawther’s sense of humor was this.

“He’s just really observant, really intelligent — so he’ll just point something out, and it will be funny, just in his tone and the way that he says it.”

Want more Nuggets news? Sign up for the Nuggets Insider to get all our NBA analysis.