Jamal Murray scores 52 points on sprained ankle as Nuggets win eighth straight on the road
INDIANAPOLIS — Jamal Murray’s ankle is fine.
He couldn’t play through the pain 48 hours earlier. It might’ve been contagious to the rest of the Nuggets. “I think he felt like he was hurting us more than he was helping us,” coach David Adelman reflected Wednesday night. But the absence of Murray proved just as painful during a fourth-quarter scoring drought and eventual loss to Dallas.
With the benefit of those 48 hours, Murray looked springier than ever.
Enough to unretire his signature celebration.
On a night he was listed as questionable on Denver’s injury report with a sprained ankle, Murray ignited for his fifth career 50-point game (including two in the playoffs) in a 135-120 win over the Pacers. He reached the round number with an off-the-dribble 3-pointer — his 10th of the game, a career-high — then fired the Blue Arrow, his go-to move dating back to college at Kentucky.
The arrow hadn’t left the quiver in multiple years. He has teased it from time to time. But he usually restrains himself, as if to keep the audience wanting more.
The occasion was right on a wintery night in Indiana. He finished with 52, the second-highest scoring total of his career. The Nuggets (15-6) have won a franchise record eight straight road games. They’ve won their annual trip to Indiana seven consecutive years.
It helps when the Pacers are missing their MVP. Tyrese Haliburton is out for the season after suffering a devastating Achilles injury in Game 7 of the NBA Finals last June. Without his play-making and his heart, the 2025-26 Pacers (4-18) haven’t resembled anything close to their former selves, and Gainbridge Fieldhouse didn’t look or sound like an arena that hosted Finals games this year.
The Nuggets sucked what little energy there was in the first place out of the building with a monstrous second-quarter run, erupting into halftime with a 72-48 lead. They eventually reached 100 points before the fourth quarter for the eighth time this season, more than any other team in the NBA.
But the Nuggets also have made a habit of playing with their food after building comfortable leads. Indiana started the fourth quarter on a 19-9 run, trimming down a 23-point deficit before Adelman brought Jokic back into the game. This night left a mark more than most. He spent most of the game with three fresh scratches across his right arm, as if by a grizzly bear.
Murray’s heater could not be stopped, though. The second-quarter run was too definitive — 32-9 in the last eight minutes of the first half, 22-3 in the last five, punctuated by a 10-for-11 shooting surge as a team.
Murray had already established a hypnotic rhythm by slithering into comfortable pockets in the midrange. When he started uncorking 3s toward the end of the run, Denver hammered the nail into Indiana’s coffin. He tried and made three of them in the last 1:54 of the half, finishing with a step-back 29-footer and some spirited trash talk before the buzzer.
