Nikola Jokic gets 90 percent of the headlines when it comes to the Denver Nuggets, and rightfully so. The soon-to-be, three-time NBA MVP is currently the best player in basketball.

Everything Denver does runs through him.

The Nuggets know what they’ll get from him on a nightly basis — excellence. Timberwolves assistant coach Micah Nori noted the easiest thing about preparing for Jokic is you know exactly what play he’ll make in any situation — the right play.

But Jokic is not the barometer for Denver’s success — if he was, the Nuggets would’ve finished roughly 78-4 this season.

No, the player who best determines the Nuggets’ nightly result is their point guard, Jamal Murray. Nori knows that, and he’s got the stats at the ready to prove it. Murray averages 22.5 points on 51 percent shooting, including 46 percent from 3-point territory, in Denver victories.

In Nuggets’ losses, those numbers dip to 17.5 points on 41 percent shooting, including 31 percent shooting from deep.

“When Murray goes well, they go well, for the most part,” Wolves guard Mike Conley said. “We’re going to try to limit that as much as we can.”

That’s no easy feat. Just ask Anthony Edwards, who’s previously said Murray is his favorite player in the NBA to watch.

“He just can get hot. He sees one go in, he might make six, seven in a row,” Edwards recently told the Denver Post. “I’m one of the guys that loves watching him play.”

Edwards noted Murray averaged 30 points a game in last year’s Western Conference finals — a sweep of the Lakers — en route to Denver’s NBA title.

“If you can find me somebody that don’t think Jamal Murray is one of the best (freaking) guards in the league, then they’re crazy. … He’s the reason they won (the title). I mean, without him, they’re not good. It’s just that simple,” Edwards told the Denver Post. “Without (Murray), they’re not a championship team.”

The same is true for Denver when Murray isn’t contributing at a high level, particularly against Minnesota.

Over the last two seasons, the Nuggets are 1-2 against the Timberwolves when Murray isn’t in the lineup. When Murray is in action, but doesn’t shoot better than 50 percent from the floor or have at least eight assists, Denver is 0-3 against Minnesota.

When he achieves any other of those statistical feats, the Nuggets are 7-0 against the Wolves.

“He’s a great player, he’s going to make his plays,” Conley said. “But we have a lot of guys we can throw at him, a lot of different schemes we’re going to try to throw at him in hopes that it slows him down a little bit.”

Last year, Nickeil Alexander-Walker was somewhat on an island against Murray, his Team Canada teammate, after Jaden McDaniels ended his own season by punching a wall in the final game of the regular season. But now Minnesota has its full complement of perimeter defensive weapons, from McDaniels to Alexander-Walker and Anthony Edwards. Each has their own specific skillset and can challenge Murray in a different way.

McDaniels’ length is tough to beat. Alexander-Walker essentially lives in the opposition’s pocket, and Edwards is so big and strong that he’s like going up against a brick wall.

“I think it’s definitely a different feel and different flow to the game (with each of us),” Alexander-Walker said. “And I think when guys are so good, you can’t give them the same looks, because they’re going to pick up on it fast and they’re going to be able to adjust, so it’s just keeping them on their toes, keeping them guessing, trying to disrupt their rhythm.”

Conley noted Murray is one of those guys capable of elevating his game in winning time. He didn’t necessarily shoot well throughout Denver’s first-round series against the Lakers, yet he buried a pair of game winners in Game 2 and Game 5, the latter closed out the series.

Murray is one of the game’s elite closers with the way he can execute pick-and-rolls with Jokic.

Nori said the Wolves have to wear Murray down. They can do that easier with their full bevy of defenders.

“When you have those three guys on the perimeter, essentially it’s just wave after wave,” Nori said. “We’ve got to make sure we pick him up and make him work. We can’t just let him walk the ball up the floor. They haven’t been playing a whole lot of their bench, so if we can wear those guys down, maybe those 16-foot jumpers he’s shooting at the end of the game, if he doesn’t have legs, they come up a little bit short.”

Especially given Murray’s current physical state. On the DNVR Nuggets podcast this week, analyst Harrison Wind watched back Murray’s 40-point performance in Game 2 of the Nuggets’ series victory last year and made the following observations:

“He looked incredible, man. Like he looked unbelievable — how quick he was, how athletic he was, how much space he was generating between him and defender,” Wind said. “He doesn’t look like that right now, I’ll just say that.”

Because Murray, who’s been banged up at various points of the season, is currently battling a calf injury that nearly kept him out of Game 5 against the Lakers.

Murray was asked by Denver reporters on Thursday if a couple days off after the win on Monday helped his body heal.

“Yeah, for sure,” Murray said. “Hopefully, it’ll be good to go for Saturday.”

Regardless, Minnesota is going to do everything in its powers to tax the guard, in hopes of slowing him — and, in turn, the Nuggets — down.

“Make sure we make him work, continue to throw different bodies at him – whether that’s Nickeil, whether that’s Jaden and whether that is Ant,” Nori said. “But the one thing we’ve just got to make sure is be physical with him, make him feel us, like they always talk about saying, and just nothing easy for him.

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The Arts Partnership will present four free concert screenings this summer on a giant video wall in downtown St. Paul’s Rice Park.

The organization — a partnership between Minnesota Opera, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Schubert Club and the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts — first tested an outdoor show in 2022 and staged a four-show season dubbed Ordway Inside Out last year.

“We are excited to bring Ordway Inside Out back to our Twin Cities community and build upon the success of our pilot season,” said Chris Harrington, secretary of the Arts Partnership and president and CEO of the Ordway. “Our goals when we launched this series were to increase access to the arts, bring people together in our beautiful parks and to play our role in contributing to the vitality and vibrancy of downtown St. Paul.”

In case of rain, the concerts will be screened the following night at 7 p.m.

The schedule includes:

Schubert Club presents Víkingur Olafsson plays Bach and Glass; 7 p.m. June 22.
The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra performs Schubert’s the Great C Major Symphony with Richard Egarr; 7 p.m. July 13.
Minnesota Opera performs Benjamin Britten and Eric Crozier’s “Albert Herring”; 7 p.m. Aug. 3.
The Ordway presents Sphinx Virtuosi’s “Generations”; 7 p.m. Aug. 17.

For more details, see artspartnership.org.

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Across New York City, workers are tearing out concrete and asphalt from schoolyards and replacing them with rain-absorbing surfaces that are more climate resilient, according to reporting by Aria Young of Feet in 2 Worlds.

This story comes to us from Feet in 2 Worlds, a project that brings the work of immigrant journalists to online news sites, podcasts, and public radio. This story was produced as part of Home, Interrupted, a podcast series by Feet in 2 Worlds that explores how the climate crisis affects immigrants across the U.S. and how immigrant communities are finding new ways to deal with a warming planet.

Cracked blacktop, rain puddles, and potholes: the conditions of many New York City public school playgrounds are not ideal ingredients for a playful childhood. At Corlears, an education complex comprising three schools on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, an outdated schoolyard is getting a makeover.

“There’s pit holes in the ground. There’s cracks where anybody can slip and fall,” said 17-year-old Dyonis Diaz, a senior at Orchard Collegiate Academy and vice president of the student council. “…when you look at [our schoolyard], it kind of just falls out of place.

New York schoolyards are becoming more dangerous as climate threats intensify. Concrete and asphalt surfaces are not water-absorbent. In rain storms, most playgrounds can create surface runoff and cause flooding. During heat waves, these playgrounds can overheat easily, raising surface temperature by as much as seven degrees.

The city has seen significant consequences from extreme weather events in recent decades. Heat waves cause over 13 heat stroke deaths annually, according to NYC Mayor’s Office of Resiliency. The New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC) reported that the city’s sea level has risen 1.1 feet from 1900 to 2013, nearly twice the observed global rate.

Corlears is located by the East River near the floodplain. In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy devastated the neighborhood, leaving its streets 14 feet under water. Now, the Lower East Side community is a battleground for the city’s climate adaptation efforts as residents fight over resiliency plans for East River Park, a vast waterfront green space in the area.

While the neighborhood grapples with the climate crisis, Corlears’s schoolyard is in development to be transformed. The Trust for Public Land (TPL) is a nonprofit organization that works in partnership with the Department of Education to renovate outdated schoolyards and turn them into climate-resilient playgrounds. Since 1996, the TPL has transformed over 220 playgrounds in New York, bringing green infrastructure to communities across the five boroughs.

TPL designs playgrounds with a committee of students, leading them through a 10-week curriculum integrated with the design process. At Corlears, the students have chosen to prioritize flood prevention by building a permeable turf field that can absorb tons of rainwater in a storm.

“We teach them about the problem with combined sewage overflow in New York City,” said Tiffany Briery, a program manager at the TPL. “Even though it’s a playground they’re designing, they’re actually creating change citywide to help with a pollution problem.”

Just two blocks away from Corlears, P.S. 184M Shuang Wen School has gone through a similar process. In 2019, Shuang Wen’s playground was renovated by TPL, after being underwater during Hurricane Sandy. Their new $1.7 million playground features infiltration basins under an artificial turf, a green roof gazebo, a student-run rain garden, and much more.

Nine years after Hurricane Sandy, Shuang Wen’s new playground successfully weathered Hurricane Ida, which claimed the lives of 13 people in New York City.

“There was not even a puddle after the tremendous amount of rain that we had,” said Mary Alice Lee, TPL’s New York City playgrounds director in a City Limits report.

The Corlears Complex started playground construction in February 2024. The new playground will feature a volleyball court, a basketball court, a playset, and numerous trees to provide shade in hot weather.

While green playgrounds have proven effective in improving resiliency during climate-related events, many public schools and playgrounds do not have the privilege of renovation. Some lower-income neighborhoods lack access to green space to begin with. In so-called “playground deserts,” residents have no outdoor play areas easily accessible from their homes.

According to former New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer’s report, New York City ranks 48th in playgrounds per capita among the 100 largest American cities as of 2019. Brooklyn is the most underserved borough, with only eight playgrounds for every 10,000 children under the age of 10.

“Going outside and being able to walk, it’s a sense of relief,” said 15-year-old Assiatou Diallo, a sophomore on the student design committee. “Because staying home all the time and watching Netflix, it gets tired and lonely… You create memories outside with people.”

By the end of the century, the city could experience as much as 25 percent more rainfall and 1.5 times as many extreme rainy days, according to the NPCC. Without climate-resilient infrastructure, outdated public school playgrounds continue to be some of the most vulnerable areas in the city.

However, protecting green spaces is hardly a priority to city officials. This year, the city’s budget for parks and playgrounds is $41.5 million less than last year’s. Less than 1 percent of the city’s total budget goes to parks and playgrounds—a significantly smaller percentage compared to other major cities in the U.S.

“This is not just a one-and-done deal, is it?” said Miles Doyle, Orchard Collegiate Academy principal. “This is not going to solve climate change. This is one part of it.”

For more reporting by Feet in 2 Worlds, visit the project’s website here.