Competitive impulse lured Jamal Murray and Jon Wallace into a gym together for the first time.

It was 2019, and the Nuggets had just hired Wallace as a basketball operations associate — “basically like an intern,” he says now. Tim Connelly , his new boss and the roster architect who drafted Murray three years earlier, created a group chat to get them connected. He wanted to know who was a better 3-point shooter. Trash talk ensued.

Eventually, the two of them arranged to meet at a Lakewood gym: Murray, one of Denver’s most exciting young building blocks, and Wallace, a former Georgetown guard whose clutch 3-point shooting propelled the Hoyas to a Final Four in 2007. They were shooting around, as Wallace tells it, “and then it turned into some light-hearted one-on-one. Then it got t

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