Jamal Murray scored all of his sixteen points in the fourth quarter. The game was already pretty much over by the fourth quarter so it was essentially a “hey rookie let’s see if you can chuck us back into this game” scenario. It didn’t really work, as the Nuggets’ fourth-quarter lineup didn’t gain much ground against the Cavs’ fourth-quarter lineup which still had some good players in it, but Murray came out of the fray having scored sixteen points in his nine fourth-quarter minutes, so it was a personal victory for him even if it didn’t result a team victory.
The 2016 draft class has been so awful that Murray, while not playing great by any stretch of the imagination, is still the seventh-best rookie in terms of total win shares. Well, he’s actually tied with some other guys; Marquese Chriss, Jakob Poeltl, and Patrick McCaw can all claim to have contributed .6 wins to their team’s efforts. But Murray is at least better than those last two dudes because he actually gets minutes and those other guys don’t. It’s a lot easier to look good when you’re not given enough minutes to make yourself look bad.