Jamal Murray

Team: Denver Nuggets · Position: PG/SG · Age during season: 29-30

Reported baseline

Murray played 75 games and averaged 25.4 points, 7.1 assists, 4.4 rebounds, 3.3 threes, 0.9 steals, 0.4 blocks and 2.3 turnovers on 48.3% FG and 88.7% FT in 35.4 minutes.¹ ESPN's July 18 preseason snapshot ranked him No. 32 standard and No. 25 roto.² RotoWire's current outlook was more conservative, recommending a fourth- or fifth-round target while also acknowledging the reliability of the Murray-Jokić two-man game.³ Dynatyze's July 18 default board placed him 34th, but its inclusion of future picks makes that a dynasty/trade-value signal rather than clean redraft ADP.⁴

Encyclopedia projection

9-cat per-game band: 22-34. Points: early third round. Totals: a wider 25-45 band because the model declines to extrapolate last season's 75 games.

Fantasy profile

• Category impact: strong PTS, 3PM, AST and high-volume FT%; roughly neutral FG%; below-average steals/blocks for an early pick.
• Points leagues: Denver has no other signed high-usage guard, protecting touches and assists.
• Dynasty: prime-age top-40 asset. His long-term value is tied to whether the post-Jokić offense remains competitive.
• Floor: top 45 if three-point efficiency regresses and recurring lower-body maintenance returns.
• Ceiling: top 18 if the 2025-26 shooting sticks and he again approaches 75 games.

Role and uncertainty

Tyus Jones can remove low-leverage initiation, not Murray's closing role. Denver's public model forecasts 66 games with a broad 56-76 band; that supports high rate confidence but medium availability confidence.⁵ Roster confidence very high, minutes high, rate high, availability medium.

Sources

Career record

Pre-NBA: Kentucky, one season (2015-16). 36 games, 20.0 points, 5.2 rebounds, 2.2 assists on .408 from three — the highest scoring average by a freshman in Kentucky history and the highest of John Calipari's tenure there. All-SEC first team, SEC All-Freshman team, AP third-team All-American. Before Kentucky he played at Orangeville Prep in Ontario and represented Canada internationally at the junior level. Draft: 2016, round 1, pick 7, Denver. He has spent his entire career with the Nuggets.

He did not appear in a game in 2021-22, so that row carries no rates. Career three-point percentage is .390; the 2025-26 mark of .435 is a career high.

Fantasy history: Murray has been a stable mid-round category asset for most of his career and broke into early-round territory only in 2025-26, when he made his first All-Star team. The category shape is consistent: strong points, threes and assists, high-volume free throw percentage that plays as a real positive, roughly neutral field goal percentage, and steals and blocks that are thin for an early-round guard. Precise season-end 9-cat finishes from Basketball Monster or Hashtag are not retrievable from public pages, so no per-season rank is asserted here. The points-league and category shapes are close, with one wrinkle in his favor: his 2.1 career turnovers are unusually low for a 7-assist guard, which is worth more in points formats than in roto. His weakest fantasy trait across all systems is that he has never produced defensive counting stats — 1.0 steals and 0.4 blocks for a career means any 9-cat build around him needs those categories covered elsewhere.

Durability: 82, 81, 75, 59, 48, 0, 65, 59, 67, 75. The dominant event is a torn left ACL on April 12, 2021, which ended his 2020-21 season and cost him all of 2021-22 — an eighteen-month absence at ages 24 and 25. Everything after that is soft-tissue maintenance rather than structural: 65 games in his return year under an explicit load-management plan, 59 in 2023-24 with a left ankle sprain plus knee and calf issues, 67 in 2024-25 with hamstring and ankle problems and a concussion. In 2025-26 he set a post-injury high at 75, missing six straight games with a right hamstring strain, playing through a left ankle issue in March, and sitting the final two regular-season games with a right shoulder impingement before returning for the playoffs. The pattern is that he now misses games in small clusters rather than long stretches.

Trajectory: The 2025-26 leap is real but narrower than the headline. Scoring jumped 4.0 points and assists 1.1, and both came substantially from shot volume and a career-high .435 from three rather than from a new skill. Minutes were essentially flat at 35.4 against 36.1 the year before, which means the gain is per-minute and therefore not a minutes artifact — that is the encouraging half. The discouraging half is that the three-point rate is 4.5 points above his .390 career mark on the highest attempt volume of his career, and shooting variance of that size at age 28 usually gives some back. What is more durable is the assist growth, which has climbed steadily since the ACL return (6.2, 6.5, 6.0, 7.1) as Denver has handed him more half-court initiation, and which does not depend on shotmaking luck. He is at the top of the aging curve now, not past it, and the three seasons of rising availability argue the knee is a closed chapter. The right 2026-27 read is to keep the assist and volume gains, regress the three-point efficiency toward .400, and price the games at something under 75 — which is roughly what the projection above already does.

Career sources: StatMuse career per-game by season · ESPN career stats · Jamal Murray, Wikipedia · Sports-Reference college stats · NBA.com, Murray returns from hamstring injury

Open questions

• How much of the 43.5% three-point season survives regression?
• Will Denver manage Murray below 35 MPG to protect its only star guard?
• Does another ballhandler arrive before camp?