Cam Johnson wakened on Wednesday morning immersed in his personal ideas, questioning the place within the cosmos they could take him. Four days earlier than the NBA playoffs, it could be simple to let work flood his mind as he lay in mattress. The buzz of anticipation for his most significant basketball in three years surrounded him.
But Johnson is aware of himself nicely. He is aware of that indulging his curiosity helps him discover peace. So he indulged.
Today’s matter was time dilation.
“So gravity, time and speed, they work together,” he defined a couple of hours later, wiping the sweat from his brow after the Nuggets completed observe. “So the faster an object goes, the slower time is perceived. To my little extent of knowledge, there’s like a meter. And at the speed of light, at the top of the meter, there’s no space for time in there. Time basically comes to a stop. So a particle of light that’s traveling at the speed of light, it doesn’t really feel time. If light takes eight minutes to get from the sun to us, that’s from our perspective. Everything’s about perspective. For that particle of light, it’s instantaneous because of its speed.”
Johnson was off and operating. He referenced the 2014 science fiction film “Interstellar,” during which Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway age 7 years for each hour that passes on a unique planet. He tied it to a extra microscopic real-life instance — that “an astronaut who worked in the International Space Station for X amount of time might age a couple of milliseconds slower than a human on Earth.” He marveled on the brilliance and creativeness of Albert Einstein and different early Twentieth-century physicists who studied relativity earlier than it was accepted as a idea. “You’re thinking, how did they figure that out?” he stated.
The 30-year-old Nuggets wing is a half-decade faraway from an NBA Finals run with Phoenix. He hasn’t had a style of the playoffs since 2023, when his Brooklyn Nets have been swept within the first spherical. As Denver’s beginning small ahead alongside the star duo of Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray, he’ll be an X-factor for a group with championship ambitions this yr. He’s broadly considered one of many smartest gamers within the NBA, an avid pupil and instructor of the sport whose comprehension of the chessboard made him look like an ideal match for Jokic when Denver traded for him last summer. His thoughts is one in every of his biggest strengths — and generally his adversary. “I’m probably an overthinker on a lot of things,” he instructed The Denver Post.
The Nuggets sacrificed a first-round decide and a longtime staple of their beginning lineup, Michael Porter Jr., to purchase Johnson in a transaction that also enabled other additions. It was their most important roster transfer in 4 years, a transparent sign from Denver’s new entrance workplace that change was wanted to return to championship kind. The outdated core wasn’t working anymore.
Nine months later, the commerce has aged higher for the Nuggets within the summary than it has on the stat sheet. They anticipated that. Porter and Johnson flipped roles. Porter’s expanded. Johnson’s contracted. His season has been a rollercoaster at instances, interrupted by accidents and taking pictures slumps and the general adjustment course of to taking part in in Jokic’s orbit. His teammates and coaches have implored him to be aggressive, not to cut back an excessive amount of.
“Cam is a really cerebral player,” coach David Adelman stated. “And I think cerebral people sometimes can get in their own way. … It’s my job to make sure he’s getting touches, that he’s part of what we’re trying to accomplish. And it’s his job to just play. Let it happen. He’s too good of a basketball player not to.”
Johnson nonetheless completed the yr a career-best 43% from 3-point vary, rating eighth within the league. He’s coming in scorching to the playoffs, the place Porter struggled lately. The coming weeks will present the true verdict on Denver’s 2025 offseason strikes. Johnson isn’t any stranger to the surroundings and the strain. He has his personal manner of navigating all of it, of harnessing his tendency to overthink as a recalibration methodology. A reset button.
When he wants house away from basketball, he places his thoughts to work on one other topic that brings him as a lot pleasure and wonderment. He goes to house.
“I just try to learn things and learn about the world around me,” he stated. “When we talk about astronomy and physics in general, as an overthinker, it kind of gets you outside of yourself. You get caught up in your own problems sometimes and the world feels like it’s this big and everything feels so heavy, and then you go and you learn about some things, and you’re like man, we are really just on a little tiny rock in a very vast abyss.”
Johnson is entranced by physics. By historical past. By the historical past of physics. He takes books on the street with him — postgame studying for the tireless hours the Nuggets spend airborne, touring from NBA metropolis to metropolis.
It has served him nicely all through this season and his seven-year NBA profession. It will proceed to provide him a type of respite throughout the playoffs, which start Saturday (1:30 p.m. MT) when Denver hosts the Timberwolves in Game 1.
“My whole world sometimes revolves around what happens in this rectangle,” he stated. “So I need the opposite.”
One of the brightest minds within the basketball universe
It doesn’t all the time present, however Johnson is pushed by a competitiveness that matches his mind. Growing up outdoors of Pittsburgh, he watched his older brother develop into a highschool valedictorian.
“He always said that he was gonna catch Aaron,” his dad, Gil Johnson, stated. That made life easy: Cam bought good grades as a result of he had no different alternative.
He additionally utilized his smarts to each sport he performed. As a quarterback in soccer, he didn’t want to put on a wrist sleeve with performs listed, Gil stated. He had a knack for understanding the place his receivers have been going, the place he wanted to place the ball. As a baseball participant, he as soon as pitched a robust recreation for his seventh-grade group, then shocked his dad by explaining precisely how he did it. He didn’t have an elite arsenal of pitches — he was a center schooler, in spite of everything — however he discovered which areas of the strike zone have been weaknesses for every hitter all through the sport. “I had no idea that he thought baseball like that,” Gil stated.
And as a hooper, Johnson was all the time attempting to establish the following cross his teammates might make, after he handed it to them.
“You saw the leadership. You saw him telling guys where to be,” stated Nick Luchini, one in every of his highschool buddies and teammates. “You could tell that guys were feeding off how smart he was.”
In a parallel universe, Johnson would possibly’ve been an engineer. He would possibly’ve studied astronomy, or historical past, or legislation. But he determined when he was younger that he would make it to the NBA. While taking part in up a few years in second grade, he impressed an opponent as soon as and earned a postgame praise: “You might be a professional basketball player someday.”
Johnson didn’t take it that manner.
“He came over with a scowl on his face,” Gil stated. Cam was offended by the “might be” a part of the remark.
“I remember it like it was yesterday,” Cam stated. “… I feel like a lot of kids think that, you know? And it didn’t always work out for me. You say that to me in ninth grade, I’m like, ‘Yeah, we’ll see.’ Of course, I have confidence in myself, but as a 5-8 freshman, it’s like, I’m also studying. I’m into books too. … By the time high school got to late junior, early senior years, I unloaded some of my APs intentionally. And kind of spent just a little bit more time in the gym, took a little bit of that (schoolwork) off my plate. So that was probably the first time I made a decision where school was a little bit more on the back burner.”
After all, Cam had already misplaced the battle to his brother. He would find yourself a measly salutatorian.
“He got me,” Cam stated. “His GPA was higher than mine. He took more APs. He did better on AP tests. He did better on the ACT. He did better on the SAT. I couldn’t catch him. He’s too smart. … He’s just smarter than me, point blank. Period.”
By the time he hit a progress spurt and have become a recruiting goal for Division I school basketball applications, Johnson was already explaining physics terminology to his highschool buddies to assist them perceive a difficult class.
“If I’m being honest, Cam taught me a lot,” his good friend Santino Platt stated, “dumbing it down for me.”
But Johnson stated it wasn’t till a sophomore astronomy course on the University of Pittsburgh that he developed an insatiable curiosity in regards to the mysteries of the universe. And the miracles of scientific discovery inside that universe. Amateur astronomy grew to become a interest as he was drafted into the NBA.
“We have such a mathematical approach to solving so much of what we cannot see,” Johnson stated. “It’s really cool how we use these equations and constants to deduce how far a planet is from a star that’s 50 light years away, you know what I mean? We can’t see it for nothing. But by measuring how much light it takes away from a star and how big that star is, we can figure out a lot. When you read about the history of it and how long we’ve been around as humans in the past thousands of years, and how rapidly it’s changing, it makes you think, ‘Well, what do we have wrong now?’ So I just like reading. Reading what people have thought in the past, reading what people think now. We have some really smart scientists in the world, and some are really really good at explaining.”
He got here face to face with one in every of them in 2023, when the Nets helped organize for him to meet astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. After an extended dialog, Johnson and Tyson recorded a “space draft” video for social media during which they took turns choosing celestial ideas and occasions. Johnson’s “team” included the carbonate-silicate cycle, Pluto and a neutron star with the primary general decide. “That’s a good pick,” he instructed The Post, doubling down.
He beamed on the show of public curiosity in NASA’s latest mission to the moon. He questioned to himself if the miracles of science are taken for granted by most individuals as he watched, in awe of the flight path’s precision. (“We go around the earth, loop to catch the moon, loop the moon, come back to the immediate, right where we want to be, drop them right in the ocean right where we thought they would end up. That’s what math can do for us. … Not a stationary earth. Not a stationary moon.”)
His favourite reads over time have included “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson and “The Planet Factory: Exoplanets and the Search for a Second Earth” by Elizabeth J. Tasker. Recently after some Nuggets video games, he’s been working his manner by means of “The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality” by Brian Greene, which dives into the weeds of theoretical physics.
“It’s sometimes a little heavy to read after a game,” Johnson stated. “Like, you’ve gotta really sit there and think on a couple pages. It’s not, like, a light read. But that’s the whole point. Sitting there and thinking. It’s pretty cool if you ask me.”
He has his different methods of unwinding from basketball, too, in fact. He’s an avid golfer. He’s a lifelong sneakerhead, his dad says. And he’s a training Christian — however he doesn’t view his spiritual and scientific convictions as being at odds with one another.
“I think we choose as humans to put them in opposition to each other,” he stated. “… If everybody always thought, like, ‘God is in control of everything, I don’t need to worry about it,’ I don’t think we would have as much scientific (discovery). You can look throughout time, and history tells us this. … I really think the two can mesh. And that’s the perspective I look at it from. I just look at it as creation and the laws of nature are God’s language, and we are slowly trying to uncover it in a way that we can understand. It’s like translating languages.”
While looking for out texts that make the complicated really feel digestible, Johnson has concurrently established himself as a purveyor of intricate ideas. He hosts “The Old Man and the Three,” a outstanding basketball podcast that was initially hosted by JJ Redick. Redick left the present when he took over as head coach of the Lakers. Johnson has been his successor, having numerous Nuggets teammates be a part of him for episodes all through this season.
The dialog doesn’t normally get round to astronomy. Johnson is cautious of boring his buddies to demise with it — although he has discovered not less than one house good friend with the Nuggets in group physician Steve Short.
“I’ll sit here and explain it, and some of my friends have no interest in it. And they’re nodding their head, nodding their head. I’m rambling. And then — eye-roll,” Johnson stated, laughing. “… I’ll get a lot of eye-rolls for sure, like, ‘Here he goes. He don’t even know what he’s talking about.’ … I wonder how many other NBA players think about this stuff.”
Finding his mojo in Denver
Johnson bought off to a rocky begin in Denver.
He started the season in a nasty droop. A 39% profession 3-point shooter, he was 21% after 11 video games, good for solely 7.2 factors per evening. Not best for a participant who had averaged an environment friendly 18.8 the earlier yr in Brooklyn.
But the Nuggets have been profitable. Johnson’s struggles didn’t get in the best way of their general offensive success. Adelman urged persistence from followers and media as Johnson navigated his new photo voltaic system, one during which Jokic is the solar. The first-year coach defended Johnson once more throughout one other rut in early March, after he missed a potential game-winning 3-pointer in Oklahoma City. It weighed closely on him.
“He puts a lot of pressure on himself — not sometimes, but all the time,” Gil stated. “He holds himself up to a high standard.”
But for a lot of the season, Johnson has been a quietly efficient position participant, defending higher than Porter and holding defenses trustworthy along with his floor-spacing, even when he hasn’t scored. He discovered his mojo once more over the previous couple of weeks, highlighted by a barrage of clutch 3s in an announcement win over San Antonio. Johnson hardly ever celebrates or will get animated on the courtroom, however that day, he shared a cathartic second with sharpshooting teammate Tim Hardaway Jr. after draining an enormous shot in extra time. It was the emotional apex of a 12-game win streak to end the common season.
Since these first 11 video games, Johnson is 46.8% from deep. The Nuggets have a 9.5 web score with him on the ground.
“We’re all telling him to shoot,” Hardaway stated this week. “It would be different if we were telling him to pass, right? So we’re telling him to do what he does best, man. Be that Brooklyn Net Cam that you were out there, averaging 17, 18 a game. Playing freely, playing fun. That’s what you were brought here to do. Knock down your shots when open and be confident. Don’t be passive.”
The ball will discover him in high-stakes conditions over the approaching weeks. The gravitational pull of the Jokic-Murray two-man recreation is simply too intense, like a planet the place time is dilated. Defenders might be sucked in from the perimeter. Johnson will get open photographs.
When he’s in these moments, nothing else issues to him — no different galaxy or photo voltaic system or planet. His universe contracts into an 18-inch cylinder.
“Basketball is a beautiful game,” he stated, “in terms of just the creativity and expression of competition. … On the court, I like to just be in that moment and respect it as that.”
Only when the second is over does the universe develop once more, ready for Johnson’s creativeness to discover it. To him, there’s one thing profound about having the ability to respect the dimensions of each issues: the basket and the abyss.
“It changes my mental state,” he stated. “You’re in an environment of high competition and the pressure of competition, where you feel like every shot is so important. I’m shooting a ball into a hole, you know what I mean? It’s a floating circle, and I’m trying to get a ball into it. I just like to kind of minimize those things when I step off the court, give my mind something else to focus on.”
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