It's not too early to say the Nuggets got fleeced in Nurkic trade

It often takes years to accurately evaluate an NBA trade, and it's hardly wise to make grand pronunciations about a transaction less than a month after the deal went down, but it's tough to look at February's Nuggets-Blazers deal without already declaring Denver got absolutely fleeced by a division rival.

To recap, the Nuggets traded Jusuf Nurkic and a 2017 first-round pick (Memphis' pick) to Portland in exchange for Mason Plumlee and a 2018 second-rounder.

Here's how that's working out for them:

Early Returns

In each of his first eight games with the Trail Blazers, Nurkic has logged at least 21:02 of action. He logged eight such games over the previous three months, combined, in Denver, as the continued success of Nikola Jokic and smaller Nuggets lineups diminished his role.

Since joining the Blazers, Nurkic is averaging 16.5 points, 9.6 rebounds, 4.5 assists, 1.9 blocks, and 1.6 steals in 30-plus minutes per game, capped by his career night against the Sixers on Thursday.

Those numbers pop further off the page when compared to Plumlee's first four weeks in Denver.

Plumlee's a solid NBA rotation player, and has proven himself a fine starting center at times, but it's hard to name something he does better than Nurkic - one of the few big men who can match Plumlee's passing and playmaking abilities.

That's a tough pill to swallow for a Nuggets team that thought, at the very least, they were upgrading in the short term.

The future

If you want to take the long-term approach rather than overreacting to an eight- or nine-game sample, there are even more reasons to question Denver's decision making.

Plumlee was drafted a year earlier than Nurkic, meaning he'll hit restricted free agency a year earlier, too. And since Plumlee and the Blazers failed to come to terms on an extension last offseason, the 27-year-old's restricted free agency will arrive this July.

Even if Portland reaches a similar impasse with Nurkic, the 22-year-old Bosnian wouldn't be RFA-eligible until 2018, meaning the Blazers have him under contract for another year and a half.

In short, the Nuggets traded a promising, if ill-fitting, young center and a first-round pick for a second-rounder and a similarly ill-fitting center who's more than four years older, with one less year of team control.

Nurkic may never have reached his full potential behind the prodigious Jokic, but that doesn't change the fact this particular deal reflects poor asset management by the Nuggets. It's simply bad business.

The playoff race

Being on the wrong end of a fairly significant, midseason deal is bad enough. When the team on the other end is a divisional foe you're currently trying to stave off in a playoff race, the pain surely lingers.

When Nurkic and Plumlee made their respective debuts for their new teams on Feb. 15, eighth-place Denver led 10th-place Portland by two full games. Entering tonight's action, the Nuggets' lead over the ninth-place Blazers has shrunk to a half-game, with the two teams tied in the loss column. Making matters worse for Denver, the Trail Blazers have won two of three meetings this season, the fourth and final matchup will take place in Portland, and the Blazers have an easier schedule over the season's final five weeks.

It's no wonder, then, why most projection models have Portland narrowly edging Denver for the Western Conference's eighth and final playoff spot.

A lot can happen between now and mid-April, and unforeseeable events could eventually swing the Nurkic-Plumlee deal in Denver's favor. But nearly four weeks after the trade was agreed to, it looks like a clear victory for the Blazers, and an inexplicable misstep by the Nuggets, who may have bolstered a division rival's future while surrendering a playoff berth in the process.