Packed tight­ly inside of Jamal Murray’s chis­eled frame, wound up and pray­ing for an exit strat­e­gy, resides a pas­sion that only comes out when the moment demands.

That moment came Mon­day after­noon in Game 1 against Utah, when Dono­van Mitchell’s his­toric 57-point out­burst chal­lenged Mur­ray and drew the absolute best out of him.

Behind Murray’s play­off career-high 36 points, the Nuggets wrest­ed Game 1 from Mitchell’s grips and took a 1–0 series lead with a dra­mat­ic 135–125 over­time win.

You could see Murray’s deter­mi­na­tion in the way he stalked the court dur­ing a scorch­ing 12-point run over an 85-sec­ond span in the sec­ond quar­ter. After one 3‑pointer, he aimed an icy glare not five feet from Utah’s bench.

It was evi­dent in the dis­mis­sive glances he gave his team­mates after anoth­er one of his dag­gers forced the Jazz to take a time­out. Micro­phones picked up some of the chat­ter, but it wasn’t hard to imag­ine him promis­ing his team­mates that the Jazz defend­ers couldn’t stop him.

“No fans, it was a lot of trash talk­ing, good trash talk­ing,” Mur­ray said. “It was fun, and that’s how us bas­ket­ball play­ers like it when you can go at each oth­er respect­ful­ly and see who’s got more bullets.”

Over and over, Mur­ray called for the ball, begged for the ball and didn’t wait for anyone’s per­mis­sion. Even Niko­la Jokic, whose 29 points and 10 rebounds sup­ple­ment­ed Murray’s erup­tion, ced­ed the spot­light and the clutch buck­ets he’s so used to taking.

“This isn’t the first time he’s doing this,” Jokic said.

With three min­utes and change left in the fourth quar­ter, Mur­ray was sit­ting on a rather pedes­tri­an 16 points. His coun­ter­part, Mitchell, was hang­ing the Nuggets out to dry on offense and abus­ing every matchup Den­ver could muster.

Over the final 8:13 of Monday’s Game 1 thriller, Mur­ray poured in 20 points, grabbed three rebounds and issued two mas­sive assists that brought Utah and Mitchell to their knees. Some of the shots he made in the fourth quar­ter and over­time would’ve been auda­cious even for a game of H‑O-R-S‑E. His nine assists tied anoth­er play­off career-high.

In over­time, Mur­ray scored or assist­ed on 16 of Denver’s 20 points — or every bas­ket that didn’t come at the free-throw line.

Even­tu­al­ly, amid Mitchell’s dev­as­tat­ing stop-and-start dri­ves that had already exposed Tor­rey Craig and Jera­mi Grant, Mur­ray momen­tar­i­ly took the assignment.

“That is what made it so fun,” Mur­ray said. “We are chat­ting as we go to time­outs, I am guard­ing him and he’s hit­ting step backs on me and he’s guard­ing me and I’m hit­ting step backs on him. I am smil­ing because those are the games you want to be in, those are games that are the most fun and most com­pet­i­tive. As a guy that takes it with that kind of pas­sion, those are the fights, those are the com­pet­i­tive spir­it that you want to have going into games.”

Nuggets coach Michael Mal­one affec­tion­ate­ly deemed it the “Jamal Mur­ray show.”

“Every time he shot, it was like you knew it was going in,” Mal­one said.

The NBA bub­ble is quite lit­er­al­ly a ster­il­ized envi­ron­ment, void of real fans, heavy noise and authen­tic ener­gy. Mal­one said he even missed the feel­ing of arriv­ing to the are­na in a team bus, know­ing the crowd and the anx­ious feel­ing that waits out on the court.

And that’s where Murray’s pas­sion injects some­thing into the bub­ble that wouldn’t oth­er­wise be there.

“Jamal’s ener­gy is infec­tious, it’s con­ta­gious, and when he got going, and he matched fire with fire, one it was great to , for those view­ing at home, but we need that from Jamal,” Mal­one said. “He’s a guy that kind of takes his game and his team to a dif­fer­ent level.”

The scary part, for the Jazz and the rest of the league in gen­er­al, is how bad­ly Mur­ray craves those moments. Still just 23 years old, he has a grand total of 15 play­off games to his name. Monday’s erup­tion prob­a­bly doesn’t hap­pen if he hadn’t already gone through the highs of last year’s Game 2 vs. San Anto­nio (that may have saved the series) or the 4‑of-18 dud he authored in Game 7 against Port­land. Because the Nuggets thrust so much on him last year, there’s already a famil­iar­i­ty to the tension.

Murray’s will­ing­ness to embrace the moment, trad­ing hay­mak­ers with Mitchell as the game was on the line, speaks to the char­ac­ter of the point guard the Nuggets have invest­ed so much in.

“You have to love that from such a young play­er,” Mal­one said.