Beat writer Bennett Durando opens up the Nuggets Mailbag periodically during the season. Pose a Nuggets- or NBA- related question here.

How concerned should we be with the Nuggets’ record against teams above .500? Currently we (have a losing record) against those teams and a (near-perfect) record against sub .500 teams. Nice to know we are beating the teams we should be beating, but the Nuggets are getting the good teams’ best games. Do you think we’ll improve down the stretch and focus when it comes to playoff time to run it back?

— Rod, Las Vegas

I tend to think it’s not a big deal because when there’s this much parity in the top half of the NBA standings, all the best teams in the league should be separating themselves by beating up on the bottom half.

Let’s compare Denver to other apparent championship contenders. Obviously, a team’s record against above-.500 and below-.500 opponents is a stat that’s constantly in flux — the 19-18 Suns play the 19-19 Lakers on Thursday night, for instance — so to keep the numbers relevant for at least 24 hours, I’ve devised what I think is a fair system. Any team with a record of .500 or within two games of .500 is considered a “neutral team.” There are four neutrals: Suns, Lakers, Jazz and Rockets. Thursday’s results will not change that list.

Any team more than two games above .500 is a winning team, and any team more than two games below is a losing team.

Nuggets: 6-9 vs. winning teams, 4-4 vs. neutral teams, 16-0 vs. losing teams.

Thunder: 10-6 vs. winning teams, 3-2 vs. neutral teams, 12-3 vs. losing teams.

Clippers: 10-7 vs. winning teams, 4-3 vs. neutral teams, 10-3 vs. losing teams.

Timberwolves: 14-8 vs. winning teams, 5-1 vs. neutral teams, 7-2 vs. losing teams.

Celtics: 16-6 vs. winning teams, 2-0 vs. neutral teams, 11-2 vs. losing teams.

Bucks: 10-7 vs. winning teams, 1-2 vs. neutral teams, 14-3 vs. losing teams.

76ers: 5-9 vs. winning teams, 3-1 vs. neutral teams, 15-3 vs. losing teams.

So the Nuggets have been marginally worse against winning teams than their top challengers (with the exception of the Sixers) … but not enough to sound any alarms. All seven of these teams have a winning percentage of .769 or better against losing opponents, and all seven have lost at least six games to winning opponents.

If you want to scrutinize the volume of bad teams Denver has faced relative to Minnesota in the context of the chase for the No. 1 seed in the West, that’s perfectly fair. But it’s equally noteworthy that the Nuggets have four remaining back-to-backs, and the Timberwolves have 10.

The Celtics are the one team with a substantially better résumé against winning teams, enough to make a mental bookmark. But that should surprise nobody; they’ve been separating themselves as the consensus title favorite for weeks. The Nuggets are about to get a look at them in hostile Boston during a five-game road trip featuring four winning opponents. If Denver loses all four of those, then maybe this becomes a more pressing topic.

But the way I see it, if it was the other way around — if the Nuggets had the same exact record but via resounding success vs. contenders and ugly losses against bad teams — then fans would complain that the team is complacent and not taking the easy ones seriously enough. The only way everyone’s happy is if their team has a near-perfect record, and that’s just not likely to happen in this era of the league when talent is so entertainingly balanced.

List these three in order of most positive (predicted) impact in the playoffs: Reggie Jackson, Peyton Watson and Christian Braun.

— Zakky, Twitter

Recency bias whispers in my ear when I debate this answer with myself. I’ll give in to it: Watson is No. 1. Since the start of December, none of the three have missed a game. Watson has played the most during that 20-game stretch, averaging 20.5 minutes to Jackson’s 20.3 and Braun’s 18.5. That seemed improbable a month into the season, when Watson was at 14.4 minutes per game and Braun was at 21. (Jackson’s minutes through November were bloated by Jamal Murray’s injury.)

Obviously, the question will be whether Watson can ramp up his game at both ends for the playoffs. Braun has already been through that transition for the first time, so Michael Malone will undoubtedly trust him to understand the intensity of those minutes, regardless of any struggles this season. With Jackson, I foresee playoff responsibilities alongside the starters as much as the second unit. Why? Obviously, his offense is his strength; his offensive numbers have been better as a starter than as a backup all year; and Denver’s second unit in the playoffs won’t have to depend on Jackson for scoring as much with Murray and/or other starters staggering constantly. Jackson’s most essential minutes, then, could be while Murray is on the bench. If he can perfect his pick-and-roll with Nikola Jokic (not to mention that give-and-go), it seems reasonable to believe Jackson’s playoff impact will be bigger on paper than Braun’s.

After hearing about the ejection of Jokic in Chicago on Serbian heritage night (not able to see thanks to Comcast), I have to ask the obvious question: Why does Jokic use his English skills to display his displeasure with the officiating when he could get colorful in Serbian without the same risk? I doubt that the NBA has any Serbian speakers employed as refs.

— Shawn Thompson, Denver

DeAndre Jordan made the same exact suggestion to Jokic in the locker room that night in Chicago. Serbian swearing would seem the wise choice. But sometimes when you’re angry at someone, you just want the satisfaction of them understanding exactly how angry you are. Not easy to convey that eloquently using a lesser-known language.

That concludes the therapy portion of today’s mailbag.

But in Jokic’s case at Chicago, I don’t think he was expecting the word to result in any consequences, so he probably felt somewhat safe saying it in English. As he marveled later, “sometimes what I said is not even a technical.”

After covering both the Avs and Nuggets, who would you say is primed to win another title first? Avs seem to have the talent but struggle between the pipes. And the Nuggets have Joker leading a team-first battleship in Denver. My money would be on the Avalanche.

— Rip, Aurora

I think about this a lot, honestly. And I have zero clue. Genuine coin toss.

I’ll say this: Juggernaut hockey teams are typically more susceptible to massive first-round upsets than top NBA teams. The Bruins (and to a lesser extent the Avalanche) learned this last season. The talent gap is usually wider from No. 1 to No. 8 in the NBA, and it’s just not as fluky a sport. Taking that into account, it seems fair to say the Nuggets have a higher floor. It’s hard to imagine them losing in the first round at the height of Jokic’s power.

As a sports fan, the in-season tournament didn’t do anything for me. Do most players feel the same way? Just seems like a publicity stunt from the marketing department of the NBA. Would think most teams and players have their eyes set on the NBA Finals.

— Tom, Highlands Ranch

I’ve addressed this already, but the players seemed to enjoy it. I know we think of all NBA players as mega-millionaires, but for guys at the end of the bench who might not have long careers or big contracts, the up-to-$500,000 prize money is absolutely worth something. And players clearly bought into the bragging-rights intensity of the event, too, as evidenced by the point differential shenanigans going on at the end of lopsided group games. Remember, Houston kept trying to score in the last minute against the Nuggets while up big.

There might be conversations for the next 11 months about whether it’s worth it for players to exert themselves too much for the in-season crown, considering the tailspin Los Angeles entered immediately after raising a December banner. But I’ll leave that conversation to the sports talk shows.

Is there something in the water in Utah?

— Madalynn, Denver

Salt. Salt and defeat.

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