Patience pays off for Nuggets ... what does that mean for Timberwolves?

After the Nuggets won the NBA title on Monday, Timberwolves center Rudy Gobert sent out a congratulatory tweet that also read as a dig at his former team, the Jazz.

"Happy for the Nuggets, beautiful Team basketball all year around,' Gobert said. "Failed over and over in the previous years, didn't quit on their guys. And Nikola Jokic will finally get the respect he deserves!"

Gobert might have been making the comparison between Utah and the Nuggets, saying that his old organization bailed on the core of himself and Donovan Mitchell before it could truly come to fruition. Denver might not have been hoisting the Larry O'Brien Trophy had it done similarly after a second-round exit two seasons ago and a first-round exit last season.

Both of those losses came without guard Jamal Murray, who had a torn ACL then, but showed he is one of the best guards in the league this postseason in playing a very prominent second fiddle to Jokic's brilliance.

The NBA is a copycat league, and teams will look at Denver and runner-up Miami to mimic them as best as possible. Look at both rosters and organizations, and you can see similar traits. Continuity of their culture, and not just one or two years of having a defined identity as organizations, but cultures that have taken several years with some of the core pieces in place for that long, like Murray and Jokic.

The times, they are a changin'

Denver and Miami were primed to take advantage of the shifting tides in the NBA. The buzzwords and clichés like culture and identity now trump just collecting as many superstars as you can in the hopes they will dazzle their way to the title, ala LeBron James' Heat squads or the Warriors with Kevin Durant.

The super team era is over, and the generation of players that have been a constant presence in the Finals for the last decade will find it harder and harder to get back — players like James, Stephen Curry and Durant. Golden State's title last season felt like the last gasp of that era as Denver rolled past James' Lakers, who had already beaten the Warriors, and Durant's Suns en route to the title.

As these players age — and the new collective bargaining agreement will have harsher penalties for teams that go far above the luxury tax — having more than two stars on any team is going to be almost untenable and not worth the investment.

That's why Denver was in the right place at the right time. The Nuggets were percolating for this moment. Years of continuity within the organization, the development of Jokic and finally some injury luck all combined for the Nuggets to take a title in this new flattened era of the NBA.

Hope for all

The margin between the best teams and the merely good teams hasn't been this small in a long time. Think of the years of James' prime. It was automatic his team was going to come out of the East. Same for the Warriors in the West. Those days are over, and the Heat battling from being the No. 8 seed in the East to a finals berth is more evidence of this closing gap in the quality of NBA contenders.

That's why all those buzzwords matter. Look at the three teams the Nuggets defeated on their way to the title — a Timberwolves team that made a radical revamp of their roster last offseason and hadn't played much at all with their projected starting five; a Suns team that acquired Durant at the trade deadline at the price of a lot of its depth and was still trying to figure it all out. Same for the Lakers, who got a major facelift at the trade deadline as well. The Nuggets were a well-oiled machine compared to those teams. They knew who they were and what they wanted to do every night and what they could expect out of their top two stars, who are in the prime ages of their careers.

One thing about this new era of the NBA — it will be better to be consistently good every night than great some nights and bad on others. The latter is where the Wolves were, with all their losses to bottom-feeding teams. Denver is the prototype of the former. Even on their off nights, the Nuggets were still hard to beat.

Meanwhile, in Minnesota ...

What does all this mean for the Wolves? In the short term, it bolsters their case for running their team back from a season ago. Given that President Tim Connelly was the one preaching patience for years in Denver before coming to the Wolves, it would be a surprise to see a major, franchise-altering move this offseason, even as the rumor mill around a potential Karl-Anthony Towns trade heats up (as it tends to do on a regular cycle, it seems).

But the Wolves don't have nearly as much time as Denver or the Heat have had with the organizational structure in place from top to bottom. For the Wolves to contend, they'll have to make serious strides in training camp and early next season to get on Denver's level of consistency. Then after next season, they will likely have to shake up the roster in a major way because of the salary cap.

In the long-term, the Wolves need to have a roadmap for how they will maximize the peak years of Anthony Edwards. Edwards is still five years or so away from when he will reach that point where Jokic and Murray are now. Getting him playoff experience now is important, but having the kind of organizational continuity Denver had and Miami had — and Towns has never had — will be essential to his and the franchise's success. That might mean sticking with a coach who could be fired, like Connelly did a few years back with Michael Malone, or sticking with a core of players even through injuries or an underperforming season.

Patience is not always a word fans want to hear, but it got Miami to the Finals after a choppy regular season, and it got Denver a ring after a half decade of falling short.