The Nuggets are a dead team walking.

They’re being dragged along by Nikola Jokic to a sad ending already etched in granite.

Like a tombstone.

Here lies the ruins of another season of Jokic’s MVP prime wasted by Denver general manager Calvin Booth.

“Nobody’s going to feel sorry for us. We put ourselves in this hole,” Nuggets coach Michael Malone said Sunday, after a 125-120 loss to Indiana, their fourth in a row.

Hot mess does not begin to describe this no-longer formidable team.

Denver’s weak championship hopes? Flush ‘em.

So quit dragging our hearts around. Let’s get the inevitable early exit from the NBA playoffs over, let Jokic fly his wife and kids back to Serbia and start the work on a major roster overhaul.

But Josh and Stan Kroenke must first decide if Booth is the right man to reshape a roster of mismatched parts.

Although Jokic scored 41 points, grabbed 15 rebounds and dished 13 assists, his 32nd triple double of this NBA season wasn’t enough to hold off the Pacers in the fourth quarter.

On a team with 99 problems, what is Jokic’s biggest concern?

“I really don’t know,” said Jokic, too frustrated to know where to begin.

Hoping Joker can save teammates unworthy of max contracts is no longer a viable strategy for the Nuggets.

“We’ve got to be better for him,” guard Christian Braun said.

But when Jokic looks around the court, what or whom can he really trust?

These Nuggets can’t guard anyone.

“The defense,” Malone said, “that’s been the most disappointing part of this year.”

The Nuggets’ primary defensive strategy apparently is to stand back, watch foes launch wide-open shots from 3-point range and pray they clank off the rim. The Pacers, however, made 15 treys, more than double the output of Denver from distance.

Despite more than $200 million guaranteed remaining on his contract, guard Jamal “The Broken Arrow” Murray has become a chronic question mark.

As his Denver teammates wrestled with the Pacers, Murray tapped out for yet another game, the fifth in a role he has missed while nursing tightness in his he has missed in a row, to nurse hamstring tightness.

“He’s hurt,” Malone said. ”This has been a weird one. It was day-to-day, day-to-day, then next thing you know, it’s not day-to-day.”

It’s true, the Nuggets couldn’t have won the NBA championship in 2023 without him.

But the story of Murray’s NBA career now cannot be written without chapters dedicated to a star-crossed history of injury that makes you wonder if at age 28, he will ever be an all-star.

Since 2019, Murray has been physically unable to play in 199 games, missing more than 35 percent of the team’s regular-season and playoff games during that time.

“Hopefully,” Malone said, Murray will be healthy enough to be back in the starting lineup by the time the playoffs (or perhaps the play-in tournament) begins for Denver.

The one-year experiment with Russell Westbrook has blown up in Booth’s face. His friends call him Brodie. But we curse him as Agent Chaos 004 for his hyperactive mistakes.

As months of hard work by the Nuggets have come crashing down during this losing streak, Westbrook has suffered through a worse week than the NASDAQ.

With the most regrettable 10 seconds by any Nuggets player in recent memory, Westbrook was the April fool that snatched defeat from the jaws of victory against Minnesota in that horrendous 140-139 double overtime loss on the first day of this month.

That loss to the Timberwolves, who also wrecked Denver’s season a year ago, ripped the heart out of the Nuggets.

The hangover effect has turned them into a dead team walking.

“It was a devastating loss,” Malone said.

But he refuses to believe having their souls crushed by Minnesota was the beginning of the end for the dysfunctional Nuggets we now see.

“Don’t know if I would say there’s been a hangover,” Malone said. “But whatever it is, we’ve got to find a way to get this out of our system.”

In a Western Conference where everyone is chasing the young guns in Oklahoma City, the Nuggets are now in real danger of not only falling out of a top four seed and home-court advantage in the first round of the playoffs, but tumbling all the way to the crapshoot that is the league’s play-in tournament.

With statistics shiny enough to make Michael Jordan drool, Jokic has somehow been better than his three-time MVP best.

And a team assembled by Booth has condemned Jokic to certain failure in the pursuit of a championship.

The Nuggets we’ve known and loved are dead.

It would be foolish to hope for a rebirth in the playoffs.

This pain shouts that major change is an absolute necessity.