Cam Johnson woke up on Wednesday morning immersed in his own thoughts, wondering where in the cosmos they might take him. Four days before the NBA playoffs, it would be easy to let work flood his brain as he lay in bed. The buzz of anticipation for his most meaningful basketball in three years surrounded him.

But Johnson knows himself well. He knows that indulging his curiosity helps him find peace. So he indulged.

Today’s topic was time dilation.

“So gravity, time and speed, they work together,” he explained a few hours later, wiping the sweat from his forehead after the Nuggets finished practice. “So the faster an object goes, the slower time is perceived. To my little extent of knowledge, there’s like a meter. And at the speed of light, at the top of the meter, there’s no space for time in there. Time basically comes to a stop. So a particle of light that’s traveling at the speed of light, it doesn’t really feel time. If light takes eight minutes to get from the sun to us, that’s from our perspective. Everything’s about perspective. For that particle of light, it’s instantaneous because of its speed.”

Johnson was off and running. He referenced the 2014 science fiction movie “Interstellar,” in which Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway age 7 years for every hour that passes on a different planet. He tied it to a more microscopic real-life example — that “an astronaut who worked in the International Space Station for X amount of time might age a couple of milliseconds slower than a human on Earth.” He marveled at the brilliance and imagination of Albert Einstein and other early 20th-century physicists who studied relativity before it was accepted as a theory. “You’re thinking, how did they figure that out?” he said.

The 30-year-old Nuggets wing is a half-decade removed from an NBA Finals run with Phoenix. He hasn’t had a taste of the playoffs since 2023, when his Brooklyn Nets were swept in the first round. As Denver’s starting small forward alongside the star duo of Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray, he’ll be an X-factor for a team with championship ambitions this year. He’s widely regarded as one of the smartest players in the NBA, an avid student and teacher of the game whose comprehension of the chessboard made him seem like a perfect match for Jokic when Denver traded for him last summer. His mind is one of his greatest strengths — and sometimes his adversary. “I’m probably an overthinker on a lot of things,” he told The Denver Post.

The Nuggets sacrificed a first-round pick and a longtime staple of their starting lineup, Michael Porter Jr., to acquire Johnson in a transaction that also enabled other additions. It was their most significant roster move in four years, a clear signal from Denver’s new front office that change was needed to return to championship form. The old core wasn’t working anymore.

Nine months later, the trade has aged better for the Nuggets in the abstract than it has on the stat sheet. They anticipated that. Porter and Johnson flipped roles. Porter’s expanded. Johnson’s contracted. His season has been a rollercoaster at times, interrupted by injuries and shooting slumps and the overall adjustment process to playing in Jokic’s orbit. His teammates and coaches have implored him to be aggressive, not to scale back too much.

“Cam is a really cerebral player,” coach David Adelman said. “And I think cerebral people sometimes can get in their own way. … It’s my job to make sure he’s getting touches, that he’s part of what we’re trying to accomplish. And it’s his job to just play. Let it happen. He’s too good of a basketball player not to.”

Johnson nonetheless finished the year a career-best 43% from 3-point range, ranking eighth in the league. He’s coming in hot to the playoffs, where Porter struggled in recent years. The coming weeks will provide the real verdict on Denver’s 2025 offseason moves. Johnson is no stranger to the environment and the pressure. He has his own way of navigating it all, of harnessing his tendency to overthink as a recalibration method. A reset button.

When he needs space away from basketball, he puts his mind to work on another subject that brings him as much joy and wonderment. He goes to space.

“I just try to learn things and learn about the world around me,” he said. “When we talk about astronomy and physics in general, as an overthinker, it kind of gets you outside of yourself. You get caught up in your own problems sometimes and the world feels like it’s this big and everything feels so heavy, and then you go and you learn about some things, and you’re like man, we are really just on a little tiny rock in a very vast abyss.”

Johnson is entranced by physics. By history. By the history of physics. He takes books on the road with him — postgame reading for the tireless hours the Nuggets spend airborne, traveling from NBA city to city.

It has served him well throughout this season and his seven-year NBA career. It will continue to offer him a form of respite during the playoffs, which begin Saturday (1:30 p.m. MT) when Denver hosts the Timberwolves in Game 1.

“My whole world sometimes revolves around what happens in this rectangle,” he said. “So I need the opposite.”

One of the brightest minds in the basketball universe

It doesn’t always show, but Johnson is driven by a competitiveness that matches his intellect. Growing up outside of Pittsburgh, he watched his older brother become a high school valedictorian.

“He always said that he was gonna catch Aaron,” his dad, Gil Johnson, said. That made life simple: Cam got good grades because he had no other choice.

He also applied his smarts to every sport he played. As a quarterback in football, he didn’t need to wear a wrist sleeve with plays listed, Gil said. He had a knack for knowing where his receivers were going, where he needed to place the ball. As a baseball player, he once pitched a strong game for his seventh-grade team, then surprised his dad by explaining exactly how he did it. He didn’t have an elite arsenal of pitches — he was a middle schooler, after all — but he figured out which areas of the strike zone were weaknesses for each hitter throughout the game. “I had no idea that he thought baseball like that,” Gil said.

And as a hooper, Johnson was always trying to identify the next pass his teammates could make, after he passed it to them.

“You saw the leadership. You saw him telling guys where to be,” said Nick Luchini, one of his high school friends and teammates. “You could tell that guys were feeding off how smart he was.”

In a parallel universe, Johnson might’ve been an engineer. He might’ve studied astronomy, or history, or law. But he decided when he was young that he would make it to the NBA. While playing up a couple of years in second grade, he impressed an opponent once and earned a postgame compliment: “You might be a professional basketball player someday.”

Johnson didn’t take it that way.

“He came over with a scowl on his face,” Gil said. Cam was offended by the “might be” part of the comment.

“I remember it like it was yesterday,” Cam said. “… I feel like a lot of kids think that, you know? And it didn’t always work out for me. You say that to me in ninth grade, I’m like, ‘Yeah, we’ll see.’ Of course, I have confidence in myself, but as a 5-8 freshman, it’s like, I’m also studying. I’m into books too. … By the time high school got to late junior, early senior years, I unloaded some of my APs intentionally. And kind of spent just a little bit more time in the gym, took a little bit of that (schoolwork) off my plate. So that was probably the first time I made a decision where school was a little bit more on the back burner.”

After all, Cam had already lost the battle to his brother. He would end up a measly salutatorian.

“He got me,” Cam said. “His GPA was higher than mine. He took more APs. He did better on AP tests. He did better on the ACT. He did better on the SAT. I couldn’t catch him. He’s too smart. … He’s just smarter than me, point blank. Period.”

By the time he hit a growth spurt and became a recruiting target for Division I college basketball programs, Johnson was already explaining physics terminology to his high school friends to help them understand a challenging class.

“If I’m being honest, Cam taught me a lot,” his friend Santino Platt said, “dumbing it down for me.”

But Johnson said it wasn’t until a sophomore astronomy course at the University of Pittsburgh that he developed an insatiable curiosity about the mysteries of the universe. And the miracles of scientific discovery within that universe. Amateur astronomy became a hobby as he was drafted into the NBA.

“We have such a mathematical approach to solving so much of what we cannot see,” Johnson said. “It’s really cool how we use these equations and constants to deduce how far a planet is from a star that’s 50 light years away, you know what I mean? We can’t see it for nothing. But by measuring how much light it takes away from a star and how big that star is, we can figure out a lot. When you read about the history of it and how long we’ve been around as humans in the past thousands of years, and how rapidly it’s changing, it makes you think, ‘Well, what do we have wrong now?’ So I just like reading. Reading what people have thought in the past, reading what people think now. We have some really smart scientists in the world, and some are really really good at explaining.”

He came face to face with one of them in 2023, when the Nets helped arrange for him to meet astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. After a long conversation, Johnson and Tyson recorded a “space draft” video for social media in which they took turns selecting celestial concepts and events. Johnson’s “team” included the carbonate-silicate cycle, Pluto and a neutron star with the first overall pick. “That’s a good pick,” he told The Post, doubling down.

He beamed at the display of public interest in NASA’s recent mission to the moon. He wondered to himself if the miracles of science are taken for granted by most people as he watched, in awe of the flight path’s precision. (“We go around the earth, loop to catch the moon, loop the moon, come back to the immediate, right where we want to be, drop them right in the ocean right where we thought they would end up. That’s what math can do for us. … Not a stationary earth. Not a stationary moon.”)

His favorite reads over the years have included “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson and “The Planet Factory: Exoplanets and the Search for a Second Earth” by Elizabeth J. Tasker. Recently after some Nuggets games, he’s been working his way through “The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality” by Brian Greene, which dives into the weeds of theoretical physics.

“It’s sometimes a little heavy to read after a game,” Johnson said. “Like, you’ve gotta really sit there and think on a couple pages. It’s not, like, a light read. But that’s the whole point. Sitting there and thinking. It’s pretty cool if you ask me.”

He has his other ways of unwinding from basketball, too, of course. He’s an avid golfer. He’s a lifelong sneakerhead, his dad says. And he’s a practicing Christian — but he doesn’t view his religious and scientific convictions as being at odds with each other.

“I think we choose as humans to put them in opposition to each other,” he said. “… If everybody always thought, like, ‘God is in control of everything, I don’t need to worry about it,’ I don’t think we would have as much scientific (discovery). You can look throughout time, and history tells us this. … I really think the two can mesh. And that’s the perspective I look at it from. I just look at it as creation and the laws of nature are God’s language, and we are slowly trying to uncover it in a way that we can understand. It’s like translating languages.”

While seeking out texts that make the complex feel digestible, Johnson has simultaneously established himself as a purveyor of intricate concepts. He hosts “The Old Man and the Three,” a prominent basketball podcast that was originally hosted by JJ Redick. Redick left the show when he took over as head coach of the Lakers. Johnson has been his successor, having various Nuggets teammates join him for episodes throughout this season.

The conversation doesn’t usually get around to astronomy. Johnson is wary of boring his friends to death with it — though he has found at least one space friend with the Nuggets in team doctor Steve Short.

“I’ll sit here and explain it, and some of my friends have no interest in it. And they’re nodding their head, nodding their head. I’m rambling. And then — eye-roll,” Johnson said, laughing. “… I’ll get a lot of eye-rolls for sure, like, ‘Here he goes. He don’t even know what he’s talking about.’ … I wonder how many other NBA players think about this stuff.”

Finding his mojo in Denver

Johnson got off to a rocky start in Denver.

He began the season in a nasty slump. A 39% career 3-point shooter, he was 21% after 11 games, good for only 7.2 points per night. Not ideal for a player who had averaged an efficient 18.8 the previous year in Brooklyn.

But the Nuggets were winning. Johnson’s struggles didn’t get in the way of their overall offensive success. Adelman urged patience from fans and media as Johnson navigated his new solar system, one in which Jokic is the sun. The first-year coach defended Johnson again during another rut in early March, after he missed a potential game-winning 3-pointer in Oklahoma City. It weighed heavily on him.

“He puts a lot of pressure on himself — not sometimes, but all the time,” Gil said. “He holds himself up to a high standard.”

But for most of the season, Johnson has been a quietly effective role player, defending better than Porter and keeping defenses honest with his floor-spacing, even when he hasn’t scored. He found his mojo again over the last few weeks, highlighted by a barrage of clutch 3s in a statement win over San Antonio. Johnson rarely celebrates or gets animated on the court, but that day, he shared a cathartic moment with sharpshooting teammate Tim Hardaway Jr. after draining a big shot in overtime. It was the emotional apex of a 12-game win streak to finish the regular season.

Since those first 11 games, Johnson is 46.8% from deep. The Nuggets have a 9.5 net rating with him on the floor.

“We’re all telling him to shoot,” Hardaway said this week. “It would be different if we were telling him to pass, right? So we’re telling him to do what he does best, man. Be that Brooklyn Net Cam that you were out there, averaging 17, 18 a game. Playing freely, playing fun. That’s what you were brought here to do. Knock down your shots when open and be confident. Don’t be passive.”

The ball will find him in high-stakes situations over the coming weeks. The gravitational pull of the Jokic-Murray two-man game is too intense, like a planet where time is dilated. Defenders will be sucked in from the perimeter. Johnson will get open shots.

When he’s in those moments, nothing else matters to him — no other galaxy or solar system or planet. His universe contracts into an 18-inch cylinder.