Nikola Jokic took over. Then the Nuggets finally started communicating again.

Nikola Jokic took the chalkboard, and David Adelman barked out the messages as the Denver Nuggets stopped a four-game losing streak with a 124-116 win in Sacramento amid a chaotic 36 hours during which Michael Malone and Calvin Booth were fired.

What’s gone on, and what’s to come, in the Mile High City is a fascinating study in communication.

Because that’s what this is really about. Not just losing games, but losing the thread. Losing clarity. Losing trust in who’s delivering the message and how it’s coming across.

Communication is at the core of the Nuggets’ current issues on the court.

Communication is the thing that led to a war that got Denver’s two figureheads fired.

Communication is what owner Josh Kroenke did boldly by making the extreme move days before the postseason began.

Marshall McLuhan famously said in 1964 that “the medium is the message … the effect of the program is incidental.” In other words, how a message is delivered often matters more than the message itself. While this is based on how messages are perceived in the media, it’s pretty pertinent to what the Nuggets are going through right now.

And it’s something that ownership certainly understood.

Because when you fire not just the coach, but also the executive in charge of the coach — and you do it in April, not in the offseason — it doesn’t just say this isn’t working. It screams this is broken, and it’s broken now.

It wasn’t just that Malone and Booth were at odds — it was how that friction filtered into the team. The lack of alignment. The passive-aggressive jabs. The tug-of-war over roster control, rotations, and development. The result? Players unsure of whom to listen to. Staffers insecure about who they’re reporting to. A locker room looking for one voice and hearing many.

Ownership finally spoke.

And, ironically, a new voice entering the conversation led to clarity — at least for a night.

The Nuggets responded to the team’s top brass by acknowledging their message with stronger play, getting out to an early lead against the Kings. They kept their foot on the gas and finally won an important game.

“It was a reaction to what went on the last 30 hours,” Nuggets interim head coach Adelman said. “Competitive people don’t want to lose five games in a row. You can look at it this way or that way, or they made a change, and this happened. I don’t really buy that. I think this is professional sports, and if you get used to losing, you shouldn’t be in this, and I think that was a big part of it, too. It was the emotion of what happened and the fact that, man, we’ve been embarrassing lately. We got to win a game.”

Where there had been a clear through-line in the feud between Booth and Malone revolving around youngster Jalen Pickett, it was the night after the feud ended that he tallied a new career-high 18 points. A sign that there was trust for the backup point guard where there used to be ambiguity.

“Sometimes in life tough things happen,” Pickett said to the team’s media after the game. “And you need your brothers there to pick you up. We’re gonna rally together as a team.”

However, the biggest issue in communication that was affecting the team on the hardwood on a nightly basis came on the defensive end. Christian Braun himself took on a ton of this blame last Sunday.

“Just staying together, everybody communicating, getting on the same page is really important especially defensively; that’s maybe been our biggest problem, just communication,” Braun said on Wednesday. “Tonight, obviously, the energy is a little different. We know how important a win is today, but I think that as far as communication goes, it probably was our best game of the year. Everybody was into it. We had players communicating with each other instead of relying on a coach to tell us everything.

The Nuggets held the Kings to just 25 points in two separate quarters. When these two teams met a few weeks ago, DeMar DeRozan cooked for 35 points; this time, at home, he was held to just 20 points.

Wednesday was a statement from the Nuggets, not a fix or a cure-all, but a rare moment this season of on-court and organizational alignment.

“He knows it’s definitely an important time for him to be speaking up and for us to hear his voice because he’s the focal point of our team, and we build everything around him,” Peyton Watson said about Jokic. “I’m glad that he has been more vocal and that his energy has been up because that’s what we need from him. We need the leadership, we need the belief, and we need his voice to be present in this locker room. So I’m glad that he’s been doing that.”

Jokic played like a guy with a new job title, embracing his new duties and activating the loudest voice of his NBA career. The ball popped. The defense was mostly on a string. Adelman didn’t reinvent the wheel, he got out of the way. He let the players dictate almost everything, and they responded by looking like themselves again for the first time in weeks — maybe months.

“The number one thing I am proud of tonight is you guys communicating with one another, during timeouts, throughout the game,” Adelman told his team in the locker room postgame, according to a video posted by the Nuggets. “You don’t always need us, you take responsibility for what you feel out there and what you see. We talked to each other the right way.”

The Nuggets’ win in Sacramento wasn’t just a stop to the bleeding — it was a scattered team suddenly finding its rhythm again.

Ownership said, loudly, that the way things were going for the Nuggets wasn’t acceptable. And finally, the message clicked — not just because of what was said but how shockingly it was delivered. Jokic took the play sheet. The players took ownership of the situation. The noise quieted. The room listened.

McLuhan had it right all along: the effect of the program is incidental. It’s not the X’s and O’s that changed. It’s that the voice delivering them did.

Maybe this doesn’t last. Maybe it’s just a blip. Maybe the playoffs will expose deeper fractures still left unrepaired by bad roster building and months-long issues that simmered.

For one night, the static faded, the signal was clear, and the Nuggets communicated again.

The loudest message the Nuggets could send didn’t come from the offcourt moves — it came from the floor — the only medium that matters in the NBA.