If it hurts the broken-down Nuggets to watch the NBA Finals from the sofa as much as it torments them to play basketball on the court, then shouldn’t Job One for Denver be painfully obvious?

Heal thyself.

Too often, this team’s starting five is in no shape to make a championship run. That’s more than an unhappy accident. It’s a plea for change.

If Nuggets president Josh Kroenke wants to call himself the team’s “Chief Culture Officer,” then the CCO must look himself in the mirror and admit the chronic health issues plaguing his team are more than bad luck.

Center Nikola Jokic is the best hooper on the planet, except when his aching right wrist messes with the touch on his shot from the paint to beyond the 3-point arc.

Power forward Aaron Gordon is a soft-tissue injury waiting to happen.

Wouldn’t Jamal Murray have more than one All-Star Game appearance on his resume if the guard hadn’t spent so much of his career rehabilitating from injury?

Wingman Peyton Watson’s breakout season went bust when his body broke down.

After spraining his ankle in late autumn, ace of pace Christian Braun couldn’t really run or jump.

When the injury bug bites once, or even twice, it can be dismissed as a fluke. But what the Nuggets are suffering from is an epidemic of basketball boo-boos.

While casting no stones at Denver’s training staff, doesn’t there have to be a better way?

“Anytime an athlete experiences pain, the brain turns off the function of the muscle because the brain associates that muscle with pain,” said Robert Weissfeld, who has spent more than 30 years in Denver researching methods to hasten injury recovery, combining his ever-evolving study of kinesiology, neurology, acupuncture and chiropractic techniques.

In recent NBA seasons, Weissfeld has watched what appeared to be relatively minor muscle strains in stars such as Klay Thompson, Kevin Durant and Tyrese Haliburton turn into catastrophic injuries that wrecked teams’ drive to the championship.

While Weissfeld does adhere to the widely accepted belief that the best predictor of future injury is past injury, he refuses to accept the conventional wisdom that bigger, stronger athletes put so much stress on their bodies that injuries sometimes seem an inevitable question of not if, but when.

The Nuggets aren’t going to hobble down the road to championship rings.

Doctor, doctor, can’t you give me some good news?

“Gordon has never had major surgery, but yet he’s often hobbled,” Weissfeld said. “That must be extremely frustrating.”

What Weissfeld detects in the chronic injury woes of Gordon, Watson, Jokic and the Nuggets is what he refers to as the vicious cycle of muscle PTSD.

“Following trauma, which includes injury, pain and other kinds of stress, some muscles become chronically weak, perhaps as a way to protect the (affected) area from further stress,” Weissfeld theorizes.

“The problem is not in the muscles themselves, which are generally healthy. The deficit is the signals reaching the muscles from the brain. Like turning on a light with its dimmer switch set too low, the muscles receive insufficient current to activate them normally.”

His study of holistic techniques to reboot inhibited muscles was inspired by the ironman NBA careers of John Stockton and Karl Malone, who swore by the work of longtime Utah Jazz chiropractor Craig Buhler.

“Could correcting muscle function help Gordon regain his career, help Watson avoid injuries … and help Braun restore his career momentum?” Weissfeld said while readily admitting there are no absolute certainties. “I believe that muscle rebooting could meaningfully impact the Nuggets’ future.”

Returning to the Big Apple with a 2-0 series lead against San Antonio in the NBA Finals, the New York Knicks have stepped out as the poster children for getting hot at the right time in the league’s new era of parity.

For the eighth season in a row, there will be a different league champion. With rules conspiring against the super teams once built by the force of personality of LeBron or Steph, winning on the margins has never been more important.

Are the Nuggets willing to invest in being the best version of themselves?

“This season was, in a lot of ways,” Kroenke lamented, “the season that never was.”

While citing the constraints of the current collective bargaining agreement put on mature rosters, Nuggets ownership spends in excess of $200 million in salaries on playing talent.

Well, I might be a knucklehead. But as best I can tell, there is no salary cap on innovative sports medicine. Instead of trading Gordon for pennies on the dollar, it might make more sense to invest in healing what ails him.

The Nuggets are never getting back to the NBA Finals with one aching wrist tied behind Jokic’s back or with a physically diminished Braun meekly looking to pass instead of driving for a dunk.

Spending millions in a new practice facility or pushing the envelope with basketball analytics? That’s all well and good.

These Nuggets, however, are nothing without their health.