DENVER — At last, Nik Bonitto’s right hand is just a hand again. No cast. No splint. No Bionic Man.

When asked last week at a charity event if it felt good to have the brace off, Bonitto grinned and grunted in affirmation. Eight months earlier, a split-second expression of frustration completely altered his season. Bonitto slammed his hand against the ground after a last-second Week 2 loss to the Indianapolis Colts and hurt his wrist badly enough that he played the entire rest of the year in a club.

That did not stop the All-Pro outside linebacker from recording a career-best 14 sacks. Still, Bonitto’s entire year was filled with uncomfortable adaptation.

“I learned a lot of lessons, I feel like, last year, just as far as battling through injuries,” Bonitto said.

He learned greater ones, too. The wrist was simple enough to fix after he underwent clean-up surgery shortly after the season. But Bonitto’s ultimate ascension to the highest echelon of NFL defenders, he knows, will depend on much deeper adjustments to the way the league’s offenses are beginning to treat him.

“I mean, it really has nothing to do with the physical part of it,” he said.

Playing chess with opposing offenses

Since he was a lanky teenager growing up in Fort Lauderdale, Bonitto’s offseason development has hinged on bulking up. He is a speed-rusher, by trade. He needed to add power after the Broncos drafted him in the second round in 2022. By 2025, coming off his Pro Bowl breakout a year earlier, Bonitto was complaining — but not really complaining — to trainer Rich Pruett that his quads had grown too thick to fit into his pants.

Entering his fifth season in the NFL, Bonitto does not need to learn how to deadlift anymore. He needs to learn to play chess.

“Being able to see what it’s like to actually have a protection plan around me,” Bonitto said, describing his adjustments in 2025. “And how to work through those things and continue to find ways to make plays, and also help other guys make plays while we’re at it — while I’m commanding those chips and double-teams, and stuff like that.”

Bonitto’s offseason in 2026, unlike previous years, has centered on watching tape to dissect how other star pass-rushers break down those protection plans. Browns Defensive Player of the Year Myles Garrett, for one. Packers All-Pro Micah Parsons, for another. Ravens star Trey Hendrickson, too. He and pass-rush specialist Javon Gopie, who’s worked with Bonitto since he was at Oklahoma, have even delved back as far as the 1990s to watch Hall of Famer John Randle.

All have markedly different body types than Bonitto, who stands 6-foot-3 and hovers between 240 and 250 pounds. The key on tape, however, is the mentality and positioning of alpha-type pass-rushers against teams that design their blocking schemes specifically around stopping them.

While watching Bonitto’s own tape from 2025, Gopie told The Denver Post that NFL offensive lines “100%” keyed in on Bonitto that year, a notable difference from his previous seasons.

“What is the saying, with Spider-Man?” Gopie said. “‘With great (power) comes great responsibility.’ And he’s at that stage, man, where — you are the premier guy.”

2025, then, was a “challenging” year for Bonitto, as Gopie said, because of a “multitude” of concepts that changed in respect to how offenses blocked him. Sometimes, tight ends or running backs or even wide receivers threw him a chip-block before flaring out, as Gopie described. Sometimes guards would slide over to double-team him. Sometimes tackles would “jump-set” — a technique where linemen fire off the snap and establish contact early to disrupt a rusher’s momentum.

The goal, as Gopie observed on film, was to simply wrestle Bonitto off his desired track.

“A lot of the times, if I can stop his momentum at the line, that may be effective,” Gopie said, placing himself in the mentality of a blocker against Bonitto. “Or again, if I can just use his speed to his advantage and just run him up the field, how does he counter to that?

“I might’ve said this two years ago — that was going to be his next evolution,” Gopie continued. “Because he was so great at bending the edge. How he learns to counter off that, and set things up, is really when things get to the next level.”

Finding a signature counter-move

Bonitto was drawing serious Defensive Player of the Year buzz through the first half of 2026, with eight sacks in his first six games. Thanks to a combination of varying protection schemes, nagging injuries and rush plans designed to cage quarterbacks, Bonitto leveled off to six sacks in his last 11 games. He was “frustrated” down the stretch after one stretch of sack-less games, Gopie said.

That manifested itself after a Week 16 loss to Jacksonville, with Bonitto zipping his jacket up over his mouth in the postgame locker room like an overstimulated teenager.

“I played like ass,” he told reporters, after recording just two quarterback pressures against the Jaguars.

It was a wonderfully simple evaluation of a complex situation, and an encapsulation of the necessary next steps. Upon film review of 18 pass-rush snaps, Jacksonville frequently shaded running backs toward Bonitto to chip him and mixed in both guard and tight end help on multiple possessions. Bonitto’s primary matchup, meanwhile — 312-pound tackle Cole Van Lanen — repeatedly backpedaled to simply funnel his speed-rush outside and past Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence. Bonitto had no effective counters or Plan-B moves other than a simple power rush through Van Lanen’s numbers, which only worked on one snap late in the fourth quarter.

Last offseason, Gopie told The Post he thought 2025 would be the season when Bonitto developed a signature counter-move. That didn’t quite happen, even as Bonitto put a couple of impressive spin-cycles on tape.

That process, again, will become even more important to Bonitto’s growth in 2026.

“His next evolution will be how he sees the game,” Gopie said, “and how he continues to just set stuff up.”

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