It’s been tough trying to explain what it means to me that the Denver Nuggets are in the NBA Finals. It’s been like trying to explain why a certain lyric means more than people realize, or trying to justify Pluto as a planet all these years after it was cut from our solar system’s starting lineup. The Nuggets have a colorful, eccentric past with no real history. Not in the broader scope of basketball, anyway. Not in the “national” sense. Not in the Wikipedia sense. Certainly not in Chris Mannix’s understanding of the word “compelling” sense.
They have just been a team that lives fun yet inconsequential lives among teams that generally have their way with them, year after year. Teams like the Lakers. The Warriors. And the Celtics. Teams that, right this second, on June 1, 2023, are all looking up at the Denver freaking Nuggets, all in their own varying states of disarray. It’s the most wonderful feeling in the world.
I’ve been a Nuggets fan all my life, going back to 1982 when they traded David Thompson for Bill Hanzlik (I’m still not over it). But the realization that Denver had fully arrived finally dawned on me the other day, when my 12-year-old son wore his Jamal Murray jersey to school after the Nuggets swept the Lakers. A buddy of his who should’ve known better came up to him and said, “Oh, look at the bandwagon fan!”
Fighting words, right? Especially for a kid who’s been wearing Nuggets gear to school since kindergarten. Normally that might’ve been insulting, the kind of thing you’d feel obligated to justify with a “Shiiiit, I’ve been watching them since Wilson Chandler was stopping the ball” or whatever, but my son didn’t take it that way. He came home and said, “Dad … there’s a bandwagon? Wait, actually? People think the Denver Nuggets can have a bandwagon? Is that even possible?”
I’ll be honest, it put a little lump in my throat. I just tousled his hair and said, “I guess it is, son. Anything is possible.”
It’s not easy explaining the years of relative invisibility for those who don’t care (which, if we’re being honest, is mostly everybody outside the Rocky Mountains). The years of near misses. The years of false promise. Of being discounted and ignored. Excluded. Overlooked. Like when Jason Kidd scoffed at them when they offered him a contract as a free agent, or when LeBron James met Denver brass for a quick minute just to humor them and stoke his own ego. Or the year that Nick Van Exel got traded from the Lakers to the Nuggets and looked about as happy as you’d imagine one of Dostoyevsky’s characters being sent to Siberia.
It’s warming to remember those Doug Moe teams that passed and slashed and ran everybody out of the gym in the ’80s, at least right up until the playoffs, when somebody was always better. For so long the Nuggets were the B-side for all those matchups with high-powered teams passing through McNichols Sports Arena. “Dr. J’s last house call!” “The Bad Boys are back in town!” “Showtime in Denver!” The Nuggets weren’t just off the national radar, they weren’t even a big deal in their own town. Shortly after the Nuggets transitioned from their ABA glory to the NBA, circa 1976, the Denver Broncos captured the heart of the city by making the Super Bowl for the first time. The Orange Crush was born. From that point on, Denver became a football town.
The Nuggets? Well-meaning stepchildren. Overshadowed. The Jan Brady of the Flatirons. By the time John Elway came to town in 1983, barely anybody made a stink about Kiki Vandeweghe being traded to Portland for the relish tray of Fat Lever, Calvin Natt, and Wayne Cooper. I know I cried a little that day while shooting on my Nerf hoop in my bedroom, but Denver handled it far better than I did. (Luckily, it ended up being one of the best trades in Nuggets history.)
Denver has maintained a level of relevance on the whole, but the franchise always has sought something more—something more like validation. We Nuggets fans have long led lives of quiet desperation. I’m guessing Thoreau had just attended Game 4 of the 1985 Western Conference finals, when Alex English broke his thumb, when he said that. It was extremely hard to see the Nuggets’ spiritual kin—equally anonymous teams like the Spurs and the Mavericks—start making the Finals over the years, winning championships, creating history.
Somewhere in those teams’ rearview mirror always has been the Nuggets. Usually about six or seven car lengths back, trying to get around some 18-wheeler, some Barkley or LeBron or Jordan. Suns fans act like martyrs, but they’ve been to the Finals. Multiple times. Same with the Blazers. And the Sonics. And even the cowpoke Sonics that relocated to Oklahoma City. Every team has at least one banner in their arena that mocks the Denver Nuggets. Well, except for a couple of the expansion teams … and the Clippers. Sometimes, when somebody says grace at the dinner table, I’ll throw out “and also thank you, Lord, for the Clippers,” just to show the celestial governors I’m truly appreciative.
It’s been hard to explain all of this over our eternal weeklong wait for Game 1. For Denver, just making the Finals means everything. Back when the NBA on NBC theme song used to come on, it had everything to do with basketball and nothing to do with Denver. I felt certain that John Tesh had never even heard of the Nuggets. Why would he have? Their greatest claims to fame were their colorful rainbow uniforms and that they’d upset the no. 1-seeded Sonics as an 8-seed in 1994. The latter was quasi-historic, at least for a few minutes, until the 8-seeded Knicks did them one better by going all the way to the Finals in 1999. I used to dream of that theme song playing with graphics of the Nuggets and the Finals logo on the same screen, with Marv Albert throwing out a “Greetings from a sold-out Big Mac in the Mile High City, and the city of Denver is rocking …”
But it didn’t happen. For a long while, it truly felt like it never would happen. For every “big” moment, there has been a semi-cataclysmic downfall. David Thompson—the player Michael Jordan idolized—developed a drug problem that cut his prime short. We get a coach like Dan Issel, who not only led the Nuggets past the Sonics but also nearly pulled off an impossible comeback from down 0-3 against the Jazz? He throws away his job by shouting slurs at a fan. We get Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, maybe the purest shooter ever? Controversy rolls in, and away he goes. We get a chance to draft Vince Carter or Paul Pierce as a franchise building block … and we take Raef LaFrentz. Raef LaFuckingFrentz. (I’m still not over this either.) We get Carmelo Anthony a few years later, and it’s not long before he’s dreaming of a life on Broadway in New York.
Nobody could save the Nuggets. Not Alex English. Not Chauncey Billups. Not Allen Iverson. Not Melo (though I will say he got the Nuggets back on the map).
Nobody.
That is, until Nikola Jokic came along.
Through Nikola, all things are possible. He is the savior of the Nuggets franchise. The redeemer. The Trojan Horse that busted the Nuggets through. He Sombor Shuffled his way into town during a Taco Bell commercial in the second round of the 2014 draft and has since won two MVPs. He’s a Serbian nightmare. Part Arvydas Sabonis, part Larry Bird, part sherpa, undaunted at the idea of carrying the whole city of Denver to the summit. Try to slow him down, and he snatches your soul. (Hopefully one day Deandre Ayton can retrieve his.) Try to defend him, and he finds a wide-open somebody at the 3-point line or at the rim.
Some see a lumbering defensive liability, I see a maestro of the hardwood—an all-seeing court general who locked his ego away at a remote horse ranch. At first, I was as much in disbelief watching him play as those casual experts who only now discovered him in 2023, those same analysts who would never deign to peek in on what’s been going on in Denver unless forced to. I saw the slow, deliberate movements and the clumsy-looking, top-of-the-key high-archers that seemed to break every rule of conventionality.
Yet it didn’t take me long to see that the cross-court passes were finding their mark. That the full-court passes were things of beauty. That the guys around him—the Gary Harrises, the Will Bartons, the Jerami Grants—were better because of him. That the no-look passes were like little metaphors for all those who didn’t see the Nuggets coming. That he wasn’t going to keep letting Denver lose. That he would will them out of the NBA woodwork to a place that’s forever seemed impossible.
The Finals.
Not that the browbeaten people of Denver didn’t see this day coming. For years, when the Nuggets have needed a bucket, they’ll get it, so long as the ball touches the magical hands of Jokic at some point in the possession. Sometimes when his teammates stray, when Michael Porter Jr. launches a 27-footer in transition or Murray throws up a desperate last-second scoop to avoid a shot-clock violation? There is Jokic, cleaning the glass with one hand, pogo-hopping the ball right back up and in. Breaking the backs of defenders. Rescuing Denver from its old bad habits.
Smart basketball people have been calling Jokic a unicorn for years, yet it still feels like many are just now catching on to all that he does. Why are the Nuggets and head coach Michael Malone using the “we’ve been disrespected” mantra as fuel throughout this year’s playoffs? Because of the reluctance out there from the media to see it for themselves. Because Mark Jackson didn’t even vote Jokic into the top five for MVP, and Kendrick Perkins introduced the words “stat padding” to the conversation, and Lisa Salters admitted on national TV she hadn’t really watched Jokic play all that much. Denver is turning being disrespected into its own personal art form. And really, Jokic has been doing that very thing for years now.
He did it against Portland in his first big playoff run in 2019. He did it when he and Murray brought Denver back twice from 3-1 deficits in the bubble against the Jazz and Clippers. He tried to single-handedly do it without his sidekick in 2021 against the Suns, and then again against the eventual champion Warriors in 2022. This year, he’s done it night in and night out. But now the Nuggets have a deep and balanced roster, with Jokic helping players like Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Bruce Brown come into their own.
People were saying the West was wide open all season, but those paying attention knew better. There was a suspicion that this was the team. There were hints all over. The team has had a mission-like focus from the time they showed up in San Diego for training camp, with each key player having something to prove. Jamal came back with a chip on his shoulder from a torn ACL, ready to prove that “Bubble Murray” was in fact “Everyday Murray.” Porter came back dedicated to rebounding and defending after back surgeries sidelined him essentially all of last season. Aaron Gordon came back resolved after being thrust into the no. 2 spot behind Jokic and being humiliated by a full-strength Warriors club.
And Jokic?
He is the man who is doing away with 47 years of the Nuggets’ NBA past that didn’t produce much of anything. The perennial underdogs and upstarts, the prospectors who never struck gold, are now threatening to win their first NBA championship. The MVP who was slighted after his best season ever—with 29 triple-doubles, eight more in the postseason so far, and about a million shrug-offs to any comparisons made to Wilt Chamberlain—is making fools of the stubborn (not naming names, Nick Wright), and validating those of us who’ve waited generations to see this day come.
It could only happen like this for a franchise that has never amounted to much. A 41st pick in the draft, a point who is constantly overlooked, and a guy who most had given up on after career-threatening back issues, along with a couple of key additions through trades and free agency are now all in uncharted territory.
They’re in the NBA Finals, on the cusp of giving the Denver Nuggets a piece of history. And if there is a bandwagon, we lonesome riders who jumped on early should welcome the company.
Chuck Mindenhall writes about combat sports without bias, and sometimes about his Denver teams with extreme bias. He cohosts The Ringer MMA Show on Spotify.