Keep a Little Fire Burning

High school prospect Spencer Haywood joined the then-Denver Rockets for a season before jumping to the NBA, but with a few notable exceptions, the franchise remained in muck for much of its existence. One name change, one historically high-scoring era and a couple of generations of ridicule at the hands of – oof – Kings and Knicks fans, and the Denver Nuggets have finally arrived: 47 years after joining the NBA proper, the Nuggets have won the franchise’s first NBA championship.

Simply put, it is really difficult to try and describe what this is like for fans who were cognizant before, say, 2006 – “Denver Nuggets,” weaponized, meant failure to a different tune. Playing in what once was the Pepsi Center meant an almost assured W for visiting teams, usually biding time one way or another on their way to Los Angeles or from anywhere else.

Originally, the Denver Nuggets were an NBL franchise that subsequently joined the NBA and promptly folded[1]. A generation later, in 1967, the ABA Nuggets were originally the Rockets[2] supposed to be based in Kansas City until scheduling and arena conflicts essentially made George Mikan, the first commissioner of that league, strongarm the team into moving to Denver[3].

Between there and here, the Nuggets had very limited success, to be charitable. They made the last-ever ABA Finals, losing to Julius Erving’s New York Nets. From 1979 through literally this series, Denver didn’t make a Finals. They only made the Western Conference Finals twice.

While Jordan and company were carrying out the Bulls’ last title run in 1998, the Nuggets were busy losing 71 games, at the time tied for the second-worst record in league history. The Carmelo Anthony years certainly helped[4], and after another down period at the beginning of the last decade, they began to return to consistency thanks in no small part to Nikola Jokić, who has led the team in win shares in every one of his seasons since arriving in 2015. Jamal Murray arrived soon thereafter, and what would become a championship team began to take shape.

By his third season in the NBA, Jokić had begun to look like the player he would become. Two consecutive MVP seasons and an exhausting, season-long dialogue over whether he “deserved” a third win when his playoff success had been limited, and he has led the Nuggets to the top of the mountain – the air, suddenly rarer surrounding the Joker.

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A few notes that don’t comfortably fit elsewhere:

• “Has he (Jokić) played for the Nuggets his entire career? Is that why he always looks so tired?”
• The only thing that was going to undo the Nuggets was foul trouble, into which the Miami Heat admirably leaned: DeAndre Jordan – who is now an NBA champion by the way, as is Reggie Jackson (looking at all of Chris Paul, Blake Griffin and Paul George) – made an appearance in the first half of Game 5 after Jokić got into foul trouble; Jordan, in a tribute to the version of himself that we all once knew and admired without necessarily enjoying, managed to block a shot in his three minutes on the floor.
• For all of the cliches he elicits regarding adversity and his singular brand of separating art from artist, Michael Porter Jr.’s disruptive gather of a Jokić steal and subsequent drive for the finish was smile-inducing, suggesting that perhaps we can have a drink with people we’d otherwise vehemently ignore in public.

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There will be time to decompress, maybe to take in some Serbian horse racing. There will certainly be time to give the Miami Heat their due credit for an impressive run to the Finals. There will definitely be time to talk about Bruce Brown’s forthcoming salary raise.

Later. For now, though, as always, we should be able to appreciate what the Nuggets just pulled off. The Denver Nuggets, a punchline for so long and a punching bag for arguably longer, are the champions of the world, and Nikola Jokić is the Finals MVP. After 47 years in the NBA and more in the ABA, the Nuggets – ahem – have finally struck gold.

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[1] Just so you don’t blow this at next week’s trivia, the last champion of the NBL was a team called the Anderson Packers, out of Indiana. They folded almost immediately upon joining the newly

[2] Long story which you can read, along with so many other wonderful anecdotes, in Terry Pluto’s indispensable ABA oral history Loose Balls.

[3] That move drew the interest of Lonnie Wright, then of the AFL’s Denver Broncos and possessing a keen interest in basketball: he would become the first athlete to play professionally in football and basketball in the same season before switching to basketball fulltime.

[4] Interestingly and perhaps tellingly, though, Melo himself only led the Nuggets in win shares one time.