Years In the Making

Denver Nuggets are the 2023 NBA Champions

Source: NBA

Commitment is often used to describe marriage or some big life decision. Well, you know that’s quite a commitment?

Commitments are made to feel daunting because of what they require. Sacrifice, compromise, trust, patience, grace, and, of course, love.

I’m married. I’m a homeowner. I’ve signed offer letters for different jobs. These are all moments where I’ve been very aware I’m making a life-altering decision. But the commitment I’ve held longer than any of these is choosing to become a Denver Nuggets fan when I was nine.

Twenty years later, I didn’t know I’d be watching the Nuggets win their first-ever NBA championship (!!!) or that this team would mean more to me now as an adult. But as Altitude TV reporter Vic Lombardi recently tweeted, fan loyalty, like the Nuggets’ championship team, is “years in the making, built on the shoulders of patience and persistence.”

Me and Grandma Thelma

As a Maryland native with no ties to Colorado, I became a Nuggets fan partly because one of our own, Baltimore’s Carmelo Anthony, joined the team. However, the most convincing reason is that the Nuggets changed their team colors during Melo’s rookie year to this eye-catching powder blue and yellow combo that set them up with my favorite jerseys in the NBA.

I started getting everything in those colors, including a pair of NBA-licensed shoes. I couldn’t tell you what model they were or how I even found them. But those colors became a must-have for any clothing I wore.

Truthfully, I didn't watch much Nuggets basketball during the first 15 years of my fandom. Nuggets games were never widely televised, and I didn’t have NBA League Pass to watch games that weren’t on cable. But I always had all the NBA Live video games and fell in love with different players that way.

Andre Miller, Kenyon Martin, Marcus Camby, Nenê, Eduardo Nájera, Earl Boykins, Ty Lawson, Chris “Birdman” Andersen, and two of my all-time favorite players: Allen Iverson, who is forever my number one, and the high-flying, ever-entertaining J.R. Smith.

Allen Iverson & J.R. Smith

Mainly, I watched the Nuggets whenever they made the playoffs, which they went to 10 straight times starting with Melo’s rookie season in 2003-04; however, the Nuggets only made it out of the first round once during that stretch. At the start of the 2008-09 season, the Nuggets traded Iverson to the Detroit Pistons as part of a deal in which they received championship-winning point guard and Colorado native Chauncey Billups.

Billups and Melo helped lead the Nuggets to the Western Conference Finals where they lost in six games to the Los Angeles Lakers led at the time by Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol. It would be six more seasons before the Nuggets returned to the playoffs.

During that stretch, I graduated college and moved halfway across the country from North Carolina to Colorado Springs for my first post-grad job. Denver was an hour away and somewhere I really only went for special occasions. But one night, my friend Skylar invited me to join him for a complimentary tour of the Nuggets’ home arena, named the Pepsi Center at the time.

We knew it was a sales pitch, and we were ready to be sold to. We bought a ticket package for the end of the 2016-17 season that included all the games a basketball fan would want to see, including matchups against LeBron James' Cleveland Cavaliers and Russell Westbrook’s Oklahoma City Thunder. Despite the Nuggets missing the playoffs off a last-second Westbrook three in the game where he broke the NBA record for most triple-doubles in a season, we witnessed glimpses of what this team could become.

In Nikola Jokić’s sophomore season, I remember watching him fearlessly back down LeBron before scoring over him. The crowd erupted. You would’ve thought the Nuggets won a championship. I also remember when Jokić threw a cross-court pass to a wide-open Gary Harris, who hit a game-winning three.

Occasionally, I’ll see discourse online like, No one knew Nikola Jokić would be this good. WE DID. Because night in and night out, we saw the magical things he did. The types of plays where you couldn’t help but shake your head and giggle. We were witnessing something special.

Fast forward to today, and the Denver Nuggets are NBA champions. Still remaining from that 2016-17 season are Jokić, his immensely talented counterpart Jamal Murray, and head coach Michael Malone. Since then, the team has made the playoffs five years straight, starting with the 2018-19 season. In those years, the furthest the Nuggets went was the Western Conference Finals in 2020’s Bubble playoffs. That is until this year when they made their first-ever trip in franchise history to the NBA Finals.

Now surrounding Jokić and Murray are former Orlando Magic star and dunk contest phenom Aaron Gordon, sharpshooter Michael Porter Jr. (although his shots weren’t always as sharp during the Finals), former champion Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, fan-favorite Bruce Brown, spark-plug rookie Christian Braun, and a string of veterans in Jeff Green, DeAndre Jordan, and Ish Smith.

Despite much of the roster being new additions within the past season or two, this year’s Nuggets team is a testament to the organization’s long-term investment in winning and the required trust and patience.

When Nikola Jokić was picked 41st in the second round of the 2014 NBA draft during a Taco Bell Quesarito commercial, the Nuggets took a chance on a player whose agent, Misko Paznatovic, said that “he found the Serb while reading about him in a newspaper and then signed him without actually seeing him play.” Then, they didn’t rush him to suit up for the Nuggets immediately. Jokić played one more season in the Serbian professional league, winning the Adriatic League regular season MVP and Top Prospect awards.

Although it wasn’t clear to most that Jokić could be a star in the NBA or even the best player in the world, 21-year-old Jokić became the Nuggets’ starting center after Coach Malone benched Jusuf Nurkić in the 2016-17 season. Decisions like this helped Jokić develop into a two-time regular season MVP and, more importantly, an NBA champion and Finals MVP.

Malone's coaching decisions also pushed the Nuggets organization to trust him even though they missed the playoffs during his first three seasons coaching the team. In that time, the Nuggets got a little better each season before finally making the playoffs in the 2018-19 season. Even then, the Nuggets lost in the second round.

In today’s NBA, most coaches would be fired if they couldn’t demonstrate an ability to get to the playoffs or achieve success once there. But what often goes unseen is what The Athletic’s Nick Kosmider describes as the “innate ability for Malone to build bonds with his players.”

When Jamal Murray went down with an ACL injury during the Nuggets’ 2020 playoff run that forced him to sit all last season, he thought he’d end up on another team. “I remember being on the bus with [Murray after the injury],” said Malone after the Nuggets went up 3-0 versus the Lakers in this year’s Western Conference Finals. “He had tears in his eyes… His first thought was, ‘Man, are you gonna trade me? I’m damaged goods, are you guys gonna trade me now?’ I hugged him and I said, ‘Hell no! You’re ours. We love you, we’re gonna help you get back, and you’re gonna be a better player for it.’”

Even when Michael Porter Jr. underwent back surgeries that kept him out of his rookie year, in addition to last season, the Nuggets stuck with him as a starter this year. As he struggled to find his shot throughout the Finals, Coach Malone allowed him to fight through and find other ways to contribute—including on defense, which is another area MPJ is often criticized for.

Many of the Nuggets’ recent additions also struggled with teams lacking faith in their abilities. Aaron Gordon was viewed as not being able to meet the moment. While Kentavious Caldwell-Pope contributed to the Lakers championship team in 2020, he was seen as one of the weaker links. Teams didn’t know how to fit Bruce Brown into their systems. And Jeff Green, Ish Smith, and DeAndre Jordan have made their rounds on multiple NBA teams. Green has been on 12 teams in 16 seasons, while Smith has been on 13 in 13. Before this season with the Nuggets, no one on the team had ever won a championship except for Caldwell-Pope.

My eyes welled with tears as the Nuggets hoisted the Larry O’Brien trophy for the first time in team history. Since 2003, I’ve witnessed the Nuggets fall short countless times. While they would advance in the playoffs, it always felt like they were a player or two away from a legitimate championship run—but they needed to be the right players. They needed to buy into the Nuggets’ culture of selflessness and sacrifice.

This season, I learned to trust the Nuggets. I bought in. I believed they had everything necessary to be the NBA’s best team.

“You have to let something take root,” said Coach Malone before the Finals. “Let it grow. Go with the growing pains.”

Even as the Nuggets lost two straight games against the Phoenix Suns in this year’s Western Conference Semifinals, I saw how they wouldn’t let up. They fought back to win seven in a row before losing to the Miami Heat in Game 2 of the Finals, sweeping the Lakers in four straight games leading up to the series.

On the Nuggets’ path to the championship, they defeated Anthony Edwards, Devin Booker, Kevin Durant, LeBron James, Anthony Davis, Jimmy Butler, and Bam Adebayo as Nikola Jokić cemented himself as the best player in the world—and as Jokić and Murray stood out as the NBA’s best duo.

I’ll never forget sitting among a group of Heat fans at the Kaseya Center in Miami for Game 4 of the Finals and watching them go from loudly cheering throughout the first three quarters to leaving early halfway through the fourth. As the final buzzer sounded, Nuggets fans began to chant, “Let’s go, Nuggets!” They filled the arena with heavenly noise.

I’m confident this won’t be the last Nuggets championship. I’ll celebrate this one now, never letting anyone get away with disrespecting the Nuggets again. But I plan to remain committed, doubling down on my trust.

This is just the beginning.