Before I gush about the Denver Nuggets snapping up the 2-seed in the Western Conference and how great Nikola Jokic is, let me get some things off my chest. One of the perks of being a Nuggets fan is that it’s a fairly low-pressure gig. The emotional tolls are mostly private affairs, well drowned out by the louder fan bases who—at least in their own minds—have broader claims to legitimacy. If the Nuggets win a game they shouldn’t, there’s an under-the-breath triumph to it, like when you find five bucks in the wash. When they lose a game they should win—or even lose one they should lose—it hurts, but it doesn’t hurt too badly because you always come back to the same realization 15 minutes after they clear the court: Nobody cares.
This is something I’ve long known. The Nuggets are never really contenders, and in those rare moments when it appears that they are—like this season, entering the playoffs after posting a 54-28 record—serious basketball fans resist the urge to pat your head if you mention it.
That’s why it’s lonely to root for the Rainbow. Each night you watch the games on the Altitude Sports Network and Bill Hanzlik comes on and fills the airwaves with optimism, saying that there’s a feistiness to the defense that he likes, even if the Nuggets have to do a better job protecting the paint. You begin to love Hanzlik for that optimism, especially through the losses. You learn to cherish his hope, because that same hope has been on layaway since David Thompson wore the pickax.
On the other hand, it’s a miserable experience, and I wouldn’t recommend it. You begin to distrust play-by-play broadcaster Chris Marlowe, who is always quick to jinx a run, or a shot, or a situation, by taking something still completely up in the air for granted. If Rudy Gobert makes a pair of free throws, you can be sure it was because Marlowe just declared that the Nuggets put the right guy on the line (this happened Tuesday night, by the way). He invites the NBA’s celestial governors to smite us at every turn, and, to the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever said a word to him about it.
What I’m saying is, rooting for the Nuggets is like pulling for Pluto to regain planetary status. It’s rooting to avoid exclusion, to just be relevant enough. In Denver, the Broncos are (more often than not) winners. The Avalanche have two Cups. Even the Rockies made the World Series in 2007. The Nuggets? There’s no validation to be found in my Alex English jersey, no sense of vicarious thrill that the Nuggets’ success becomes your success. There is just the abstract hope that one day it’ll happen. The great screenwriter William Goldman went to his grave waiting on the Knicks. I can only hope that’s not my fate with the Nuggets.
Lately the highest hopes centered on the number eight. As in, the eighth seed in the playoffs. The invitation to at least partake. Every year that is the goal, and it was the goal this year, too—to merely sneak in as the eighth seed and try to give some glorious, nationally treasured team hell. To see if we might make Golden State uncomfortable. It’s gone on for years.
And years.
After all, it was an 8-seed that produced one of the greatest memories in Nuggets history, when Denver upset the top-seeded Seattle SuperSonics in 1994. I can tell you this: When Dikembe Mutumbo clutched the ball and cried at the end, he cried for all of us long-suffering Nuggets fans. He knew. It was like winning a championship. That same team got down 3-0 against Utah in the next round, only to storm back and force a seventh game. That, too, was like a championship. Robert Pack, coming off the bench, was the man back then. LaPhonso Ellis, Reggie Williams, the late, great Brian Williams (not yet Bison Dele), and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf (formerly Chris Jackson). What a team. The Nuggets lost in Game 7, tragically (and predictably), but it was a battle.
I cling to the feeling of that run as tightly as Mutumbo did that ball. That improbable postseason remains the very pinnacle of the Nuggets’ achievements. There were some fun times with Doug Moe’s breakneck teams back in the 1980s, particularly the 1984-85 team that made it all the way to the Western Conference finals—the series in which English broke his fucking thumb against the Lakers, and had to sit out—but even back then it felt like overachieving. Ultimately those teams really were, as Moe liked to call them, a bunch of stiffs. (Sorry, T.R. Dunn. I still love you. And you too, Fat Lever—those triple-doubles are forever.)
Even when Chauncey Billups came back to Denver and helped Carmelo Anthony’s Nuggets get to the conference finals in 2008-09, we were bobbing along on a kind of dream flow. (And yes, in seasons like that I take a share in the pronoun—we, goddamnit, we!) There was already a feeling of doom in that series with the Lakers, and then Anthony Carter threw away the fucking inbound pass to give away the first game, and—poof—it was over.
I’ll just say it, because when else am I going to: Denver would have beaten Orlando in the Finals that year. That’s the other thing I cling to, an unprovable, hypothetical belief that the Nuggets are residual world champions in some sliding doors sense. Why? Because what else is there?
The Nuggets have never been to the Finals. They’ve appeared twice in the conference finals, but never have they dribbled a basketball in June. During and just after Melo’s reign, they went to the playoffs 10 straight times and made it beyond the first round only once. Denver’s playoff record from year to year, decade to decade looks exactly like Dalí’s painting The Persistence of Memory—just dead time pieces sagging all over some forlorn plain.
Even the 2012-13 team that won 57 games after shipping Anthony off for a truckload of talent couldn’t get past the first round. That was the year the Nuggets played an upstart Golden State team right out of the gate, thinking it would be a cakewalk when David Lee went down with an injury. Instead, Steph Curry and Klay Thompson came of age, sniping our high-altitude friends from 3-point range and becoming stars virtually overnight. That series was the beginning of the Dubs as we know them. That was also the last time the Nuggets made the playoffs.
In the meantime, the NBA has become more and more driven by star player movement. Denver, unfortunately, isn’t exactly a basketball destination. When owner Josh Kroenke sent LeBron James a throwback rainbow jersey as a means of luring him to Denver, LeBron said simply, “I didn’t give it much thought.”
That’s why when you tell people you’re a Nuggets fan, they look at you like you just said you’re big into lapidary. Even my fellow Nuggets fans just kind of keep an emotional distance. Now that we have Jokic leading us back to the playoffs for the first time in six years, a few of us are daring to dream again. Or at least I am.
Am I a sucker? Of course I’m a sucker. The secret to being a lifelong Nuggets fan is embracing that suckerdom, to recycle it emotionally every year and twice in good years. So back to what I started to say about Jokic and this magical season …
Here’s the thing about Jokic that stands out to you immediately, whether you are a Nuggets fan or not: He doesn’t go in for the kind of mediocrity we’re used to in Denver. He looks like a 7-foot slab of Serbian mediocrity who’s nursing a cold, and he walks like he’s barely got the energy to get where he’s going, but he wins. When he has the ball, good things happen. Possibilities open up. When he’s conducting, his teammates swarm to open lanes—sometimes hovering in midair for seconds at a time—anticipating his pass. It’s like that old video game Tempest, with Jokic the centerpiece that everything is firing around. At his very best, it becomes a dance around the beanstalk.
Because the team has learned to accept Jokic as a kind of human switchboard, the Nuggets are the no. 2 team in the West. That is a surprise. It’s the kind of surprise that never really sank in during the season, because most of us suspected an implosion of some kind was around the next corner. It just never happened. There were some bad losses, like last week’s stinker against Washington at home, when Jokic got ejected late for arguing with the refs (something he’s not particularly good at), and Tuesday’s game at Utah when he drowsily fouled out in 16 minutes after scoring two points. There were some reality checks, like when Golden State came into Denver and hung 51 declaratory first quarter points on the Nuggets, en route to a 142-111 drubbing. And there were those two games at Houston, but perhaps the less said about those, the better.
(Let’s just say there’s a reason the Nuggets celebrated when Paul George buried that 3 against Houston on Tuesday night, all but giving Denver back the no. 2 seed and dropping the Rockets to no. 4—the Nuggets want nothing to do with the Harden–Clint Capela pick-and-roll in a best-of-seven.)
For the most part, though, Jokic kept the Nuggets around in just about every game. He led them to a 34-7 home record, which was tops in the league. He guided them to a four-game sweep of OKC, which nobody saw coming. He one-upped Luka Doncic’s thunderous late-game dunk with a game-winner the other way, and single-handedly sunk Philadelphia with a 32-18-10 line. He threw water polo passes the length of the court and hit his receivers in stride, and played in the All-Star Game. At just 24 years old, he passed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on the all-time list for triple-doubles by a center, and now trails only Wilt Chamberlain. The fans even chanted M-V-P during his free throws midseason, before it became clear he didn’t have a shot in hell at the award.
He is, by all accounts, a jovial, gelatinous god with a handle, the kind of guy who doesn’t take any shit from Karl-Anthony Towns—the kind of player who could push Denver past San Antonio and deep into the playoffs just by keeping everyone dialed in. With the youngest team in the postseason (average age 24.6) and virtually nobody outside of Paul Millsap with any playoff experience, he just needs his buddies to keep up.
Namely, he needs Jamal Murray to be a dick. When Murray’s firing his imaginary blue arrows into the stands, it usually means he’s caught fire, and when he catches fire it usually means he’s letting the opposition know. Everybody loves that Murray, except the people who hate him. When he dribbled the ball around Lonzo Ball last season and pissed off the entire Lakers team for showing him up? That was for all those times the Lakers danced on Denver’s grave. It felt good to know that the Lakers had it in their hearts to actually hate a Denver Nugget, rather than shrug him off like some cute thing.
Even better was when Murray launched a jumper against Boston this season, in a game that was well in hand, to try to get 50 points. That prompted Kyrie Irving to throw the ball into the stands, which is—for a team that’s so ignorable—totally awesome. Agitating Boston, too? Finally somebody in Denver is kicking back against the psychic overlords that have ruled them for decades. That’s the Murray we need in the playoffs. If he’s a dick, that means we’re competing. If he’s a consistent dick? Second round. If he’s a colossal dick, the kind of dick that makes everybody outside of Denver hate him? It’s back to the Western Conference finals, baby! (Note: Not to be fatalist, but even if he’s the biggest dick the world has ever known, Denver won’t get by Golden State or Houston.)
It would help if Will Barton could become Will the Thrill rather than Will the WTF Are You Thinking. The good Barton is a human slinky who can knock down the 3 as easily as he can score 10 straight from various contortions in the paint. That’s the Barton that Jokic benefits from. The bad Barton disrupts ball movement and goes through fits of erratic play. It would also help if Millsap could do the heavy lifting down the stretch with his defense and his scoring (that 3 he hit on Wednesday to complete the comeback against Minnesota was huge), and the three-piece reserves combo of Torrey Craig, Mason Plumlee, and Monte Morris could hold the fort when they come into the game. Denver’s defense has been suspect early in games all season, but clamps down late. The Nuggets were the stingiest team in fourth quarters, giving up just 24.8 points on average. So they can play defense, they just sometimes opt not to. (Which is maddening.)
Mostly, though, it’s up to Jokic. He just has to do what he’s been doing since he became the identity of the Nuggets. That is, be the unicorn that the Rainbow has always yearned for. He needs to play flawlessly, or as close to flawlessly as a guy with limited athleticism can. He needs to be the leader, and carry the team. And if you’ve seen his vertical, well, you know he jumps like a man who has his team on his back. I think we got this.
I don’t really believe the Nuggets will win a championship this year, and really, if I’m being honest, ever. Not with Golden State in the league, and Houston, and future Golden States and Houstons. I do know that they are good, which—when you’re a Denver fan—is kind of like being one of those teams. They have a center who defies explanation, and a gang of star-like players who orbit around him majestically. When they’re on, they’re awesome to watch. They don’t need to win it all to be memorable, though. They just need to trade blows so that the dull pain of inferiority goes away, at least for a while.
A triumph in the first round would be huge. It would become an instant success story, and something to point out in Nuggets lore. If they go beyond that? If we do? It would fuel hope for another 20 years. It would become one of those memories you point back to, and hold tight in your relative seclusion as a Nuggets fan, just as Mutumbo held onto that ball back when we did something remarkable. Behold that sad picture. Got it?
Now you know what it’s like to be a Nuggets fan.