Back in 2013, when Jon Jones was a 26-year-old phenom champion in the UFC and seemingly invincible to the pay-per-view public, he found himself getting his ass kicked in front of a gasping crowd in Toronto. I can remember it like it was yesterday because it’s the kind of event that sears into your brain. Alexander Gustafsson, a no-hope Swede who came in as more than a 4-1 underdog, opened a cut over Jones’s eye early in the first round.
That by itself was a “holy shit” event. We’d never seen Jones really bleed. From my cageside seat, it felt as revelatory as when Rocky opened that cut on Drago’s eye out in Russia. Jones wasn’t invincible. It meant we were in for a fight.
Then, with a minute to go in the first round, Gustafsson did the impossible—he took Jones down. Understand that to that point, Jones had been immovable. He was rooted to the earth like an old banyan tree, and he had just as many freakishly long limbs growing out of him. In his 13 previous UFC fights, nobody could budge him an inch off his moorings. Opponents were a combined 0-for-16 on their takedown attempts.
Yet there it was. Gustafsson took the great Jon Jones down, and at the end of the round he was up on the scorecards, 1-0. Crazier still, Jones, who was used to taking a fight wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted, couldn’t take Gustafsson down. He made many attempts through the first few rounds and was thwarted each time. It was Hitchcockian vertigo for Jones bettors. Totally surreal to watch unfold for everyone else. What the hell was happening to the man who was being called the Michael Jordan of MMA?
As the fight entered the “championship rounds,” Gustafsson was winning. He continued to piece Jones up on his feet, and every writer on media row was beginning to pen their Jon Jones title run eulogies as the fourth round neared its end. With a minute to go in that round, Gustafsson had outstruck Jones in head shots, 88-18. Jones was done. The man who sported Gatorade and Nike sponsorships on his trunks for the first time in UFC history was about to be dethroned …
Then it happened.
With 40 seconds left in the fourth round, Jones looked up at the clock, and it was as if he suddenly understood the severity of the situation and snapped himself out of a daydream. He threw a spinning elbow that caught Gustafsson and hurt him, then went into the clinch, where he slammed knees home. The champion was alive. What looked like a lost round now belonged to him; he tied it up on the scorecards at two apiece heading into the final round.
Before that fight, people had wondered whether Jones could take a punch. This was when he proved that he could. That he could dig deeper than the hungriest fighters out there, who were all coming for his throne. The thing is, he found himself in a battle. That should be read in two ways. Both guys looked like they’d been thrown down a thousand feet of rocky hillside, battered, bloody, eyes swollen shut, yet Jones refused to lose.
What a scare, though. Jones took Gustafsson’s best shot and survived. I think that was when, as a champion, he understood that these fuckers were trying to kill him.
Which brings me to my Denver Nuggets.
I know, I know, it’s a long way to go to make a point about my basketball team, but I’m a fight guy. I think in fight parallels. No, the Nuggets don’t have an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, as Jones said he did after he held off Gustafsson (at least, not that I know of), but when the Nuggets had their backs against the wall in this Minnesota series—when all the talking heads had buried them as goners upon watching them fall into a shocking 0-2 hole—they found some fight. They realized something that happens to be a timely lesson for a team that has never defended anything in its nearly 50 years of existence.
These dudes are coming for their throats.
It’s a lot different defending a title than it is being a challenger. This is all very new to Denver. So perhaps it was fitting that Games 3 and 4 took place at the Target Center, because that was where the Nuggets showed that they’re up to the task of being one. Minnesota is the hungry team coming for what the Nuggets have. And in those first two games in Denver, the Wolves punched the Nuggets in the face. But rather than wear the pawprint into the offseason, they woke up.
If you watched Denver’s first seven games of these playoffs, you know what I’m talking about. The Nuggets were sleepwalking. They treated first halves as optional in the first round against the Lakers, trusting that they could turn it on when it mattered to get the job done. Two Jamal Murray game-winners and what felt like a million missed 3s later, they managed to get by. Nobody in Denver felt particularly great about the way the team was playing, but ousting the Lakers is such a happy new tradition in Colorado that the toasts drowned out the concerns.
Then the Minnesota series started. And there was Anthony Edwards, smiling ear to ear with those irresistible dimples after the first game in Denver. There was Naz Reid, banking in a 3. And Rudy Gobert, banking in an ugly shot from the key. The Wolves beat the Nuggets down the stretch on Denver’s home court. Wasn’t Denver’s sublime championship pedigree to be found in its chemistry? Wasn’t Denver supposed to be the team that “executes” when the game goes down to the wire? Didn’t Denver have Nikola Jokic, who wouldn’t let the team lose that kind of game?
Yet that didn’t wake them up, either. Denver got swarmed in Game 2. Blitzed. In some instances, outright mugged. The Nuggets got their ass kicked up and down the court, and the whistle wasn’t saving them. Jaden McDaniels was on Jamal like a fashion statement. Jokic looked human. Jamal was throwing a heat pack at a referee. The bench was just a bunch of woodwork fellows more comfortable in the role of bystanders than contributors. Losing by 26 in what was supposed to be a bounce-back game? It was ugly. Deflating. In the eyes of a sensationalistic national media, exposing.
That’s the worst part. People calling the Nuggets frauds. Like they’d pulled the wool for the past how many years. Diminishing what they’d accomplished last season in particular, which was the most magical year Denver has ever known. Saying things like, “This is what it’s like when you don’t face play-ins.” It was a lot to deal with. Given the circumstances, the best counter I could come up with for any of it was “Nuh-uh.”
I have to admit, I was a little guilty of jumping to conclusions myself. The idea of a chump’s death just a year after they finally broke through was hard to stomach. One title can’t be called a dynasty, but it certainly can be accused of being a fluke. It was all foreign territory for Denver. Everyone knew that so long as the Nuggets had Jokic, Murray, Aaron Gordon, and Michael Porter Jr., they wouldn’t die easy. They came back from 3-1 deficits against the Jazz and the Clippers in the bubble, so they had fight—but maybe Minnesota was just that good? It was a long four days between games. Yet coach Michael Malone made the most of it by putting together that reel of all the media heads counting Denver out, and—somehow—it worked like smelling salts to get them into the series.
That’s when the Nuggets delivered the equivalent of Jon Jones’s spinning elbow when all seemed lost. They weren’t done yet.
Game 3 was the most fun I think I’ve ever had watching the Nuggets. There have been bigger games, but when you think about all that was on the verge of being lost, it’s right up there. Not only did they respond, but they looked like themselves again. The team we knew and loved. This is all Denver fans have been wanting since the playoffs began. The ball was moving. The shot selections were better. The screens were definitive. And Murray, absorbing the boos like a supervillain absorbing energy, finally became Playoff Jamal again.
Poor Stephen A. Smith had to apologize to his audience for prematurely proclaiming this series over. It was glorious. Everybody should get to experience watching the critics of their team eat crow.
And Sunday night’s Game 4 served as confirmation that Denver is back to doing what it does best—that is, seeming inevitable. Looking unsolvable. Showcasing what selfless basketball looks like. (I am a big-time homer, so I can say these things!) Everyone was clicking. Gordon was a quiet hero, going 11-for-12 from the field. Justin Holiday emerged as a revelation, perhaps providing an ounce of the bench magic that Bruce Brown brought last year. Jokic looked every bit a three-time MVP. Jamal hit a 55-footer to close out the first half in one of the wildest sequences in Nuggets history, with Denver scoring eight points in 20 seconds.
Now the series is tied 2-2, and the pendulum swings back to Denver. The road team has won every game, which might seem like an omen for the Nuggets. But it doesn’t feel that way because they’ve now taken on the feel of last year’s team, which wouldn’t be denied. It took Denver a couple of weeks to fully lock in, just like those old Tim Duncan–led San Antonio teams.
Last season Denver was trying to exorcise half a century of being treated as second-class citizens in the NBA. The Nuggets had to prove themselves as champions by taking out the Wolves (who were just coming into their own), the Suns (who had swept Denver two years before), the Lakers (who had owned them since the Jimmy Carter administration), and finally the Heat (and the legend of Jimmy Buckets). They were overcoming history itself, which became a desperate hunger shared by all of us who’d lived through those lean years of playoff cameos and draft busts.
This year? Speaking for Nuggets fans everywhere, it’s all we’ve wanted since 1976. To find out what it’s like to be a bull’s-eye in the playoffs, the team that everybody wants to beat. The defending champions. The team that brings out the best in everyone, takes their best punch, and wins anyway.
Fighters, in other words.