Originally, when I thought about writing about the Denver Nuggets, it was contingent that they actually won the NBA Championship before anything would be written about them. I was going to write about being a millennial and seeing the strange sensation of seeing certain teams in major sports break through the wall of success and win a championship.
But the more I did some cursory research on the history books, at least as far as being a millennial goes, MLB and the NFL doesn’t have nearly the parity as the NBA has had throughout, at least my lifetime. Which is really strange to say about the NBA having parity, considering the seeming dynasties that have run rampant throughout my own lifetime, with the Bulls, Lakers, Spurs and Warriors all winning a ton of championships, but at the same time, the NBA has had more teams squirt through the cracks of history and win a championship, and break streaks of franchises to never be champions before.
Growing up, the NBA really was my first love as far as sports fandom went. I was a big Knicks fan, but also a supporter of the Washington Bullets, and whenever the Knicks were bounced by the Chicago Bulls, I’d typically prefer to see them win over whoever emerged from the West.
That being said, during my own upbringing as an NBA fan, there were always certain teams that were always the doormats and/or the laughing stocks of the NBA. The teams we never, ever wanted to play in a video game, the teams we always went ballistic whenever our favorite teams ever lost to them, if it ever happened, and the teams that were always forgotten about whenever talking about the league in general.
During this time, some of those teams were the Warriors, the Bucks, the Mavs, Cavs and of course, the Denver Nuggets. Sure, at various points, some of those teams had some fairly successful seasons as far as win percentages go, but they were still never serious threats to win championships, usually being fodder for the Bulls, Lakers, Pistons and the Rockets.
I remember how weird it seemed when the Spurs broke through the glass ceiling and won their first championship. I was resentful because I was a Knicks fan, and I chalked up the Spurs’ win to being a lockout shortened year, and how it shouldn’t really count. But then they’d go on to win several more championships over the next decade, and truly cementing themselves as one of the all-time great teams.
The same could be said of when the Miami Heat broke into the upper echelon, even before LeBron James took his talents to South Beach and won two more championships, and the same was said when the Golden State Warriors not only reached the top of the mountain, they built a house on top of it, winning four championships and basically living in the NBA Finals for the better part of a decade.
However, aside from the teams that grew into dynasties, regardless of my casual, and only during the playoffs interest in the NBA, I’m always fascinated by the teams that sneak out a championship, seemingly, to me, out of nowhere. Especially when they’re one of the teams that I grew up thinking would never, ever, in a million years, see a championship ascension, regardless that on a long enough timeline, everyone eventually has to win one of these days.
I’m talking about squads like the Toronto Raptors in 2019, the Milwaukee Bucks in 2021 and the Denver Nuggets of this past Monday, who were all these jobber franchises when I was a kid, and now they’re all champions within the last five years. All while teams like the Bulls, Rockets and Pistons are the jobber squads now, with not a lot of hope that they’ll be more than pretenders any time soon.
But back to the subject of this post, I never thought I’d ever see the day that the Denver Nuggets would be NBA champions. Throughout my life, I’ve often been low-key supportive of the Denver Nuggets, mostly for ironic reasons and mostly because of the fact that Dikembe Mutombo was the star of the team, and I love that guy. Their ridiculous old uniforms that looked like Tetris blocks. I celebrated and was happy when the 1994 Nuggets were the first time in history that a #8 seed took down a #1 seed when Dikembe Mutombo blocked 31 shots in five games and upset the heavily-favored Sonics. I genuinely thought that Carmelo Anthony was the answer to the franchise’s fortune, but same old result, of being pretenders throughout it all.
I found the Nuggets to be interesting to me this year, mostly on account of the MVP debate that raged on throughout the season, with two-time consecutive MVP Nikola Jokic of the Nuggs, basically averaging a triple-double throughout the whole year, but still constantly under question against Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid, who was having a monster year in his own right, but in my opinion, shouldn’t really have been in the conversation for MVP. At least not over Giannis-I’m not even going to try and spell his last name for memory and I don’t feel like googling it to copy/paste it so I’m going to type all this shit out instead to avoid writing it-Giannis.
But due to a pretty obvious race card drawn by Kendrick Perkins, the NBA caved and gave the MVP to Embiid, denying Jokic from being the second-ever MVP three-peat since Larry Bird, and that was all I needed to really get on the Nugg-train once the playoffs began. Not only did I want to see the Nuggets win because it would be bonkers to think of the Denver Nuggets as NBA champions, I want to be proven right about Jokic being the true MVP.
And I actually watched more basketball in the past three weeks than I have over the past like, 5-6 years. It’s really been fun watching the Nuggs play, primarily because of the way Jokic has transformed the game in a way that’s almost Steph Curry-like, except the fact that Jokic makes it look so tremendously effortless. He’s a 6’11 white guy that can shoot, rebound, but most impressively, pass the ball, and it’s like every time I checked a box score, he had a triple-double.
Not many guys have the balls to try and fire up LeBron James, but when Jokic proclaimed that the Nuggets would sweep the Lakers, I really focused on those games, because I wanted to see how LeBron and the Lakers would react, but as true as an MVP goes, Jokic led the Nuggs to a monster squishing of the Lakeshow, and the motherfucker backed up all his talk with tangible results.
Five games later, and a fairly subdued NBA Finals, and we have a reality where the Denver Nuggets have become NBA champions. Naturally, Jokic secured the Finals MVP, and all I could think of was when Michael Jordan was quoted talking about how he was pissed that Barkley got the MVP over him in 1993, but then he responded by taking the NBA championship away from him. But at the same time, from what I’ve learned about Jokic, he seems like he couldn’t give two shits about any individual accolades or awards, as much as he wants to be a champion and spend time with his horses back in Serbia.
All the same, I’m quite pleased with the end result being Denver Nuggets, NBA Champions. The question is now, will the Nuggs be a one-and-done champion like the Mavs, Cavs, Raptors or Bucks, or will Jokic continue to exploit the rest of the NBA and lead the Nuggs into legendary status and start going for moar rings? Only time will tell, but at least for now, it’s fun to take part of this reality where the Nuggs are champions.
