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The Nuggets went through hell for decades before finally building a championship-caliber team.
Denver’s first (pro) basketball club debuted in 1948 as the “Nuggets” — on account of all that gold — with the National Basketball League. The Nuggets joined the NBA in 1949-50 before folding after one season, not enough wins, not nearly enough gold.
Denver sat dormant until 1967, when local trucking scion Bill Ringsby purchased two-thirds interest in an ABA franchise.
Ringsby named his team the “Rockets” after his line of moving trucks, which was fun, because in the same offseason a new NBA team from San Diego named its club the “Rockets” after the local developers of the Atlas intercontinental missile. The San Diego Rockets kept the name upon moving to Houston in 1971, nodding toward the city’s aeronautics industry. Anticipating a move to the NBA and with its trucks outshone by all that jet propulsion, Denver’s ABA team re-named itself the “Nuggets” in 1974.
Denver grew to be one of the hits of the ABA, dealing for Dan Issel and Bobby Jones, outbidding the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks for top overall draft pick David Thompson, hiring 34-year old Larry Brown to coach. The Nuggets applied for NBA expansion in 1975 after a 65-19 (ABA seasons ran 84 games) campaign, but the NBA didn’t want to know.
The 65-win season ended in a first-round bungle, falling to 19-year old center Moses Malone and the rest of his Utah Stars. In the 1976 ABA Finals the Nuggets dropped in six to Julius Erving’s New York Nets. Denver never secured the ABA crown, joining the NBA in 1976 with three other ABA clubs from Indiana, New York, and San Antonio.
Relative to the rest of its ABA brethren, Denver made it to the NBA unscathed, adding veteran Paul Silas, winning 50 times in its first NBA go-round, taking two games from Portland’s eventual champions in the playoffs. Brown was Larry, however, trading Silas and center Marvin Webster to Seattle for Brian Taylor in 1977, handing Seattle two Finals’ appearances and the 1979 NBA title.
Brown and GM Carl Scheer also bungled swapping Bobby Jones to Philadelphia for George McGinnis, once a franchise-level scorer, now a floor-bound shot-misser with no saintly excuse for strapping up defensively alongside Dan Issel, sieve of sieves, down to Dan’s missing two front teeth. Larry’s Nuggets made the playoffs in 1977 and 1978 before Brown quit, midseason.
Luckily the Indiana Pacers had an inexplicable eye on McGinnis, offering a first-round pick and 26-year old swingman Alex English at 1980’s trade deadline.
Denver agreed, and English became the decade’s leading scorer.
Denver made the playoffs nine consecutive seasons under head coach Doug Moe, Larry Brown’s former college and pro teammate, assistant coach, and polar opposite. Doug credited subversion for prosperity at his craft:
“My whole life I’ve managed to establish myself as a complete fool,” Moe says. “Therefore, any success I’ve had has looked like an upset.”
Moe’s top-flight offense was up to Denver’s players — “other coaches were diagramming our plays on the blackboard, and we weren’t running any” — and Denver’s defense occasionally showed teeth. GM Vince Boryla had the guts to deal doughy 29-point forward Kiki Vandeweghe to Portland for frontline stopper Wayne Cooper, burly scorer Calvin Natt, and triple-double machine Michael Adams.
Not even Nugget trainer Chopper Travaglini could help his previous decade’s stars adjust to age’s onset. Denver won 36 percent of its games in the 1990s.
Denver hired Bernie Bickerstaff as general manager in 1989 and fired Moe after a 43-win playoff run in 1989-90. Replacement Paul Westhead responded by fielding the fastest NBA team in three decades: Denver averaged nearly 114 possessions per game in 1991, eight players averaged double-figures, the team’s league-worst defense gave up 130 points per game, 20 wins.
Bickerstaff drafted Dikembe Mutombo, the Nuggets shot up to 13th defensively in 1992 before shaking down Westhead and hiring Nuggets broadcaster Dan Issel to his first coaching job. Bickerstaff drafted two-way studs LaPhonso Ellis and Bryant Stith and the Nuggets were fifth in defense by 1994, the No. 8 seed in the loaded West. The 42-win Nuggets dropped the first two games in the five-game series against Seattle, yet it didn’t stop Dikembe from clutching immortality.
The Nuggets fell 0-3 to the Jazz in the next round before peeling three consecutive wins, falling in the semifinals but securing certain expectations for 1994-95. Yet after beginning that season 18-16, Issel quit, telling the press his job was “making me something I don’t want to be.”
Issel was burned out. “I never coached before, and I certainly won’t coach again.”
(Four years later, Dan coached the Nuggets again.)
Bickerstaff flailed in his role as personnel chief. Mutombo left via free agency in 1996 after Denver’s owners cheaped-out, disastrously attempting holding serve with new additions Mark Jackson, Ervin (Not Magic) Johnson, and Sarunas Marciulionis.
The bottom was 1997-98. Franchise star Antonio McDyess, facing a contract extension after 150 games as a Nugget, demanded a training camp trade to a contender. The Nuggets, run briefly by Allan Bristow after Bickerstaff’s firing, acquiesced, and won only 11 games.
In early 1998 Issel moved from the radio booth (wherein he’d loudly derided Nuggets 1997 lottery pick Tony Battie as “El Busto”) to GM, drafting his doppelganger in 1998 with sweet-shooting big man Raef LaFrentz.
Issel dealt El Busto and draft pick Tyronn Lue for Nick Van Exel, who helped recruit McDyess back to Denver as a free agent in spite of Jason Kidd and Rex Chapman’s flight to snowed-out Denver, bidding to keep McDyess with the sunny Suns.
Issel named himself coach in 1999 and appeared on the way toward playoff contention in 2000-01 before his team, turned off by Issel’s postgame verbal abuse of LaFrentz, boycotted a practice in late 2000.
Issel kept his job, briefly. He was asked to resign a year later for, uh.
The Nuggets floundered, badly, traded 2001’s lottery pick for one year of Ron Mercer, selecting Nene (nice) but also Nikoloz Tskitishvili (not) in the 2002 lottery, combining to start Junior Harrington and Vincent Yarbrough 90 times in 2002-03. Yarbrough never played NBA basketball after that season, and not because he got sick.
But Denver drafted Carmelo Anthony in 2003, traded the fading McDyess for Marcus Camby, and free agent signee Andre Miller led the club back to the postseason in 2004. George Karl was hired as coach midway through 2004-05, Carmelo’s shot chart responded with a gleeful throb, Denver won 32 of 40 games under Karl to finish the season.
The Nuggets acquired Allen Iverson for Miller and then Chauncey Billups for Iverson, making the Western finals in 2009. Denver fell victim to the loaded West in the years following, falling in the opening round from 2010 through 2013 despite winning 63.5 percent of its games.
Carmelo was only around for one of those flops, demanding a trade away from Denver in 2011. The players the Knicks sent Denver in return for Carmelo kept the Nuggets afloat, the first-round pick New York sent Denver was used to acquire Andre Iguodala, giving Denver 57 wins in 2013, still the most in franchise history.
Of course, Karl’s Nuggets lost in the first-round in 2013, with Iguodala negotiating courtside with members of the Golden State front office, Karl later called Iguodala “a mole.” The Nuggets lost George months after he was named 2013 Coach of the Year, and executive Masai Ujiri weeks after Ujiri was named 2013 Executive of the Year.
Hired in respective place were Brian Shaw, who coach-rapped, and GM Tim Connelly, currently best known as the Minnesota GM who traded 22 draft picks plus Walker Kessler for Rudy Gobert.
But before Connelly moved on — driven away from the Nuggets by the same ownership parsimony which cost Denver Ujiri — he drafted Nikola Jokic with the 41st-pick in 2014. Jokic is a two-time MVP, a scarred-up amalgamation of Arvydas Sabonis and Chris Webber. Connelly used a pick swap remaining from the Carmelo Anthony trade to pounce upon Jamal Murray, and hired Michael Malone to coach after the Kings left a $100 bill on the floor.
Twenty-two years after a player practice boycott, Denver is one win from its first NBA championship. Labor strikes work.
