Hey! Nuggets packed a lot of joy into this ride

It might be the best franchise that never won, as Denver starts its first NBA Finals tonight.

Carmelo Anthony

A few hours before the Denver Nuggets earned their first spot in the NBA Finals, Carmelo Anthony retired.

As convergences go, you can’t get much more harmonic than that.

Of all the greats, near-greats, gunners, glitterati, horse players, Mona Lisas and mad hatters that have passed through Denver over the course of 55 basketball seasons, Anthony is one of the few who failed to radiate fun. He averaged 24.8 points in almost nine Mile High seasons, and he later won an NBA scoring title with New York, and retired as the ninth leading scorer in history.

He also took Denver, or Denver took him, to the playoffs every season he was there. But the Nuggets lost in the first round in seven of those eight trips, and in 2011 he began looking around. He hired LeBron James’ agent, informed the Nuggets that he wanted to play in either Chicago or New York, and stirred up the hot coals between himself and coach George Karl, who was fighting throat cancer. They made the deal in February of that year, and it’s part of the reason the Nuggets are playing Game 1 against Miami Thursday night. The Finals, and the Nuggets, never have experienced such altitude.

For Anthony, the Nuggets picked up Wilson Chandler, Raymond Felton and Danilo Gallinari and got to the playoffs without Anthony, and played quicker and in concert. The Knicks also gave them Timofey Mosgov, two first round picks and two second round picks, with Minnesota as the third party. One of those first-rounders sat under the tree until 2016, but it blossomed like a rosebud and lasted far longer. The Nuggets took Jamal Murray from Kentucky, and he and two-time MVP Nikola Jokic have become the best twosome in franchise history.

Jokic was a second-round pick in 2014. The Nuggets were far more excited by another European center named Jusuf Nurkic, whom Chicago had picked in the first round. Denver took shooter Doug McDermott, packaged him with Anthony Randolph, sent them to Chicago and got Nurkic and Gary Harris, who would become a large brick in the coming Denver wall.

But the NBA Summer League had barely begun when coach Michael Malone began raving about Jokic’s court vision and decisions. The Nuggets traded Nurkic to Portland three years later, where he is today, although he’s played 70-plus games only twice.

Jokic is the lottery ticket that floats into your lap when you’ve observed a righteous basketball life. The Nuggets have played .510 basketball in their history, one of 16 teams over .500, yet they’re the only one that hadn’t reached the Finals until now. Their 38 playoff appearances are seventh in league history, but the other six have all visited the Finals, although the Hawks, who began their story 18 years before Denver did, haven’t gotten there while in Atlanta.

The Knicks, the Celtics and the Nuggets are the only teams on that list that remain in the cities where they started. Denver is a robust sports city on all fronts and has been afflicted with Broncomania since the mid 70s. Its passion for the Nuggets is also multi-generational. Better yet, each mom and dad in the line has a unique chapter to remember.

For the real old guys, it’s the tri-colored basketball and the frantic nights of the ABA. The Denver Rockets were three years old when they drafted Spencer Haywood, who had led the 1968 Olympic team to gold. Haywood had been a collegian for two seasons, and the ABA had a rule that prohibited early entries. But most ABA rules were written in water, and commissioner Mike Storen came up with the “hardship” idea, in which someone like Haywood, whose mother picked cotton in Mississippi and had 10 kids, could be exempt.

Hardly anyone remembers how supreme Haywood was. In his only Denver season he averaged 30 points and 19 rebounds, and the Rockets won their division. Then he jumped to Seattle of the NBA, which resisted, and Haywood brought a suit against his new league that went to the Supreme Court before the NBA settled.

Five years later Carl Scheer took over the franchise, now the Nuggets, and hired Larry Brown as coach. Brown supervised a 65-win season, and the Nuggets averaged 120 points, and they brought over 12,000 fans a night to brand-new McNichols Arena, almost 5,000 more than any other ABA club. The next year David Thompson showed up, again a mystery to the ESPN generation, but an idol to his colleagues and one of the top gravity-deniers of alltime. As someone who grew up on Tobacco Road, I am not alone when I argue that Thompson was the best player in ACC history, a tick above Christian Laettner.

Thompson’s North Carolina State team had beaten UCLA in the 1974 NCAA Finals, and in the fall of 1975 he joined Ralph Simpson, Dan Issel and Bobby Jones. Those Nuggets won 60 games, but lost to Julius Erving and the New York Nets in the Finals, just as the 1974-75 team had run into George McGinnis (whom Philadelphia would later trade to Denver, for Jones) and a 40-point night in the Western finals.

Nevertheless, the Nuggets now had a hammerlock on Denver hearts. It also had Bob Travaglini on the bench. Back then, an NBA trainer was also the traveling secretary, consigliere and amateur comedian, and Travaglini, known as Chopper, knew no limits. He worked for the Virginia Squires before he came to Denver. One night, the Squires were running late to the Pittsburgh airport, during a snowstorm, and Chopper somehow got on the tarmac and stood in front of the plane until it stopped. “You’re not leaving without us,” he shouted. The plane indeed stopped, the Squires got on, and they proceeded to New York, where their game was snowed out.

Chopper lived at a Holiday Inn, which was shaped like a cylinder and stood next door to McNichols and Mile High Stadium, back in its glorious, Erector-set days. He came up with an all-purpose homemade elixir that somehow cleared up injuries, although nobody knew what it was. He also loved gambling, although “loved” might not be strong enough a word. He once lost the club’s per diem in a poker game, and when Brown and assistant coach Doug Moe bought six greyhounds, Travaglini brought them into the training room to make sure they were healthy. If you see a little street near Ball Arena and wonder why it’s called Chopper Circle, that’s why.

Moe coached the Nuggets for nine festive years, making the playoffs every time, making the West Finals in 1985, back when the Lakers were winning most of those. He ran a passing-game offense, full of back door cuts and motion, and it was particularly tough when it was run at 5,280 feet. He called it “run whatever the hell you want.” Moe took the game more seriously than he pretended to, but life was usually a cabaret. “My philosophy of life is to enjoy it, because it goes fast,” Moe said. He also said he had an edge on the world because “despite my age, I’m less mature than everyone else. My body may be old and I can barely walk, but mentally I’m about 12.”

After one playoff loss to the Lakers, Moe was asked if his team was flat. “It wouldn’t have made any difference if we were round,” he replied.

Moe also had Alex English, who scored 29,893 points for the Nuggets, mostly with his feet on the ground and with very few words. English is the 21st alltime scorer in pro basketball history and was a physical marvel who played either 80, 81 or 82 games in each of his first 10 years in Denver. The fact that he wasn’t included among the NBA’s Top 75 players either means nobody on the panel knew how to Google, or was older than 28.

At about that time, Kevin O’Brien was wearing several hats in the front office of the Kalamazoo Wings, a minor league hockey team in Michigan. He had grown tired of organ music at the arena. As he perused his collection of vinyl singles, he ran across Gary Glitter’s “Rock And Roll Part II,” which had a catchy beat and a place where the band yelled, “Hey!” It caught on.

A few years later the original Colorado Rockies NHL team, which became the New Jersey Devils, hired O’Brien, and also hired the song.

. Denver fans loved it, and the Nuggets embraced it when the Rockies felt. Every night at McNichols, the scoreboard would show a cartoon of two feet starting to stomp, and the fans would go nuts. Since this is a copycat nation, approximately 14,318 colleges and high schools borrowed it too.

In 1994, with Dan Issel coaching and with Dikembe Mutombo sending back shots, the eighth-seeded Nuggets knocked out the top-seeded Seattle SuperSonics in a best-of-five first round. In 2009, with Karl coaching and with Anthony and Chauncey Billups running the show, the Nuggets reached the Western Finals and got eliminated by the Lakers in six games.

After five years out of the playoffs, Jokic and Harris slowly brought the Nuggets back into the picture in 2019. They won 57 games but weren’t quite ready for the spring, losing a Game 7 in the Western semis when C.J. McCollum scored 37 points for Portland.

The next year was the bubble season, and Murray announced himself by matching Utah’s Donovan Mitchell thrill-for-thrill and winning one of the best 7-game series ever played in the NBA. That gave Denver the opportunity to get rolled by Kawhi Leonard, Paul George and the Clippers, and the Nuggets obediently fell behind 3-1. Then they came back to win that series and to push the Lakers, the eventual champs, in the Western finals. What did they remember from that adventure? The journey, not the outcome, and that’s the way it’s been for the best franchise which never won.

Jokic is the perfect Nuggets’ headliner — original, circumspect, contrarian, and fully aware that basketball is the means and not the end. For some franchises, winning is torture. For the Nuggets, the scoreboard stays in the arena. That way, it can’t bother the party. Finally, beginning on Thursday, they’re one and the same.