Denver Nuggets: A quest for relevance in their own city
By Brendan Vogt
The Denver Nuggets are a staple of the NBA and a professional basketball team in one of the best sports towns in the country. So where are all the Nuggets fans?
In the 1994-95 NBA season, the Denver Nuggets were eliminated from the first round of the playoffs by the top-seeded San Antonio Spurs. That season was the final chapter of a 19-year stretch for Denver that included 14 playoff appearances, two conference finals trips and a monumental upset of the top-seeded SuperSonics in 1994.
Denver didn’t know it at the time but they were headed for a free fall. The Nuggets would miss the playoffs for the next eight seasons and somewhere along the line, the fans began to lose faith.
ESPN‘s attendance report only runs back as far as the 2000-01 season — when the Nuggets won 40 games and finished 20th in attendance. Two years later and eight years into Denver’s playoff drought, the Nuggets finished a dismal 17-65. As you might expect, the fans gave up. Denver plummeted to 25th in attendance.
It probably isn’t surprising to you that poor performance would correlate with poor attendance. A higher win total would imply that the team is better at the game and thus, significantly more fun to watch than one that is bad. That’s simple and fairly intuitive, yet it’s not always the case.
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Take the Los Angeles Lakers, for example. The hype is growing around Lonzo Ball, Brandon Ingram and the potentially star-filled future of the Lake Show in the years to come. But the Lakers aren’t a good basketball team right now and they haven’t been for quite some time. They haven’t won more than 27 games since the 2013 season, yet they’ve finished no lower than 11th in attendance during that span.
The Lakers are a bit of an exception. You get a much longer leash when you’ve won 16 titles. But what about those less fortunate teams around sports with fans who are rowdy, loud and full of unconditional love? Like the Chicago Cubs, Cleveland Browns etc? There are franchises void of traditional success, but their home stadiums are full of fans year after year.
The Nuggets don’t have that relationship with their city. Allowing the Browns to break your heart is a yearly tradition in Cleveland. It’s a part of a unique sports culture: a city that grows further in love with their teams with each cripplingly disappointing loss.
The Cubs went over a century without raising a world series flag. But for over three decades now, the familiar sounds of Steve Goodman’s “Go Cubs Go” have rang through the streets of Wrigleyville. The Cubbies have become synonymous with the North Side.
Denver is a phenomenal sports town in its own right. While it’s not quite the same market size as L.A., New York or Chicago, it’s a popular city with four major sports teams and gorgeous facilities. But there’s a difference between being a sports town and a basketball town. What the Lakers and the Cubs have does exist in Denver, it’s just reserved for the Broncos.
ESPN‘s NFL attendance report has full records for every season since 2006. The Broncos have been in the top 10 if not the top five every single time.
So what does that mean for the Nuggets? It means they don’t get the long leash the Lakers have. They don’t receive the unconditional love, or at least attention, of their hometown fans like the Cubs or the Browns do. It means if they want to put butts in seats, then they need to win.
The Denver Nuggets had an encouraging 2016-17 season, but you wouldn’t know it by glancing at some of the numbers. They finished below .500, outside of the playoff picture, fourth in their division and they had one of the worst-rated defenses in the entire league. Not surprisingly they ranked dead last in attendance.
This was no surprise. The Nuggets ranked last in 2016 attendance as well. That year, Forbes released a piece in January detailing the NBA’s least engaged franchises. The Nuggets made the list.
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2015 wasn’t much better. The Nuggets slid all the way to 28th after finishing 19th in 2014. Why the drop-off? Cross reference the Nuggets’ attendance rankings with their season finishes. The answer is obvious: After making the playoffs every year from 2004-13, the Nuggets began losing again.
That nine-year stretch was eerily similar to a prior run they had from 1982-90 — nine seasons, but only one conference finals trip and zero Finals appearances to show for it. That stretch of course coincided with the drafting and subsequent rise of their organization’s biggest star ever: Carmelo Anthony.
Melo made an impact right away. Following his selection in the 2003 NBA Draft, Denver immediately shot up the attendance rankings, going from 25th all the way to 12th. They would enjoy a period of decent attendance for the remainder of the Carmelo days. Those days ended, of course, when Melo demanded a trade to the Knicks in 2011.
The Nuggets sputtered the following season without him. But they followed that up with an incredible 57-25 record in 2013. Despite lacking a true go-to guy on the team, George Karl led the Nuggets to the third seed out West in what was likely the most impressive year of his coaching career.
Despite losing their biggest star, the Nuggets were continuing to succeed. More importantly, fans were continuing to show. Team governor and president Josh Kroenke doubled down in 2014. It was time to take the next step and launch the Nuggets into the ranks of the elite organizations in the NBA. He built a state-of-the-art jumbotron, a new sound system and introduced free wi-fi for all fans in the Pepsi Center.
But the Nuggets are not the Lakers, the Cubs or the Browns. Andre Iguodala moved on from the team in free agency and Denver fired George Karl before the following season. The Nuggets began to lose games again, and the fancy new toys inside the Pepsi Center proved to be ineffective. Denver fell back down to 19th in attendance and have kept falling ever since.
Denver belongs to the Broncos. That’s a fact. The Nuggets don’t have any championships to boast and the closest thing they have to a John Elway was Melo — the guy who only made it past the first round once in his career, and forced his way out of town before he ever reached a Finals.
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Even now, the Nuggets’ best player is a 22-year-old Serbian who played in front of a national audience for a grand total of 24 minutes last season. Jokic is a star, but he’s not a marketable one just yet. He’s no Elway.
With the Broncos in town, the Nuggets can’t rely on the unconditionality of their fan’s loyalty. Without a John Elway to put on their posters, the Nuggets have no sex appeal to sell. With zero Finals appearances, the Nuggets have no history of success to fall back on. With no playoff appearances in the four years, the Nuggets can’t rely on fancy screens and free wi-fi to fill their arena.
There’s only one thing the Nuggets can do: win basketball games. Much will be made about the inevitability of a Golden State Finals victory in 2017-18. What’s the point of playing the season if we already know who will win? Well, there’s more than one way to define a successful season. And the Nuggets are a shining example.
For the Nuggets, there is a large middle ground between a ring and a bust. A first playoff performance in four years would go a long way for Denver. It’s step one in convincing the sports fans of the Mile High City to turn their eyes back to the gold, white and now Western Union blue of the Nuggets.
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They’ve built a strong core, they’ve attracted a legitimate star and now they need to show the fans and future free agents that they can follow those things up with success. There’s only one way to get fans in that arena. Just win, baby. Just win.