Franchise
The years before the banner, and the one that hung it
Filter the years
14 beats on the page.
1967
A charter franchise, named after a truck
Denver was awarded a team in the new American Basketball Association and almost called it the Larks. Bill Ringsby, of Ringsby Rocket Truck Lines, took control and named the club the Rockets before a game was played. They tipped off at the Auditorium Arena and the Denver Coliseum.
1970
Spencer Haywood makes the league look small
In 1969–70 Haywood was ABA MVP, Rookie of the Year, and All-Star MVP, averaging 30 points and 19.5 rebounds. Denver won a division and learned what a superstar looked like at altitude. The Rockets were a hit. A title was not.
1974
The Rockets become the Nuggets
On August 7, 1974, the club took the name Nuggets, a nod to an earlier Denver team and a practical step: the NBA already had the Houston Rockets, and everyone could see a merger coming. The next season they won 65 games and still fell to the Indiana Pacers in a seven-game conference final.
1976
One finals, then a buy-in
David Thompson, Dan Issel, Bobby Jones, and coach Larry Brown took a 60–24 team to the last ABA Finals and lost in six to Julius Erving’s New York Nets. McNichols Sports Arena was new. Denver paid about two million dollars to enter the NBA with Indiana, New York, and San Antonio, and never did win an ABA crown.
1977–78
Division titles, and no breakthrough
The Nuggets won the division in each of their first two NBA seasons. Thompson and Issel were stars. The playoffs kept ending early. Being good in October through April became a Denver habit long before being finished in June did.
1985
Doug Moe’s beautiful, leaky machine
Moe’s Nuggets led the league in style and, too often, in points allowed. They were nicknamed the Enver Nuggets for the missing D. Alex English won the 1983–84 scoring title and became the franchise’s career scoring leader, with 21,645 points. In 1985 Denver finally reached a conference final and lost to the Lakers in five.
1988
Fifty-four wins, then Dallas
Fat Lever, English, and Danny Schayes powered another division title in 1987–88. Denver won 54 and went out in the second round to the Mavericks. Moe’s 432 regular-season wins were later hung in the rafters — not as a jersey, as a number that meant the work.
1994
The finger wag, and a first
Dikembe Mutombo, drafted in 1991, anchored a defense that had been a punchline. In 1994 the eighth-seeded Nuggets knocked off the top-seeded Seattle SuperSonics — the first time an 8 had beaten a 1 in the NBA playoffs — then lost to Utah. Mutombo was Defensive Player of the Year the next season. He left for Atlanta in 1996.
1998
Eleven wins
The late ’90s were bleak: 21 wins, then 11, and a 23-game losing streak that tied an NBA mark. Ownership changed hands more than once — Liberty, the Lauries, Donald Sturm — until Stan Kroenke bought the club in July 2000. The Pepsi Center had opened in 1999. The basketball had not caught up to the building.
2003
Carmelo Anthony, third overall
Anthony arrived and the city had a face again. George Karl eventually built a division winner around him. Allen Iverson passed through in 2006; Chauncey Billups arrived in the trade that sent Iverson out. In 2009 Denver reached its first conference final since 1985 and lost to the Lakers in six.
2011
The trade, and a quiet pick three years later
On February 22, 2011, Anthony was dealt to New York. The Nuggets still won 50 that season, then wandered. In 2014 they used the 41st pick on a Serbian center most of the league did not bother to study. Nikola Jokić is the reason that sentence is now a civic myth.
2020
The bubble, and another Lakers ending
Michael Malone’s team, with Jamal Murray erupting, climbed out of series deficits inside the 2020 bubble and won the division. The Western Conference Finals ended against Los Angeles again. The building on Chopper Circle was renamed Ball Arena that year. The wait for a finals continued.
2023
June, at last
Jokić — MVP in 2021, 2022, and 2024, the first in franchise history — and Murray led Denver past the Lakers in a conference-final sweep and then past Miami in five. He was Finals MVP. The Nuggets were the last of the four surviving ABA clubs to reach the NBA Finals, and the second, after San Antonio, to win one.
2026
The window, argued in public
Malone was dismissed in April 2025. David Adelman is in his second season. The 2025–26 club won 54, finished third in the West, and lost a first-round series to Minnesota in six. Defense has ranked 21st two years running. Jokić, 31, has said he intends to sign an extension next offseason if Denver wants him. The banner is up. The argument is whether another one is still realistic.
Twelve division titles
Crowns, by decade
Two in the ABA, ten in the NBA. A division banner was never the thing this city was starving for. It is still the clearest chart of when Denver was actually good.
- 1970s4 · 1970, 1975, 1977, 1978
- 1980s2 · 1985, 1988
- 2000s3 · 2006, 2009, 2010
- 2010s1 · 2019
- 2020s2 · 2020, 2023