Since Hector Was a Pup: A Farewell to the Voices of Denver Nuggets Basketball

It was just three weeks ago that I jumped onto an unexpectedly early work meeting with my entire team. While our boss had called it last minute, I’d told my crew that I didn’t think there was anything to worry about, since they had aggregated all of us for the chat wholesale. And then the boss started in…

“There have been some huge changes made to the business, and we’ve had to make some tough decisions about all of your positions…”

I don’t remember a lot of what was said after that. Basically several platitudes and gratitudes that all sounded like, “Goodbye, and you’re not getting paid much longer.” After five years in a dream gig, it was all just a massive shock to the system. 20-some days later, it still is.

So I cannot imagine what that shock must feel like to a public-facing figure who has been in their dream gig for 20+ years… or even 33 years. But such is the case for Chris Marlowe, Scott Hastings, and Chris Dempsey of Altitude network, who all came to find in the last couple days that some tough decisions had been made about their positions as well. I don’t know what it says about my effed up head that I hadn’t shed any tears over my own job loss, but did so copiously over the Altitude trio. Maybe just delayed shock. In many ways, it felt like it had happened to family.

Dempsey was the least-tenured of the crew, and still felt as if he had been there forever, with a stint as a writer for the team before he took to on-camera work in the studio. With similar gigs at the Denver Post and Boulder Daily Camera preceding that time, “Demps” still felt like a fixture that had been around or with the team a long time. While the words on camera never seemed to flow as seamlessly as they did from his pen, he always found them, and he then gave meaningful and insightful critiques of the Denver Nuggets play. Game after game, week after week, season after season, Dempsey was on the case, and speaking to the plusses and minuses of each game uniquely, never falling back on tropes or how he had addressed anything previously. He took care to give each contest its own due, and you could see the creativity of the writer in him always shining through. Earnest, funny, heartfelt, and incisive, he gave viewers a deeper insight into each contest.

Marlowe had been the play-by-play announcer for the team for north of two decades. He called the team from some of their lowest lows to their highest highs, though the local announcers always ended up having to step aside once the first round of the playoffs had passed. Marlowe came up with so many unique phrases for so many unique players and combinations, I wouldn’t pretend to try to encapsulate them all here. Denver Nuggets fans who were parents made bingo-style games for their kids to draw them into the games, having them listen in for phrases like “Serbian Slinger”, “Little Buddy to Big Buddy”, “Since Hector Was a Pup”, and dozens more. While I’d occasionally roll my eyes when another “Hector” came across the line, I always did so with a smile. Chris Marlowe was the consummate professional, and the fanbase seemed to adore him, which made his dismissal such a shock.

And maybe still not the level of a shock that it was to hear that former Nuggets player and long-time Denver sidekick Scott Hastings also found himself on the cutting block. Hastings was Marlowe’s color guy, and colorful he was. As a player, as a guest on David Letterman, as a sideline analyst for TNT, as the co-host of KOA’s long-running Sports Zoo, as the color guy for Broncos radio for years, and as the color analyst for the Nuggets for 33 years, Hastings has been a media fixture for longer than my kids have been alive. Incisive, witty, thoughtful, caustic… Hastings could be all of those, oftentimes in the same sentence. He lent a gravity and biting humor to the call that was one of my favorite aspects of any broadcast team I’ve ever heard. The phrases wit and wisdom get thrown around far too casually when it comes to people doing what Scott did, but he was filled to the brim with both. He often had to pull himself back from saying it all in ways that were going to “get him in trouble again”, as he could cut the situation to the core. For as much a Nuggets homer as he always appropriately was, he also was the first to point out when they were making dumb mistakes, or when a replay showed that it actually HAD been a foul or indiscretion by the team. He may have always been wearing Nuggets-colored glasses, but was bravely unafraid to call it as he saw it, a rarer and rarer quality these days.

All three of them, gone. The flavor of watching a Nuggets game will never be quite the same. Marlowe and Hastings esepcially deserved to call their own shots regarding their departures.

So, the Nuggets broadcasts will look a LOT different for the 2026-27 season. Vic Lombardi will still be in the mix, and he is a pro’s pro, and a delight. Katy Winge will quite probably step into a bigger role she has consistently shown herself more than capable of, and that somehow feels overdue, even with the melancholy the above news all brings. Her stripes are earned, and the fear of many of us fans was that there wouldn’t be a big enough role for her long-term to stay with this broadcast team. Those roads are certainly all of a sudden quite a bit clearer, and I’m excited to see what that means for her. Bill Hanzlik has not been a part of anyone’s mentions these last few days, but it’s hard to picture the team letting him go at this point, with the biggest announcements already made. He’ll provide some continuity through the changes, assuming he is still in the picture.

And will this impact the actual play of the team? Of course not, any more than shifting out the PA announcer or the in-arena crew would. It will simply influence how we as fans see and feel many of the games, and that will be adjustment enough. I’ll miss hearing all three of their voices the same way I still wish I could still hear my grandma read me Christmas stories every December. Marlowe, the gold medal Olympian and septuagenarian, has said he is “not done”, and one assumes he’ll still be making his brilliant calls of volleyball matches for NBC, something he recently did at the Olympics. Hastings will move to color commentary for the radio on home games, alongside the amazing Jason Kozmicki, and I may just turn the radio on at times to hear his thoughts. Dempsey is too talented a writer and analyst to not land firmly on his feet somewhere, and I’ll follow along wherever he lands, even if outside of Denver sports. Time moves along as always, and sometimes changes come and “tough decisions” must be made. But the sounds of Denver Nuggets basketball will never quite be the same, and it won’t be too far into this next season when I’ll feel like I haven’t heard those comforting and familiar voices since Hector was a pup.

Good luck, gents. THANK YOU for all the meaning, insights, and wonder you brought to some of my favorite moments in sports. Here’s hoping your next chapters are still your greatest ones.