Colorado Rockies exemplify why Denver Nuggets fans should be thankful

So much of your experience in life depends on how you see the world, which frame you chose to view things through, how you go about contextualizing events throughout your own personal history as well as those that appear in the news on a daily basis. You can chose to buy into what talking heads tell you to believe or you can scavenge for the facts. You can analyze oft-bland data for a more accurate depiction of society or react emotionally by mining your own personal biases and inclinations. But no matter how you chose to view the word, the point is just that: It’s your choice. You get to decide what canvass you want to wake up to every morning and nobody else but you.

One world where this theory tends to get oddly complicated, however, is that of sports. Here our biases intertwine with numbers and statistics to create a paradoxical universe of “kind ofs” “almosts” and “basicallys” whereupon we utilize certain digits to our advantage while shunning others in order to create the vista that best fits our personal leanings. One fan may sport their favorite player’s jersey based on his prolific scoring ability while another points to his defense as the team’s greatest weakness. One fan may also dislike a certain player’s attitude while another highlights his on-court production as a reason he deserves playing time. Factor in style of play, looks, emotional attachment and the lines get even more blurred. As losses inevitably pile up fans take to bickering, pointing out how certain people are “optimists” while others only see the negative aspect of a given situation at which point the way everyone sees the world has been reduced to a microscopic examination of petty details rather than a holistic, macro-evaluation of the problem(s) at hand.

For the past two years much of the Denver Nuggets online community has been engaged in this sort of persnickety behavior, blaming Denver’s failures on a variety of figures, from ownership to management to the coach and even the players. The taboo phrase “rebuilding” has found a common resting place on fans’ lips and all the negative connotations that go along with it can be found reverberating throughout social media commenting systems. Most everyone says the Nuggets will be worse than last year, that they’re in for a lengthy steak of losing, that the past few years are just the beginning, that Josh Kroenke is a terrible owner, and on and on down the line until their breath has been expended. But I’m here to say:

Be thankful.

Be thankful for the 10 straight years of winning basketball that culminated with a franchise-best 57 wins in 2012-13.

Be thankful that despite two rough years of losing basketball the Nuggets already look poised for a bounce-back season next year, which will only compound in the years following.

Be thankful for Michael Malone and his defensive mindset, for a top assistant as talented as Ed Pinckney.

Be thankful for Emmanuel Mudiay. The future is always much brighter with a potential superstar on your hands.

Be thankful for Jusuf Nurkic, Gary Harris, Danilo Gallinari, Wilson Chandler, Kenneth Faried, Nikola Jokic and Jameer Nelson, all of whom are locked down for the foreseeable future. I know a lot of teams would give an arm and a leg to have such a talented young core secured for years into the future.

Be thankful Tim Connelly knows how to draft and has a particular knack for finding diamond-in-the-rough overseas talent. His shrewdness in this regard has expedited the Nuggets’ rebuilding process two-fold.

Be thankful you have something to get excited about watching next season. Between Mudiay, Nurkic, Harris, Jokic, Will Barton, Joffrey Lauvergne and a beloved head coach there’s a lot of novelty to look forward to. Even if the Nuggets lose more games than they win, this team will almost certainly be a thrill to cheer for on a nightly basis.

Be thankful for the right to swap draft picks with the New York Knicks next year. I know I’ll be monitoring this situation all season long.

And most importantly, be thankful you get to root for a team that’s actually going somewhere, that clearly has a plan, is in the midst of executing that plan and looks more than poised to succeed in the near future — unlike the Colorado Rockies.

While I’ll readily admit I’m no die-hard Rockies fan, I am still a fan. The Rockies are my baseball team. They have been for all my life. So when Jose Reyes was quoted in a recent Denver Post article saying, “I don’t want to spend the rest of my career on a last-place team… I don’t want to waste my time like that,” I could not help but juxtapose the Rockies — a team I root for — with the Nuggets — a team I absolutely adore.

For five years now the Rockies have lost more games than they’ve won. In the last decade the Rockies have had a mere three winning seasons. Granted, the 2007 run to the World Series was one of the most incredible sports spectacles of my life. But outside of that lone, magical stretch of about two months the Rockies have done absolutely nothing to give me hope for the future. In fact, since trading Troy Tulowitzki they’ve all but sealed my last sinewy thread of patience and reason completely shut. This is a franchise so poorly run (mostly starting and ending at the top with the Monfort ownership), so corrupt, so incomprehensibly inept — and has been for so long — that I’m beginning to view anyone who watches more than 20 Rockies games per season as an All-Star masochist.

Of course, Rockies fans can too be thankful. They can be thankful for the lovely Coors Field, for Nolan Arenado, D.J. LeMahieu, Carlos Gonzalez and promising prospects like Jon Gray and David Dahl. But for Rockies fans, maintaining this sort of overly-optimistic perspective is entirely utilitarian. The main function of counting their blessings is simply a mechanism to retain their sanity, to simply scrape by on a day-to-day basis and persuade themselves that putting this much time and energy into an ostensibly hopeless situation is in fact worth it. And herein lies the main difference between Nuggets fans and those who support the Rockies with equal fervor: One side has the luxury of exercising gratitude in order to maintain proper and accurate perspective of an already promising situation while the other must command it as a way to survive.

And that, for Nuggets fans, is truly something to be thankful for.