Denver Nuggets 2020: The Heroes' Journey

A few weeks ago, I was standing in line at a killer deli not too far from me, and ordered their Italian Hero, called the Godmother. It was so tasty, I actually ate it in my car in the parking lot. That hero… did not have much of a journey.

Ba dump bump.

In the more classical sense, Joseph Campbell formulated a theory long ago about the nature of stories that have hero arcs, and the steps that need to be taken in great adventures, or at least in mythology and monomythic tales. Campbell must have been onto something, as his proposition has be debunked, rebunked, bunk-bedded, and bunco-ed until it’s become a part of everything from movies and comic books to pop psychology. Don’t believe me? Look closely at the season-long arcs of your favorite drama or book series. Many of the tentpoles of Campbell’s theories are still a major part of storytelling today, including the idea that the apogee of our hero’s arc, the always-darkest-before-the-dawn moment, comes about halfway through the telling of the tale. And man, are your Denver Nuggets on a hell of an adventure.

It’s almost a little eerie, the way this 2019-20 Nuggets season has unfolded like a classic monomyth. In the beginning, the already-impressive-but-flawed hero hears the call to adventure, but initially ignores it. Similarly, your nearly-a-Western-Conference-Finalist-last-season Nuggets came into the year successfully, but with a sense that they weren’t fully engaged, especially superstar Nikola Jokic. In Campbell’s version, something or someone magical is introduced to compel our hero to begin. Similarly, Denver had Michael Porter, Jr. spreading a little magic of his own, once he came into the Nuggets tale.

From there, as the adventure is fully engaged, our hero invariably goes through a series of trials, usually failing here and there, but for the most part triumphing his way through what he or she perceives to be the test they must pass to achieve their goal. When they complete these trials, and discover their journey has only begun, we are often somewhere around the halfway point of the story. This is usually when the defecate smacks into the rotary oscillator. Or the sh– hits the fan. Something to the tune of Darth Vader announcing himself your biological dad, or three of your starters and two of your most successful backup players being out due to injury as you go into the lion’s den of your least-successful outings over the last few seasons. The Balrog drags Gandalf into the pit. Rochester offers Jane Eyre an opportunity to step away from her adventure and live a cushy life. In any adventure, that halfway point brings darkness, doom, and gloom.

But…

But. In each of our tales, of hero sallies forth. Down, but not defeated, they stand up and move on to their greatest challenge yet. Luke faces Darth. Perseus fights the Kraken. The Nuggets figure out how to use bubble gum and bailing wire to truly test the talented depths of their bench. The larger fight, the fight that changes our hero permanently, is engaged.

And in a hero’s journey, when shaped by someone who can control the outcome, our hero comes out the victor. Wiser. Learned and stronger. The flaws we saw in him at the beginning or the journey have been tested out of him by the trials he had to face along the way. Even as she or he avoided that call, it ended up shaping them into the thing they had wished to be all along.

Will this year’s Denver Nuggets follow that path? It has been frighteningly easy to see the flaws in this young squad, even as they have slowly worked many of them out of their system. But this midway-mark test will give them an opportunity to strengthen themselves in ways few other trials could. To either fold under the pressure and find themselves in the middle of the pack yet again, or to sharpen themselves into something much more dangerous by season’s end. If they can find the intestinal fortitude to do the latter, they may still lose a number of games along the way, between injuries and lessons learned. But they’ll be the team no one wants to face in the playoffs, and could give themselves their best shot yet at a ring they’ve yet to wear.

It would be a hell of a tale. These Nuggets simply need to do something a little heroic.