Gut Check

“Patience, he thought. So much of this was patience – waiting, and thinking and doing things right.”

– Gary Paulsen

My first gig in radio came after almost two years of interning (read: volunteering) at my favorite local station. I had doggedly put in 23 months of splicing, dicing, and vocal frying to finally find myself working the midnight-to-6am shift one night every weekend, and it was glorious. Everything I had hoped it might be, and more. I ended up having so much fun, I was promoted to the five-night-a-week overnight jock for the station two more months into my employ. The wait had been long, sometimes seeming interminable, but the payoff had been even more exciting and energizing than I’d imagined. Sometimes, the dream actually is worth the wait. 

And sometimes… you just wait.

When the Denver Nuggets take the court against the San Antonio Spurs tonight, it will be with the opportunity to sweep a five-game road trip. How rare is that? Rare enough that it’s been 284,525,200 seconds since the last time they pulled it off. Before you go running for a calculator, that’s nine years and five days since the Nuggets pulled off a five game sweep while away, as the road has typically not been their place to shine. Since that shining example of determination and grit, Denver has enjoyed 13 more opportunities to sweep a road trip of at least five games in length, and rarely even came close. Almost a decade without a sizably-long road trip sweep.

When Denver pulled the feat off last, they were the Nuggets of George Karl, Danilo Gallinari, Andre Miller, and Nene. The game that capped the sweep was it’s jewel. In a 122-93 spanking that dropped the Sacramento Kings to 6-13, Gallo and Nene each posted a ludicrous +30 on the evening, with Andre not far behind at +27. It wasn’t just a different era of Denver basketball, it was a different era of basketball all together. In that lockout-shortened season, the Nuggets would finish second in their conference, only to be knocked out by the Lakers in a seven-game first round loss. They were building something pretty special in that moment, as the team would go on the following season to post their best record in history, only to again lose in the first round to an emerging Golden State Warriors squad.

Fast forward to 2021, and Denver has their first MVP candidate in years, with Nikola Jokic shouldering the early season burden while some of the players and rotations gel around him. Over their last dozen or so contests, carrying that load has begun to pay off as the team keeps improving its stock on both ends of the floor. Jamal Murray has had a gut check (and nut check) of his own, shaking off a slow start to the season to come to look more and more like the max-contract guy Denver expects and needs him to be. Gary Harris has gone from lost behind the arc to deadly, and Michael Porter, Jr. continues to grow and impress. 

The Nuggets bench has slowly begun to find their way as well, with their own early-season troubles primarily predicated around new personnel finding their way together. As the bench unit has discovered their strengths, the team has slowly started to rack up win after win, climbing past .500 for the first time all season, and now gaining steam. 

San Antonio is never an easy out, with Gregg Popovich at the helm, and is only a game behind Denver in the standings coming in. That said, they still have a 4-5 home record they are trying to improve upon, and will bring their best game to make sure the Nuggets don’t have anything easy as they go for the sweep.

Which will it be, Nuggets Nation? With five wins in a row, and four of them on this trip, it would be very easy to take a night off and come home still very proud of a 4-1 swing. But this team hasn’t been doing much of anything the easy way for a while now. Tonight will be a gut check to see if they intend to establish themselves as contenders again this season on their way to hopefully surpassing last year’s Western Conference Finals jaunt. 

Shoring up as much as they have as quickly as they have after stumbling out of the gates? That took guts. Let’s see if they’ll bring them to bear against the Spurs.