SAN DIEGO — The range of emotions that will soon engulf Nuggets personnel on championship banner night is best filtered and summarized through three viewpoints.
There’s Reggie Jackson, a child of Colorado Springs who’s still convinced he won’t be awake even as the 2022-23 Nuggets are being immortalized in the rafters of Ball Arena on Oct. 24. When new teammate and fellow NBA journeyman Justin Holiday became aware Jackson was a hometown kid — “that’s crazy,” he said — Jackson’s response was as simple as, “Yeah, I’m gonna wake up soon. Best dream ever, bro.”
He keeps telling his brother the same thing. The 33-year-old first-time NBA champ definitively expects to cry.
“There’s no way this can be real,” Jackson said. “I’m with a bunch of people that I made great bonds with over my career. Back home. In front of family. Yeah, I’m probably the happiest person on the team. Like I said, I never feel like this is real. Maybe in a few years, one day I’ll wake up and it’ll probably sink in that I was able to come home and be part of something special.”
Then there’s Jackson’s coach, the indefatigable Michael Malone, whose eyes will be locked on the empty space next to the shiny new banner. He has ambition on his mind, something more akin to a Gregg Popovich-esque future.
“We can’t live in the past,” Malone told reporters Tuesday in San Diego after the Nuggets’ first day of training camp. “… I can’t wait for opening night because once they raise that banner and we get those rings, now it’s over. That puts an end to the last season. It’s a responsibility that we have. If we’re going to try to be a team that can repeat — if we’re going to try and be a team that can be a dynasty like Golden State, like San Antonio — we have to have a standard of excellence each and every day.”
Not that Malone isn’t capable of appreciating the moment. He was the life of the party in downtown Denver during the Nuggets’ parade in June. But the worst fear of a motivator as fervent as himself is complacency, the kind that sets in after his go-to bulletin board material — Denver as the overlooked No. 1 seed fighting to steal media attention from bigger markets — has been replaced by a target on Denver’s collective back.
“It would be really easy for me to say, Well, we don’t have to work on our shell drill because we won a championship,” Malone said. “That’s never going to be the case. We’re going back to our basics and building from there. The core principles. … I think it starts with me, my approach, and making sure all our practices are built and structured in a way that we are demanding our guys to do the most basic things.”
If Malone wants to be the Spurs of yesteryear, then lastly there’s the Tim Duncan in this analogy. Nikola Jokic sometimes conveys a public persona bordering on ambivalence toward having won the NBA title. He was quick to declare on national television that he was finally free to go home to Serbia as confetti rained at Ball Arena.
So where does the two-time MVP stand on banner night anticipation: closer to the Reggie Jackson or Michael Malone perspective?
“It’s once in a lifetime,” Jokic said, acknowledging that he wants to properly soak in the ceremony. Then the Malone in him surfaced.
“Or maybe once in a lifetime — we will see,” Jokic said. “But for some players, it will be once in a lifetime, so hopefully we will enjoy the night.”
That occasion, with the Los Angeles Lakers fittingly in town to open 2023-24, will mark a final endpoint to victory lap season. Players are still hearing questions about the triumph for now. Even Jokic is still fondly reminiscing. He said Tuesday that throughout the summer, he occasionally re-watched highlights from the playoff run.
“I think it’s cool, just to see how we won it,” he said. “I think it was a really nice run. Some people say it was a historic run. So I think it was a really good quality of basketball. If you like basketball, I think it is really nice to watch.”
The entertainment following the banner reveal, Malone hopes, will be just as nice.
Training camp’s first day
Tuesday was the first official step toward that season opener. Live competition isn’t very typical for the first day of training camp, but the Nuggets scrimmaged during their practice, Malone said. While it was an introduction for the organization’s rookies, Malone was equally fascinated by how his older players would handle the first day. Avoiding complacency was already on his mind.
“I wasn’t really sure what to expect from our veterans,” he said. “But they were really good today. Their energy was good. Their focus. We competed a lot the second part of practice, and just overall really good energy. … As always, offensively, guys are playing way too fast. They’ve gotta slow things down a bit. But overall, a really good first day of camp.”
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