Melo Ruled

For over a decade, Carmelo Anthony’s legacy in Denver has been all about his playoff failures and the way he maneuvered his way out of the city. I admit that it’s been somewhat difficult for me to feel sympathetic for him as he’s bounced from team to team in the twilight of his career, still chasing the ring that eluded him in both Denver and New York.

Today, with the Nuggets one win away from their first NBA Finals in franchise history, Melo is calling it a career. I find myself sitting here, awash in good vibes from Denver’s current #15 and his band of merry men, feeling incredibly nostalgic for the powder blue era when Melo was synonymous with basketball in Denver.

The year was 2003. The Nuggets were abysmal. I was eight years old and just beginning to get seriously interested in basketball. I played for my first YMCA team that year (we lost one game 42–2), and I started following the NBA more closely. I knew that LeBron James was going to be the #1 pick in the NBA draft, and that the Nuggets were so bad they would have a chance at getting him.

In March and early April, I watched the NCAA men’s basketball tournament for the first time (I remember it was periodically interrupted with live reports on the bombing of Baghdad.) Like the rest of the nation, I was captivated by the Syracuse kid with the cornrows and the megawatt smile. Maybe the Nuggets could get him in the draft if they don’t get LeBron, I thought. Sure enough, two months later the Nuggets took Melo with the #3 pick.

I can’t overstate how dramatically and how immediately this changed the perception of the Nuggets in my school cohort. The year before, in second grade, no one talked about them. No one wore Nuggets gear. I remember seeing an ad on TV for an upcoming game that year, and the voiceover said “be there as Kobe Bryant and the Lakers take on Juwan Howard and the Nuggets.” Who’s Juwan Howard?, I thought to myself. Now the Nuggets had a certified star.

I remember being at a sporting goods store in Boston that summer and seeing novelty Cleveland #23 and Denver #15 mini basketballs for sale. For the first time, it seemed to me like the Nuggets actually existed. Of course, my parents got me a youth size Melo jersey for Christmas that year, and I was far from the only one in my third grade class who got one. Our teacher that year, Mrs. Manning, was a Nuggets season ticket holder, and the Nuggets were daily conversation.

That fall, I was on a new YMCA basketball team, this time with friends of mine from that class, and we were actually pretty good. The year before, the Y teams had been given lame cotton t-shirts with the YMCA logo on them. Now, everyone got reversible, powder blue and white actual jerseys with “JUNIOR NUGGETS” written on them. It was Nuggets, Nuggets, Nuggets everywhere you looked.

I went to my first ever Nuggets game on October 24, 2003. It was a preseason game against the Indiana Pacers, and the Nuggets won. That season, I followed the Nuggets in the paper, on the radio (Jerry Schemmel was an incredible basketball announcer) and, once a week when they were on UPN, on TV. I had a nerf hoop in my bedroom and I would try to act out the game as it was happening on the radio. My friends and I played basketball outside during recess just about every day.

As the 2003–04 regular season neared its conclusion, the Nuggets were in the hunt for the 8th playoff spot in the West. It had been a spectacular turnaround already but, to me, making the playoffs was the ultimate goal. My dad (who had an incredible Midas touch with this sort of thing) bought us tickets to go see the 80th game of the season on Saturday, April 10 against the Portland Trail Blazers, who were the Nuggets’ main competition for the 8-seed.

That night is a core memory for me. Melo took over the game at the end of regulation; tying it twice in the final 30 seconds. The noise level in Pepsi Center after he hit the jumper with 3 seconds left was unlike anything I had heard in my life up to that point. Melo stayed hot in overtime and helped the Nuggets pull out the biggest win in the last decade of their existence. For all that’s been made of his lack of playoff success, he was one of the most clutch end-of-game players I have ever seen.

Two weeks later I was back at Pepsi Center for game 3 of the Nuggets’ first round series against the Timberwolves. It was my first playoff game in any sport, and the first time I ever experienced what we would call a playoff atmosphere. It was a magical night, as the Nuggets won their first playoff game since 1994 and everything seemed to go their way. Of course, it would be their only win of the series, but that first round exit didn’t feel the same as all the later ones. In 2004, just making the playoffs and winning a game was a huge victory.

Carmelo Anthony, more or less single-handedly, saved the Denver Nuggets. Don’t let anyone distort this for you. Every other piece they acquired, from Kenyon Martin, to George Karl, to Allen Iverson, to Chauncey Billups, was to help him win. Before his arrival, the Nuggets had missed the playoffs eight seasons in a row. With him, they never missed the postseason.

He also ensured that an entire generation of kids like me grew up as Nuggets fans. Not Laker fans, not LeBron fans — Nuggets fans. The tribalism of the LeBron vs. Melo debates in the early years, while it may sound like “The Beatles vs. The Monkees” now, was intense. I still remember the score of the first Nuggets/Cavs game in 2003 (93–89 Nuggets). Melo was our very own superstar, and we loved him the way we love Jokic and Murray now. If people want to forget about the way he made this state feel in those early days, that’s on them.

I saw one of Melo’s first NBA games back in the fall of 2003, and last year I was witness to one of his last. Playing for a 2022 Lakers team going nowhere (ironically alongside LeBron), it was poignant watching him hit those same 18-foot jumpers as eighteen years prior. The Lakers lost that day to the Nuggets, as Nikola Jokic, who was an 8 year-old like me when Melo broke into the league, scored 38 points and collected 18 rebounds. As a two-time MVP who has the Nuggets on the cusp of their first ever NBA Finals, Jokic is the greatest player in Nuggets history, and his #15 will certainly be retired. I still have some hope that, with the passage of enough time, Melo’s #15 will someday hang next to it in the Ball Arena rafters.