Denver Nuggets Win 2023 NBA Finals Champions

The Denver Nuggets are bringing home the coveted Larry O'Brien Trophy as the 2023 NBA Finals Champions! The clock was ticking, on a long and fruitless basketball dry spell in town, and on the 2023 NBA Finals. Ball Arena, so appropriately named, began to shiver inside. Something was about to happen. Everyone sensed it, knew it.

Kentavious Caldwell-Pope took the ball, saw the remaining seconds, and began to dribble, dribble, dribble. And just before the buzzer sounded, he grabbed the ball and hurled it skyward. Nobody is still quite sure where it landed, or if it landed.

All that mattered was the Denver Nuggets, finally, were champions. And as fresh champions do, grown men began behaving like kids released at recess. Jamal Murray fell to one knee and welled up. Aaron Gordon grabbed his head with two hands and wore an astonished look while he staggered around the floor.

And Nikola Jokic, the NBA Finals MVP Nikola Jokic, found his two brothers, said something in their native Serbian language — no doubt one of those words was “love” — then hugged and kissed them on each cheek.

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These are your Nuggets, who were crowned after a tense, suspenseful Game 5, when they withstood the Heat, and a late rush by Jimmy Butler, and overcame their shaky 3-point shooting, and leaned once again on Jokic, who dropped 28 points and 16 rebounds in victory.

The Nuggets won 94-89, closing out the series in five games, and therefore there was really no doubt. The Nuggets, one of four surviving teams from the ABA merger in 1976, who never even reached the NBA Finals in their entire existence until now, cashed in on their first trip.

This was for coach Michael Malone, and Jokic, and KCP, and Gordon, and Michael Porter Jr., and the Nuggets fans who waited so long.

But this is also for David Thompson, who put Nuggets basketball on the map. It is for coach Doug Moe and those entertaining teams he coached in the 1980s and early ’90s. For Fat Lever, the 6-foot-3 guard who improbably dropped triple-doubles before Jokic.

And for the great Nuggets scorers Alex English and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf and, finally, for Dikembe Mutombo clutching the ball after a massive upset of the top-seeded Seattle Super Sonics in 1994 in what was the franchise’s most vivid postseason moment. Until now.