Denver Nuggets

It took fifty-six years of franchise history to produce a single NBA championship, and it came in 2023 against the Miami Heat, four games to one. Nikola Jokić was named Finals MVP, the payoff of a run that had already reshaped how the league thought about the centre position.

The club's name changed twice before it settled. What began in 1967 as the Denver Larks, a charter member of the American Basketball Association, became the Denver Rockets, and only on 7 August 1974 did the franchise become the Nuggets. Two years later it entered the NBA as part of the ABA-NBA merger, carrying with it an unfinished appeal from 1976, when Denver reached the ABA Finals and lost to the New York Nets, four games to two — the closest the franchise came to a major title before Jokić's team settled the matter.

Denver's roll of Hall of Famers runs from Dan Issel and David Thompson through to Dikembe Mutombo, whose shot-blocking made the lane at old McNichols Arena a hostile place for visitors. Carmelo Anthony, inducted in 2025, carried the franchise through its post-merger decades without delivering the title his numbers seemed to promise; that task fell to a different generation. Jokić, a second-round pick who arrived without fanfare, now shares top billing with Jamal Murray, the guard whose return from injury underpinned the 2023 run.

The Nuggets share Ball Arena with the Colorado Avalanche, and its 19,520 seats have hosted the club since the venue's Pepsi Center years. Denver's sharpest modern rivalry runs with the Minnesota Timberwolves, sharpened by repeated playoff meetings, with Utah and Miami supplying the other regular flashpoints.

Two years removed from the title, Jokić remains the league's most complete offensive centre, and Denver again enters the season expected to contend rather than merely compete.