In a front-row seat at the Pepsi Center on Thursday night, a young, bearded fan wore a baby blue Nuggets jersey over a white hoodie, with the No. 15 and the name Anthony plastered on the back.
That shade of blue had arrived here in 2003, along with a new wave of basketball in a city that had largely forgotten about it.
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“We kind of started or created a different culture here. The uniforms changed, we changed the colors of the uniform, and the vibe in Denver was different,” Carmelo Anthony, the long-ago Nuggets superstar who moved so many of those jerseys, said upon his return to Denver with the Trail Blazers, his fourth different team since forcing a trade out of the Mile High City in 2011. “The aura in the city, the energy was different. We were a part of that change.”
Two rows behind those fans in baby blue were two fans wearing shirts with the same number, only surrounded by a darker shade of blue and with a different name printed on the back.
Nikola Jokic was only 8 years old when Carmelo Anthony put on the No. 15 for the Nuggets back in 2003, and he was still an unknown commodity in small gyms in Serbia when Anthony requested a trade and was sent out of Denver for New York in 2011. Still, Jokic has a measure of respect for the man who wore the number — his number now — and stood under the bright lights of superstardom in Denver before he did.
“He had a huge impact here, especially because he was leading the team to the playoffs,” Jokic said. “He had an impact with this team, of course, and the people of Denver.”
During the Nuggets’ 114-99 victory over the Trail Blazers here Thursday night — a cathartic runaway win on the heels of a 1-3 road trip — it was impossible to ignore the jerseys, the obvious link between two superstars who first made names for themselves in an often-overlooked city. Anthony, who scored 20 points in his seventh career game as a Nuggets opponent (0-7), received a mix of cheers and boos when he was introduced to the crowd, and that same reaction of emotional fan gumbo greeted him when he touched the ball.
For some, there will always be hurt. Some won’t get over frustration that Anthony asked out of Denver just one year after guiding the franchise to within two games of the NBA Finals. Then there are those who have let time turn any lingering bitterness into appreciation for all the years Anthony made the Nuggets relevant. The season before he was drafted, the Nuggets won 17 games. Then, Anthony arrived, fresh off a national championship as a freshman at Syracuse, and everything changed.
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“I remember the pickup games that September, you could immediately see how talented he was. He was at a whole other level,” Ryan Bowen, the current Nuggets assistant coach who was a veteran forward for Denver during Anthony’s rookie season, told The Athletic on the eve of training camp in October.
“Obviously, it was a fun year considering the year before and how bad we were. My first impression was how just good he was. I had watched him play a little bit in college, but you see just his presence and how gifted he was. I remember that in the pickup games. We were like, ‘Holy cow, this guy is really good.’”
Anthony elevated the Q Score, the cool factor, the very gravity of basketball in Denver, from the moment he arrived. An NBA TV crew followed the Nuggets around during that first training camp, and Anthony’s first game in Cleveland against fellow rookie LeBron James felt like a rock concert.
“I hadn’t really played with a guy of that stature coming in,” Bowen said. “It was a whole different level everywhere you went. It wasn’t your normal, ‘Hey, here’s your normal draft pick.’ You could tell this guy was a superstar. But he didn’t have any sort of arrogance about him. He came in and worked hard. He just wanted to be one of the guys.”
Jokic’s arrival didn’t have the same pizzaz. He was drafted — 41st overall in 2014 — to little buzz outside the diehards pulling up grainy highlights from his pro games in Serbia. While Anthony was hitting 3-pointers, accompanied by his trademark three fingers to the dome, and knocking down pull-up jumpers, his 20 points felt loud, like he was always on the verge of an explosion that could shift the night.
Then there was Jokic, totaling big numbers of his own while somehow still blending himself into a crowd.
“The funny thing is Nikola put up 20 (points), 11 (rebounds) and six (assists) and we haven’t even talked about him,” Nuggets coach Michael Malone said after fielding questions about everything from Michael Porter Jr.’s two 3-pointers to Gary Harris’ aggressiveness, but none about Jokic. “That’s how you know you have a special player.”
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As Anthony was draining one shot after another in the first half, another man who knows a thing or two about the complicated dance of stardom in a Nuggets uniform chimed in with his own thoughts about the old No. 15’s return to Denver.
“Melo is the one player who I thought would have broken my scoring record if he had stayed with the Nuggets,” Alex English, the Hall of Famer and the franchise’s all-time leading scorer, tweeted during the game. “He really looks good tonight.”
So who might come for English’s scoring record of 21,645 points?
The star of Denver’s Western Conference finals team posited in a message to The Athletic that Jamal Murray has the chops to challenge the mark. And the same goes for Jokic.
“It’s a matter of health and longevity,” said English, who played 11 of his 15 NBA seasons with the Nuggets.
Anthony has had enough staying power to give some of the elementary school kids who idolized him enough time to reach the NBA and stand face to face with the guy from their posters. That was the case in the second quarter Thursday when Porter, who was just 5 years old when Anthony debuted with the Nuggets, checked into the game and had to quickly focus after a starstruck moment.
“It was crazy. When I first checked in, he was like, ‘What’s up, young fella?'” Porter said. “That was cool for me, for sure. He was one of my favorite players.”
Midway through the second quarter, Anthony got the ball on the wing and squared up the 21-year-old rookie. As he did so often for 10-plus years on that floor, Anthony got by his man and scored.
Afterward, Anthony talked about cherishing the opportunity to be back in Denver once again, even though he fell to 0-7 all-time as a Nuggets opponent. His history with the city will always be complicated. He represented equal parts hope and heartbreak, sprinkled with every emotion in between.
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But before he left the Pepsi Center, the number became a topic of conversation once again. Anthony wore No. 15 here because he had worn it at Syracuse, where he had one of the most remarkable freshman seasons in NCAA history. Jokic wore it because when he was a kid playing on a youth team in Serbia, the No. 15 was the biggest one the coach had. And, well, Jokic was the biggest kid.
Now, that one number represents superstardom in Denver, past and present, in two wildly different forms. On Thursday, that one number rested on the backs of fans with two different names, telling two stories with endings yet to be written.
Is that the same way it will rest in the Pepsi Center rafters one day?
“This is where it should be retired, to be honest with you,” Anthony said when asked if he’d like to see his number retired in Denver. “Just my opinion, man. The history is here. This is where it all started. Maybe not because Joker’s got 15 now. We’ll see. We still have time for that.”
(Photo of Jokic and Anthony: Garrett Ellwood / NBAE via Getty Images)
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