Confetti flying in Denver. The Nuggets sharing hugs while passing around the NBA championship trophy.
Those scenes that, for almost a half-century, seemed impossible, then more recently started feeling inevitable, finally turned into reality on Monday night.
Denver outlasted the Miami Heat 94-89 in an ugly, frantic Game 5 at Ball Arena that did nothing to derail Nikola Jokic, who bailed out his teammates with 28 points and 16 rebounds on a night when nothing else seemed to work.
Jokic became the first player in history to lead the league in points (600), rebounds (269) and assists (190) in a single postseason. Not surprisingly, he won the Bill Russell trophy as the NBA Finals MVP — an award that certainly has more meaning to him than the two overall MVPs he won in 2021 and 2022 and the one that escaped him this year.
“We are not in it for ourselves, we are in it for the guy next to us,” Jokic said.
“And that’s why this (means) even more.”
Jack White, the 25-year-old Victorian and former Cairns Taipans and Melbourne United small forward, became the first Australian to win a championship, and seventh all-time, since Matthew Dellavedova in 2016.
White was a two-way player for Denver during the season, meaning he was rostered for both the Nuggets and their G-League affiliate Grand Rapids Gold.
He only played in 17 NBA games in the season, the last of which coming on April 4, but will be awarded a championship ring.
The Nuggets missed 20 of their first 22 three-pointers. They missed seven of their first 13 free throws. They overcame that to take a late seven-point lead, only to see Miami’s Jimmy Butler go off. He scored eight straight points to give the Heat a one-point lead with 2:45 left.
But trailing by three with 15 seconds remaining, Butler jacked up an unsuccessful triple. Bruce Brown and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope made two free throws each down the stretch to clinch the Larry O’Brien Trophy for the first time in franchise history.
“Those last three or four minutes felt like a scene out of a movie,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said.
“Two teams in the centre of the ring throwing haymaker after haymaker, and it’s not necessarily shot making. It’s the efforts.”
Butler finished with 21 points and Bam Adebayo 20 for the Heat, who survived a loss in the Play-In tournament and became only the second No.8 seed to make it to the finals.
“What I was most proud about is, throughout the game, if your offence is not working and your shots are not falling, you have to dig in on the defensive end,” Nuggets coach Michael Malone said.
There’s little doubt that Denver has always been a Broncos-first sort of town. John Elway and NFL team owner Pat Bowlen holding the Lombardi Trophy high in 1988.
For the first time in 47 seasons, nobody in the NBA shines brighter than the Nuggets.
“The fans in this town are unbelievable,” said team owner Stan Kroenke, who also owns the Colorado Avalanche, the NHL team that won their third Stanley Cup last year.
“It means a lot to us to get this done.”
AUSTRALIANS TO WIN NBA CHAMPIONSHIPS: Luc Longley (Chicago Bulls – 1996, 1997, 1998), Andrew Gaze (San Antonio Spurs – 1999), Aron Baynes (San Antonio Spurs – 2014), Patty Mills (San Antonio Spurs – 2014), Andrew Bogut (Golden State Warriors – 2015), Matthew Dellavedova (Cleveland Cavaliers – 2016), Jack White (Denver Nuggets).
