Monday afternoon, Tulin Yarmon and her 14-year-old daughter, Shawnna, walked away from the Pepsi Center box office with wide smiles. In their possession were six tickets for tonight’s Nuggets home opener against the Los Angeles Lakers.
“It’s an event now,” said Shawnna, who celebrated her last birthday by attending a Nuggets game with 14 of her friends.
Tulin Yarmon spent $119 for the six tickets, which she called an entertainment bargain. She and her daughter plan to attend several games this season. Riding the coattails of last season’s hot finish, the team has sold more than 9,300 season tickets, its most since 1994. As recently as 2002-03, when they won 17 games, the Nuggets were forgettable cellar-dwellers. Yarmon went to a game or two that season.
“It was boring, it was dull,” she said. “You were more apt to see hecklers than you were to see true fans. People went to Nuggets games because the tickets were given to them, or to drink a lot, but not necessarily to see the Nuggets play.”
Now expectations are a mile high. The glow from last season’s 32-8 finish under coach George Karl remains. This season, it appears nothing less than a Northwest Division title and a trip deep into the playoffs will satisfy the team and its fans.
“The city is really excited,” forward Carmelo Anthony said. “After last season, I can see why.”
After averaging a franchise-record 17,657 fans a game last season, the Nuggets’ front office has aspirations of surpassing that mark.
“That is our No. 1 goal,” said Paul Andrews, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Kroenke Sports Enterprises. “To do that, we have to make a Nuggets game an exciting entertainment experience.”
Another Nuggets goal is to sell at least 7,000 of their popular 10-game ticket packages. According to Andrews, the Nuggets are about 1,500 short of that mark but are confident they’ll get there in the next couple of months.
While dance teams, high-voltage music, glitzy scoreboards and Rocky the mascot are part of the package, the essential element to having sellout crowds remains winning basketball games. It was nowhere to be found when Kiki Vandeweghe took over as general manager Aug. 9, 2001.
“When we first came back here, one of the biggest surprises to me was that the team had sort of distanced itself from the community,” said Vandeweghe, who played for the Nuggets from 1980-84. “The Nuggets and this city had grown apart. I didn’t think the fans enjoyed the games. We had to make the games fun and entertaining again. That was one of my biggest goals.”
There was a time when Nuggets basketball was a Rocky Mountain version of the Lakers’ showtime. Vandeweghe longed to bring back those days.
“Every night you went into the old (McNichols Sports) Arena, it was electric,” recalled Al Albert, a Nuggets broadcaster for 18 years, beginning with the 1975-76 team that made the ABA Finals. “The Nuggets had David Thompson and some of the brightest stars in the league. It was a windshield-wiper type of game – up and down the court. It was like basketball played in a blender, and the fans were part of it. They were loud and as soon as you stepped inside the arena, you felt it.”
At Brooklyn’s restaurant and bar across the street from the Pepsi Center, fans have packed the place for years but more often than not wore Avalanche colors. But late last season, with the NHL season canceled and the Nuggets on a hot streak, things began to change.
“The Nuggets were not that big a deal before, unless there was another star team coming in that everybody wanted to see,” said Ruthe Gleason, a Brooklyn’s waitress the past four years. “But after George Karl came in last year, there was a huge difference. We started getting a ton of Nuggets fans in here.”
Patrick Saunders can be reached at 303-820-5459 or psaunders@denverpost.com.
