They came, they saw, they went bonkers.
Nuggets fans erupted inside the Pepsi Center on Wednesday night as their hometown team — led by a hometown hero — won the Western Conference semifinals against Dallas, 4-1, with an electric 124-110 win.
And, for the first time in 24 years, the Nuggets have advanced to the Western Conference finals.
The Mavericks closed to within 103-97 with seven minutes to go, but Carmelo Anthony hit a 3-pointer at the shot-clock buzzer, followed by a technical foul on Dallas’ Antoine Wright, and Denver pulled away.
It’s been a long time since a Nuggets team reached this rarified air. It was May 7, 1985, to be exact, when coach Doug Moe’s Nuggets defeated Utah to advance to the conference finals against the Los Angeles Lakers.
Tonight, the Nuggets will tune into Game 6 of the Lakers-Rockets series, to see if the Lakers can close out the series or if the Rockets will force a Game 7. If Houston wins the series, Denver has home-court advantage, because the Nuggets are seeded second in the West and Houston fifth. But if the Lakers win, they’ll have home court because they’re the No. 1 seed, just like last season, when they swept the Nuggets in the first round.
This is new territory for the Nuggets, but not for Chauncey Billups, who will be making his seventh consecutive appearance in the conference finals. The former Pistons star came up huge Wednesday, scoring 28 points to go with seven rebounds and 12 assists as Denver was never seriously threatened.
Nuggets forward Carmelo Anthony averaged exactly 30 points in the previous four games against Dallas, but by halftime on Wednesday, he already had 21. He finished with 30 points.
The series may not have been that competitive, but the Mavericks provided more tabloid juiciness than Miss California, from Dirk Nowitzki’s imprisoned girlfriend to owner Mark Cuban screaming an insult to Kenyon Martin’s mom to the handful of Mavericks fans who treated the Nuggets’ families like fraternity pledges.
As for the Nuggets, what makes this team so likable is that they weren’t predestined to be here.
This is a team of fighters. Kenyon Martin returned from two microfracture knee surgeries; Nene beat cancer; Chris Andersen beat substance abuse; Anthony and J.R. Smith are maturing in front of their fans; and Billups, Denver’s homegrown warrior, bounced among four different franchises before finding himself in Detroit, and now he’s back in Denver, where the hoops dream started, and where he’s making another one come true
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