LOS ANGELES — The Nuggets will indeed play at Pepsi Center on Monday, upset the wrong people — notably “The Animal,” “The Legend Killer” and, most-frightening of all, Vince McMahon.
Pepsi Center originally booked a World Wrestling Entertainment “Monday Night Raw” event for Memorial Day, but with the Nuggets in their first conference finals since 1985, the Pepsi Center had to bump the wrestlers. The Nuggets will play Game 4 that night, according to Paul Andrews, the executive vice president of Kroenke Sports Enterprises.
But McMahon, the WWE chairman, has a show to put on — as well as a live international broadcast—- and now he has no venue.
“I’m up the creek, and I don’t have a paddle either — I really don’t know what to do,” McMahon said Monday by phone. “We can’t reschedule the event. We can’t get out there as often as we would like for a television event, because we’re the second-largest traveling show in the world to Ringling Brothers. The amount of equipment we have is extraordinary.”
There have already been 10,000 tickets sold to the event and McMahon said he expects a sellout. WWE secured the Pepsi Center Aug. 15 and as recently as April 15, a week before the No. 2 seed Nuggets entered the playoffs, a the Pepsi Center sent a contract to WWE.
“There’s no provision in the contract whatsoever that states we could be preempted,” McMahon said. “We would have never played the date if we known we could be preempted. We’ve been working around NBA dates for a long, long time, and had we know that this was going to be something unceremoniously thrown out on, we never would have taken the date on a tentative basis. We don’t do that.”
Andrews said the Pepsi Center is working to reschedule the event.
As for McMahon, who is currently in Louisville for an event, he will have to make a decision possibly in the next 24 hours about where to take his traveling show.
“I don’t have any idea what I’m going to do, whether I’m going to produce a show out of a parking lot somewhere,” he said. “I have no idea what’s going to happen.”
