Nuggets’ historic NBA Finals run passionate family affair

Although Nicholas Owens cannot walk, he has been there every step of the way with the Nuggets during their run to the first NBA Finals in team history.

When Owens rolls his wheelchair into the Denver locker room before every home game to study video of Kevin Durant, LeBron James or the next superstar standing in the way of a championship 56 long basketball seasons in the making, center Nikola Jokic greets Nicholas with these words: “Good to see you, my brother.”

If you did not grow up with this franchise, forced to fight for every smidgeon of respect since the Denver Rockets fired their first jump shot as an outlaw in the renegade ABA back in 1967, maybe it’s impossible to fully understand the hullabaloo shaking down thunder in the Rocky Mountains.

What we’re witnessing is more than a quest for a championship by a team born during the 1960s, back when Hampden Avenue marked the end of local civilization rather than the beginning of endless suburban sprawl.

With only Miami left to conquer in the NBA Finals, this unprecedented Nuggets run is a passionate family affair of the heart.

“We built this team, all of us together, players and coaches and owners and ticket sales people and fans. Maybe we’re different from any organization in pro sports, because this really is a family, and we’ve been waiting for this moment for a long, long time,” coach Michael Malone told me as we stood in the hallway of Ball Arena, where the Nuggets are undefeated in eight games while rolling to a 12-3 record in the playoffs.

With a joyful sense of purpose, Jokic and this happy family have not only eliminated the Timberwolves, Suns and Lakers, but also silenced national pundits who trashed Denver’s legitimacy as a title contender.

Nearly 38 years ago, Owens was born with spina bifida, a birth defect that leaves a section of the spinal cord and nerves exposed through an opening in the back. And since he was a child learning to count as high as the biggest numbers in the box score, nobody has been more devoted to the Nuggets.

The scrapbook of team history is plastered with snapshots of Owens’ life. He has contributed in roles ranging from child ambassador and ball boy to his current duty as a game-day consultant, befriending and inspiring a generation of players from Dikembe Mutombo to Jokic. They call him Nick, except when shouting his full name as the exclamation point on a “W.”

“NICK-OH-LAS!” bellows veteran Jeff Green as Denver teammates bounce off the court and fist-bump Owens after victories at home.

But when the Nuggets won the Western Conference Finals by sweeping away the tradition-rich Lakers in Los Angeles, he watched on television from Colorado. “Go get me a broom!” Owens sweetly ordered his parents, Sherwood and Maryianne, during the final seconds of Denver’s 113-111 victory in Game 4.

Then, broom in hand, Owens needed to sweep away tears in his eyes.

“I did cry, because I was so happy,” he said. “But the job’s not done. We still have work to do. Four more wins.”

During these heady days, being confined to a wheelchair can’t stop Owens. His heart soars toward a hoop dream close enough to touch.

Dan and Alex want company

Photographs of legends adorn the walls of Malone’s office at Nuggets headquarters. Dan Issel. Alex English. Dikembe Mutombo.

“I had those photos put up in my office on Day 1 of Year 1 with the team,” Malone explained. “I was a history major in college. And I wanted to connect with the Nuggets’ past.”

Issel and English scored 41,069 points between them in Denver. Their jersey numbers — 44 and 2 — have been retired and reside in the arena rafters. They would like some new company up there.

“Not every team in the league has a championship banner in the rafters. It’s the peak of the pyramid. A championship banner would be awesome to see for all the former Nuggets that love the team and have an affinity for the city of Denver,” said English, whose presence will add a royal aura to proceedings during Game 2 of The Finals.

“Seeing the Nuggets in the NBA Finals? I don’t want to say it’s weird. But it’s definitely different. The usual suspects — the Lakers, Celtics and Warriors — have been eliminated. It’s a delight, because the Nuggets haven’t been there. It’s a changing of the NBA guard. I believe this Nuggets team not only has a chance to win one championship, but championships for years to come.”

Issel won a “chip” in the ABA with the 1975 Kentucky Colonels alongside towering Artis Gilmore and little Louie Dampier. With the Nuggets, however, the best efforts of a man called “Horse” were thwarted in the playoffs by teams too tough to handle, from the Trail Blazers of Bill Walton to Magic Johnson and the Showtime Lakers.

“Not to besmirch the Heat, but Magic, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and James Worthy aren’t playing for Miami. I see the Nuggets winning it, for a very simple reason: They have the best talent,” Issel said.

“Nikola Jokic is easily the best Nugget of all time. He should have won the MVP three times in a row. The people that voted for Joel Embiid now look kind of silly. And Jamal Murray? Before it’s all said and done, he might be the second-best player to ever wear a Nuggets uniform.”

Wait a second. Jokic and Murray are a more talented tandem than Issel and English?

Yes, sir.

“As far as I know,” Issel said, “Alex and I aren’t making a comeback.”

These Nuggets, however, consider it a privilege to honor the memory of 2 and 44. After falling short against the Lakers seven times in the playoffs, Jokic and Murray punched their ticket to the Finals by getting vengeance in the names of English and Issel.

“To do it against that team (in L.A.) made it even more special because of guys like Dan Issel, Doug Moe, just the great players and great people that have represented this franchise for so many years. This was for them, as well,” Malone said.

“In the moment, it’s us, our coaching staff, our players. But this was for all Nuggets.”

A $500,000 Basketball Jones

As Mimi Yen did the math in her head, I could hear the ca-ching of every cent emotionally invested by a season-ticket holder of 47 years.

What’s 47 seasons multiplied by two seats and 41 home dates before the playoffs?

Roundball madness.

“I’m a happy idiot about basketball with a Nuggets problem,” said Yen, chuckling at the cost of her stubborn devotion that began when the team joined the NBA in 1976.

“I’ve never really thought about how much my husband and I spent on tickets. But it must be at least $500,000. A half million dollars? I’m sorry you brought it up. I don’t know where I’d be right now if I didn’t spend all those years watching the Nuggets. Maybe on a tropical island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by sharks.”

This feisty 87-year-old has forgotten more about Nuggets history than most of us have ever known.

“The first time I saw Michael Jordan play,” Yen recalled, “I thought: ‘Oh, my gosh. He’s just like David Thompson.’” She recoils in horror at all those years the Celtics visited Denver and the building was packed with green-clad spectators. Yen swears she never missed a home game, just as she now admits to a crush on rookie Christian Braun for the same reason Bill Hanzlik once was the apple of her eye: DE-FENSE!

Truth be known, it was Yen who dragged Bill the radiologist to McNichols Arena on snowy winter nights. Although her devoted husband died in 2005, the basketball jones lived on.

But Yen, who sits in the first row within shouting distance of the visitors bench, feels the clock ticking on her last shot to see the Nuggets win a championship.

“I never thought I’d live to see it,” confided Yen, who sent me an email six years ago, expressing fear she would go to heaven before Denver reached the NBA Finals. “But now I’m as close to a championship as I’ve ever been, just like the Nuggets are.”

Here’s the rub. Father Time is undefeated, and Yen no longer feels safe driving a car at night. Her iron-woman streak must end at 47. “I’ve never quit on the Nuggets,” she said, “but I’ll be 88 by the time next season starts and I am giving up my tickets.”

“Oh. My. God,” she said. “I’d be so excited if the Nuggets won the championship. I would think all those 47 years were worth it.”

Two dogs and soothsayer

The game-day ritual begins with Carrie Underwood and Ludacris cranking up the volume to 10 and rattling the bedroom walls.

In the Owens household, where spina bifida has never been allowed to win, Nicholas’ parents always awaken him on the morning of Nuggets home games to the beat from “The Champion,” a musical mash-up of country and rap.

After beating the Heat in the series opener, I’d love to hear the Denver crowd sing along to Owens’ fight song:

I am invincible, unbreakable

Unstoppable, unshakeable

They knock me down, I get up again

I am the champion,

You’re gonna know my name

You can’t hurt me now, I can’t feel the pain

Around Valentine’s Day, after the Nuggets had already won 40 times and put a firm grip on the No. 1 seed in the West, Nuggets president Josh Kroenke parked his black SUV at the arena and tended to the two dogs that regularly accompany him to work.

By pure happenstance, Owens and his father were rolling into the building at the same time. But what happened next now seems decreed by the basketball gods.

After exchanging hellos, Nicholas eyed his right hand and divulged a premonition to Kroenke.

“Josh,” Owens declared, “on this finger lies the ring.”

Say what? There was no jewelry to be seen on Owens’ ring finger, except in the vivid imagination of a 37-year-old Nuggets employee in a wheelchair.

“We were on a big run and after every win, I’d look at the ring finger of my right hand,” Owens noted. “So I said: ‘Josh, that championship ring is going right here, and when we win it all, it’s going to look really nice.’”

For decades, the franchise’s championship dreams have been dashed by everybody and everything from a strange interloper named Dancin’ Harry to the curse of a bad inbounds pass against the Lakers, as fans old enough to have slapped a “Native” sticker on the bumper of a Ford Bronco remember all too well.

If a lazy reporter with a lazy take had bothered to dig two shovels of dirt from sports history in the Rocky Mountains, Chris Mannix of Sports Illustrated wouldn’t have ever said something so stupid as, “Frankly, the Nuggets aren’t very interesting.”

On the eve of the conference finals matchup against the Lakers, Owens reached out with a text to Jeff Bzdelik, who lived the misery of coaching a shamelessly tanking team to a 17-65 record during the 2002-03 season in order to draft Carmelo Anthony and end the darkest period in Nuggets history.

Coach Buzz promptly returned a text: “I am hoping they win and you get yourself a NBA world championship ring! Nobody deserves it more than you!”

A hymn for unsung heroes

Nuggets equipment manager Sparky Gonzales walked slowly off the court, guiding an 18-inch floor mop with his right hand while steering the squeaky wheels on a rack of basketballs in his left hand.

The simple sight of Gonzales grinding through his daily chores made me grin. Why?

The Post assigned me to my first reporting duty with the Nuggets in 1983, back when Moe’s best bit of coaching was to leap from the bench, wave his arms maniacally and scream at English as the silky forward dribbled at a defender: “Take him, Alex!”

Every frame of my fondest Nuggets memories is photo-bombed by the hard-working presence of Gonzales in the background. It seems as if Sparky has always been here, because he has.

“It’s fun. Beats working,” he said. “I take my attitude from Moe, who used to tell me, ‘Spark, there’s a lot of stiffs out there working. And we’re not one of them.’”

But I want to know: Why do players cherish Gonzales?

“They don’t,” wise-cracked forward Michael Porter Jr., before fessing up. “No, I’m playing.”

Batman wouldn’t be a superhero without Alfred. For 45 years, Gonzales has been the basketball concierge to the Nuggets. He started as a teenage security guard posted at the locker room door. At age 62, he still works the 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. shift on game day, doing everything from stretching a tight hamstring prior to tipoff to calming nerves when a panicked player forgets where he stored his Rolex.

“He’s the OG around here,” Porter said. “He’s definitely a big part of our team culture, always bringing the upbeat attitude. … We just love that dude.”

Champions like to talk about sportsball as family. The Nuggets, however, don’t require a championship ring to validate their family values.

Lisa Johnson, who celebrates her 42nd anniversary as a member of the team’s front-office staff next week, is a Denver girl who grew up, landed a job with the Nuggets fresh out of the University of Denver and got married in 1996.

“Do you remember who gave me away at my wedding?” asked Johnson, stumping me. “Dan Issel.”

“I remember it well,” Issel said. “I was honored to be part of Lisa’s wedding.”

Johnson’s father passed away long before the Baltimore Claws traded Issel to the Nuggets. Cheri Issel, wife of the Hall of Fame center, was present to offer Johnson a comforting shoulder in the hospital when her mother died far too young.

“Lisa has always thought of us as her surrogate parents,” said Issel, who ate dinner Tuesday on a double date with the Johnsons and will be Lisa’s guest of honor when he and Cheri attend Game 1 of the Finals.