It’s easy to be cynical about the human side of sports these days, where everyone is a brand and it’s difficult to know what to believe. The dynamics that influence the impunity of the rich and powerful in America extend to sports, and the lack of loyalty expressed by the owners of the teams we love is returned in kind by players who know that they will become disposable as soon as a billionaire deems them so. Especially in the NBA when seemingly half the league always has an eye on their next destination.
But Aaron Gordon, also known as Mr. Nugget, is different. It’s impossible to be cynical about his journey to becoming perhaps the NBA’s most indispensable role player. He and his brother Drew were born with supreme athletic gifts, and Drew Gordon made a name for himself at UCLA and New Mexico, but not enough of one to be drafted by the NBA. He worked his tail off to get into the best league in the world, playing nine games for the Philadelphia 76ers during the 2014-15 season along with stops in the G League, Serbia, Sardinia, Turkey, France, Lithuania, Poland, Russia and Ukraine.
Drew was Aaron’s best friend, and he provided a model of hard work that his more talented brother followed en route to being drafted at the age of 19 by the Orlando Magic with the fourth overall pick in the 2014 NBA draft. Drew told Yahoo Sports that “being the older brother, having to set an example and be a role model, I couldn’t be more pleased with how he has progressed as a player and individually.”
After getting his feet wet learning the NBA game his first two seasons, Gordon began to establish himself as a player to be reckoned with. He never achieved the stardom he or the Magic had hoped for, and Gordon began to garner the moniker of a good stats/bad team guy, a backhanded compliment given to players the NBA intelligentsia believe could not replicate those efforts on a winning team.
The story of players like this usually is that they have trouble adjusting to any role where they are not the primary focus of offense on their team, and they eventually fade away into obscurity as the intelligentsia’s critique is proven true. Aaron Gordon not only bucked that trend, but provided a model for future high draft picks who don’t quite fit the mold that was created for them, despite still being good NBA players.
In the 2020-21 season, the Denver Nuggets had begun to truly fashion themselves as a contender, albeit with a glaring LeBron James-sized hole. Nikola Jokic was just beginning his ascent to becoming the NBA’s greatest player, but the Nuggets were being torched by large wings getting to the basket at will. Defense wins championships, as the saying goes, and the Nuggets were never going to win a championship without finding their defensive anchor.
Enter Aaron Gordon.
The Nuggets asked Gordon to effectively abandon the only NBA life he has ever known and accept a trade with a much more limited role as their fourth or fifth option on offense, and spend his nights doing all the dirty work that fourth overall picks are not asked to do. In a league filled with brands, it would have been easy for Gordon to reject this ask and keep plugging away at becoming the number one option the Magic wanted him to be, or go elsewhere to try to achieve that dream, but that’s not how he’s wired. He’s a winner who only cares about winning, in large part due to the influence his brother Drew had on him.
Gordon came to Denver and immediately transformed the Nuggets from a fun team who could score 130 points or give up 130 points on any given night to a true championship contender, and in his second full season in Denver, the Nuggets erased 47 years of misery and won their first NBA championship. As much as this was the story of NBA Finals MVP Nikola Jokic establishing himself as the standard of greatness in the modern NBA, this could not have happened without Aaron Gordon guarding a bunch of different great players along the way–ranging from guards like Anthony Edwards, Devin Booker and Jimmy Butler, to forwards like Karl-Anthony Towns, Kevin Durant, LeBron James, Anthony Davis and Bam Adebayo. He did it all, all while chasing down rebounds like a madman.
It’s easy to talk about sacrifice and making winning plays, but it’s much harder to go out and actually do it, and Aaron Gordon did the damn thing and made himself a Denver legend, earning the nickname Mr. Nugget. He is a man of the people, as evidenced by him going out shirtless into the streets of Denver immediately after winning his first NBA championship to celebrate with the people.
The Nuggets’ championship defense ran out of gas in a dispiriting game 7 collapse against Minnesota the following season, but that heartbreak paled in comparison to what Gordon would go through just a few weeks later. His brother Drew would die in a car crash at the age of 33, survived by his wife Angela, their sons Zayne (5), Brody (2) and Jayden (12). Aaron Gordon’s teammate Michael Porter Jr. told Andscape that “when that first happened, I was there with [Aaron]. It was me and him and KCP [ex-Nuggets teammate Kentavious Caldwell-Pope] ended up pulling up. We sat there, digested it, talked. And we were there for him. He’s held it down since the day it happened. That was his big brother.”
Gordon switched his number this season from his longtime 50 to Drew’s 32 to honor his brother, and no one would have blamed him for having a season weighed down by his heavy heart—especially after injuries took 31 games from him. Add in the chaos of the Nuggets’ internal war between ex-coach Michael Malone and ex-General Manager Calvin Booth becoming unbearable for the entire franchise, and Gordon had every reason to call this a lost season. Instead, he posted the best true shooting percentage of his career, buoyed by his best career free throw percentage and a shockingly good three-point percentage for a player who had always struggled from long range to varying degrees.
The Nuggets could have thrown in the towel after firing their head coach just a few games before the playoffs, but with Mr. Nugget, that’s not how they’re wired. They battled against one of the hottest teams in the NBA for seven grueling games in the first round, and they would not have won the series against the Los Angeles Clippers without Aaron Gordon’s heroics in Game 4 to slam home a buzzer beater to save one of the worst shots that Nikola Jokic has ever attempted and tie the series up going back to Denver.
Last night, the Nuggets began their second round series against the NBA’s best team in the Oklahoma City Thunder, who the oracles in the desert pegged at -700 favorites to advance. This team led by the only legitimate threat to Jokic’s MVP throne in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, flanked by dynamic young athletes all entering their athletic prime looked the part for 46 minutes, comfortably leading the Nuggets all game long, right up until the difference between a championship team and a young team with championship aspirations made itself clear.
Nikola Jokic played one of the all-time great Nikola Jokic games, willing the Nuggets back into it with a preposterous 42 point, 22 rebound and 6 assist performance only ever matched by George McGinnis, Wilt Chamberlain and Giannis Antetokounmpo, but the ultimate image of what championship mettle looks like was punctuated by Aaron Gordon. After Chet Holmgren clanged two agonizingly close free throws that could have extended Oklahoma City’s lead to three with just under ten seconds to play, Christian Braun grabbed the rebound, threw it up court to former legendary Thunder guard Russell Westbrook, who cut into the lane and found Aaron Gordon open behind the three-point line. A 29 percent shooter last season who teams were begging to shoot three pointers, now turned 43.6 percent three-point shooter this year put the exclamation point an entire offseason of hard work in the midst of unimaginable anguish with a moment that will live forever in Denver sports history.
Gordon brought his nephews with him to the postgame presser, and in true Aaron Gordon fashion, deferred to his teammates when asked about interim head coach David Adelman and Nikola Jokic both calling him the soul of the team. “Stick with it,” he told his nephews at the podium. “Be a demonstration of resiliency.” This is what leadership looks like both on and off the court.
Christian Braun told The Denver Post about a story last year where he was visiting his aunt who only had a few hours to live. She had long had a crush on Aaron Gordon, and she told her nephew that “I love you, but Aaron’s my favorite player.” Not knowing whether he would pick up, Braun called his teammate and said that Gordon “was literally sleeping in China. He didn’t have to answer the phone. But he picked up in the middle of the night. … He turned on his lights, got out of bed, showed her his new tattoo.” Braun continued, saying “she was kind of coming in and out of (consciousness) a little bit. And I showed her Aaron so she could see, and her eyes lit up, man.”
Aaron Gordon lights up every room he’s in. Whether it’s with his nephews off the court, in a hospital room halfway across the world, or in an arena where some poor defender made the mistake of leaving him open. He is the consummate teammate and professional, and if you ever find yourself losing faith in the goodness of sports, just take one look at Aaron Gordon and you will reclaim it in no time.
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