Denver Nuggets
American basketball team
The Denver Nuggets are an American professional basketball team based in Denver. The Nuggets compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a member of the Northwest Division of the Western Conference. The team was originally founded as the Denver Larks in 1967 as a charter franchise of the American Basketball Association (ABA), but changed their name to the Rockets before the first season began due to a swift ownership change that came from the owners of the local Ringsby Rocket Truck Lines company. The Rockets then changed their name to the Nuggets on August 7, 1974, as a precautionary measure for their franchise to move from the ABA to the NBA. After the name change, the Nuggets played for the final ABA Championship title in 1976, losing to the New York Nets.
The team has had some periods of success, qualifying for the ABA playoffs in all but two seasons of the ABA's existence. The team made the 1976 ABA Finals, losing to the New York Nets. The team joined the NBA in 1976 after the ABA–NBA merger and qualified for the NBA playoffs in nine consecutive seasons in the 1980s and ten consecutive seasons from 2004 to 2013. In 2023, the Nuggets, led by Nikola Jokić and Jamal Murray, reached their first NBA Finals and defeated the Miami Heat to capture the franchise's first NBA championship. The Nuggets were the last of the four surviving former ABA teams to reach the NBA Finals, and the second former ABA team to win an NBA title (after the San Antonio Spurs). The Nuggets play their home games at Ball Arena, which they share with the Colorado Avalanche of the National Hockey League (NHL) and the Colorado Mammoth of the National Lacrosse League (NLL).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Denver Nuggets” as american basketball team. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as american basketball team. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q162954. VIAF identifies the subject as 132555710. The Library of Congress control number is n82245398. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1967, 1974, 1976 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “Denver Nuggets” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.