DENVER—Every NBA champion has its own way of celebrating, and I’m pretty sure the Denver Nuggets invented a new one Monday night: They made it rain Champagne from the ceiling. Nikola Jokic, the newly crowned Finals MVP, sprayed the largest bottle of Moet you’ve ever seen into the massive, illuminated gold Nuggets logo mounted above the home team’s locker room at Ball Arena. Kentavious Caldwell-Pope uncorked another. Aaron Gordon fired away with glee. Before long, the logo had become a massive, glowing sprinkler head, dispersing a golden, bubbly mist over the rowdiest, bounciest, smokiest party you’ve ever seen. (Since last June in Boston, at least.)
At a glance, a championship celebration can look like chaos—so many bouncing players, coaches, and staffers; so many cigars and extra-tall beers and magnum Champagne bottles; so many cameras and reporters and well-wishers; so much smoke. And it is! “The best chaos,” Caldwell-Pope clarified as the bottles keep popping, “and the best moment and experience for everybody.”
This title was laden with meaning: the first in franchise history, the first for Jokic, the first for coach Michael Malone. It served as the culmination of years of savvy scouting and roster tweaking, as well as the final rebuttal to a world of skeptics who had dismissed the Nuggets as too injured or too flaky, insufficiently talented, or simply not gritty enough. Their celebration was a mix of jubilation and told-you-so defiance.
“We won as a family!” Malone shouted above the din as the first round of bottles popped, at 9:37 p.m. “We stayed together as a family!” The entire room answered back: “Family!”
Something else I learned here Monday: All that happy chaos requires a lot of planning, and a small army of NBA and team staffers, from multiple departments, to set it in motion, in a very short amount of time. “Organized chaos,” one league official calls it. The league granted GQ early access to the locker room, and an afternoon walk-through, to see it all unfold.
The most striking part? How quickly the league can convert a locker room into a private club. And how anxious those minutes are for everyone involved in staging the scene—without any certainty that the party will even happen.
The Nuggets, who held a 3-1 lead in the series, were clinging to a four-point lead with less than four minutes to go in Game 5. Fifteen sets of goggles—standard eye protection from carbonated alcohol—were arranged on a locker-room countertop, just below a TV showing the game. But within minutes, the Heat had taken an 89-88 lead, and Nuggets equipment manager Sparky Gonzales was hurriedly tossing all those goggles into a cart and wheeling them away.
As the NBA staffers who work these clinching scenarios every year will tell you: There’s no greater nightmare than having a dejected team walk into a locker room decked with tarps and Champagne. Or distributing the wrong set of commemorative T-shirts and hats (since the league always orders full sets for both teams). And nothing is more stressful than a Game 7, when workers might not even know which swag to grab or which locker room to prep until moments before the final buzzer.
That was the case in 2016, when the defending champion Warriors held a four-point lead over the Cavaliers with less than six minutes to play in Oakland. Staffers who had been camped out at a literal midpoint between the two locker rooms started making initial preparations for a Warriors celebration – only to reverse course when the Cavs’ Kyrie Irving sank an instantly legendary 3-pointer to break a tie with 53 seconds left.
Or recall Game 6 of the 2013 Finals, when the Spurs were within seconds of defeating the Heat, and the yellow security ropes were already in place around the court—until Ray Allen’s dramatic 3-pointer tied the game and forced overtime.
Or Game 7 in 2010, when the Lakers and Celtics dueled down to the final seconds, while antsy NBA staffers—one armed with a duffel bag of Lakers merch, the other with a bag of Celtics gear—perched in opposite vomitories, wondering which of them would do the mad scramble after the buzzer to get all those hats and T-shirts into the right hands.
“It’s just this rush,” Christopher Arena, the NBA’s head of on-court and brand partnerships (and, unofficially, the master of all things trophies and uniforms), told me in the days before the Nuggets were crowned champs. Arena worked that game in 2010, and was manning the Celtics bag, which had to be disposed of when the Lakers pulled out the win. “You sprint back, and you drop it in a secure location they give us, and then you're sprinting back onto the court and help everybody with the ceremony.”
Or imagine you’re the staffer cradling the Larry O’Brien trophy in the tunnel, waiting for the final buzzer…only to have the potential champion stumble in the final minute. That happened in 2008, when the Celtics failed to close out the Lakers in Game 5—and the person carrying the trophy had to quickly pivot (in high heels!) and run the other way, lest either team see Larry before it was time.
None of these folks have a rooting interest, of course. But there was a palpable relief Monday as the Nuggets closed in on the title—thus averting the need to regroup and do this all over again in Miami, where the tiny visitors locker room would have made things much more challenging.
Here’s what it takes to turn a locker room into party central. Back in Denver, several nervous moments pass, as a half-dozen league and team staffers watch the Nuggets build a thin lead again—a Bruce Brown putback, a couple free throws from Caldwell-Pope—and now the Heat are starting to unravel. “That’s just not the shot,” ABC’s Jeff Van Gundy remarks on TV as Jimmy Butler misfires a tough 3-pointer with 24.7 seconds left, with Miami down by three. Now the locker-room conversion can begin in earnest.
Nuggets staffers start wheeling away all the players’ chairs, to a back room. At 8:59 p.m., an NBA staffer arrives with a huge duffel bag packed with championship gear. The Heat miss their last shot, a Kyle Lowry 3-pointer, with 12.5 seconds left. Caldwell-Pope grabs the rebound, and the final buzzer sounds at 9:01 p.m. Things are about to get hectic.
Staffers quickly line a table with a dozen magnum-size bottles of Moet, along with a half-dozen customized, 750-liter Michelob Ultra bottles, an array of black championship towels and pennants, and two different types of branded goggles (Moet for some players, Nike for others, depending on their personal sponsorships). Pop-up banners, featuring Michelob Ultra and the Finals logo, are quickly mounted on collapsible stands. Packing is affixed to the backs of pennants and banners.
At 9:04 p.m., a group of workers rush in with four big ladders. Their mission: Install floor-to-ceiling pressure rods, to hold up all the plastic tarping needed to protect lockers, personal belongings and the high-definition TV. Everyone is barking directions. “Go down a little bit! Now go up! Watch out for the sprinkler heads!” The room is filled with clanging, squeaking, the ripping of tape, the banging of bottles, the squawking of CB radios. “You guys work fast!” someone exclaims. “Bobby says we need more plastic!” someone else announces.
At 9:06, the first wave of league-employed photographers and videographers arrive. The small task force of a half-dozen has ballooned to 25. The first Nuggets team official to pop in? Mike Penberthy, a front-office consultant and shooting coach, who won his first two rings as a role player alongside Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant in the early 2000s. A massive black banner—embossed with Nuggets and Finals logos, inscriptions reading “22-23 NBA Champions” and the team’s slogan, “Bring It In”—is laid across the floor, Amid all the bustle and frantic note-taking, I nearly get sealed behind a wall of plastic.
Not everything is going smoothly. Some of those tarps aren’t in place yet. Can that one cover that wall? Probably, a worker says. “I’d like to turn that probably into a most definitely,” his co-worker replies. Someone loses their grip in the process. “Pole coming down!”
By 9:20, there are 30 people in the room, including NBA photographer Nathaniel Butler, who’s been shooting the Finals since 1986. (“Until you actually see it or experience it, you don't really grasp the magnitude and the scope,” Butler had told me earlier. “I've ruined a few cameras over the years. Shaq got me one time really good. Just a total dump of champagne on me while we're taking the pictures.”)
A few minutes later, with everything finally in place, the small army of locker-room preppers start to disperse through a back exit, and a Nuggets employee exclaims, “Ten-win seasons! I remember watching 10 wins!”
“Sparky, how much time do we have?” someone asks. The reply: “They’re already coming in!” At 9:26, Jokic and Caldwell-Pope are the first players to burst in, and Caldwell-Pope is pleased to see a collection of Champagne bottles and beer cans awaiting. “Oh, I got all this by my locker!” Jeff Green, a 15-year veteran who’s played for 12 teams and has just won his first championship, shouts, “I’ve been waiting! I’ve been waiting for this shit!”
The room quickly fills again, this time with jubilant players and coaches instead of workers. Goggles are going on. “Everybody grab a bottle of Champagne!” someone announces. “Pop that shit!” a player yells, and at 9:32 p.m. the corks are finally flying – followed by a lot of hugging, spraying, shouting, whooping, singing, and dancing. Stan Kroenke, the 75-year-old Nuggets owner, is bobbing his head (adorned with a black championship hat) to “Lowdown,” by Lil Baby.
The organized chaos has quickly turns joyful. Eventually, the trophy arrives, sparking several more rounds of whoops and selfies. As the merriment continues, the tarps began to pull away. Assistant coach Popeye Jones accidentally bumps a pole, letting a whole sheet of plastic dip.
“Hectic!” says Aaron Gordon, before rejoining the fray. (And then, eventually, taking his one-man celebration into the streets of Denver.)
“It’s pure happiness,” says veteran center Thomas Bryant. “I can’t even describe this, man.”
On one side of a sagging tarp, the TV is showing a dejected Butler and Lowry at their postgame press conference. On the other, the Nuggets are drenched in euphoria.
“I see a bunch of guys who worked really, really hard…who achieved something special together, genuinely love each other,” says Nuggets assistant general manager Tommy Balcetis. “We’re just enjoying the chaos fully. I hope it never ends.”