Championship and get out of here: The zany, true story of the Colorado 14ers ·

25 Jun 2024, 00:00

Tim Wiens knew his grand experiment was flatlining.

The plan to build a suburban arena at the foot of a sprawling residential development, a state-of-the-art building that would host big-name music acts one night and exciting minor-league sports the next, had been met with eager anticipation just three years earlier. But now, in the spring of 2009, with many in the United States still reeling from the economic collapse that began the previous year, the jig was up. Wiens, a banker and real estate developer who was one of the architects of that venture dreamed up in Broomfield, Colo., already had a foot out the door.

So as the Colorado 14ers, the three-year-old NBA Developmental League franchise for which Bob MacKinnon served as head coach, general manager, primary marketer, you name it, prepared to enter the playoffs after a first-place run during the regular season, Wiens needed a straight answer.

“Tim calls me into his office and says, ‘Bob, tell me the truth. Do you have a chance to win this thing?'” MacKinnon recalled. “Because you being in the playoffs, every round just costs me more money.’ So I said, ‘Yeah, Tim. I think we can.’ He said, ‘OK, well, if you win the first game, make sure you win all of them.'”

A few short weeks later, the 14ers were raising the NBADL trophy as the first professional basketball franchise in Colorado to win a championship. Then, two months after a group of talented-but-overlooked players and their do-it-all coach trimmed down the nets inside the Broomfield Event Center, the 14ers were no more, sold to a group that included Mavericks general manager Donnie Nelson and moved to Frisco, Texas. They now play in the ever-expanding G League as the Texas Legends, their roots at the base of the Rocky Mountains largely forgotten.

“I was pretty surprised by it,” said Eddie Gill, an NBA journeyman from Aurora, Colo., who played parts of two seasons with the 14ers. “You think that a team winning championship in a city is a good enough reason to stay.”

Eleven years after the 14ers left town on the ultimate high note, the Nuggets are still searching for the right opportunity to build a minor-league franchise. Denver is one of only two teams in the NBA, along with the Portland Trail Blazers, that doesn’t have its own G League affiliate. So the Nuggets develop their young players who still need pre-NBA seasoning by sending them to various other affiliates across the league, from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas to Chicago.

If and when the Nuggets do finally have a franchise of their own, they’d be wise to infuse it with the same spirit of that group from the nascent D-League, a team that went to two championship games in its three years of existence and helped launch the successful careers of dozens of players in that span, from Rockets forward P.J. Tucker to Sonny Weems, a former Nuggets guard who has forged a highly lucrative career overseas. It was a franchise that, despite the economic hardships that engulfed it, used a breathtaking pace — with a little help from “the best happy hour in town” — to author one of the brightest and zaniest chapters in the state’s basketball history, albeit it a largely forgotten one.

“After I left the D-League, I probably played in 40 or 50 countries,” said Dominique Coleman, a former University of Colorado star guard who played a key role on the 14ers’ 2009 title team. “I was able to see the world. You’re talking about a kid who came up in tough times and didn’t even know what the Eiffel Tower was, and now I’m walking under it. I didn’t understand the magnitude of it when I was playing, but when I looked back, I was just like, ‘Man, you really lived it.’

“And that all started with the 14ers.”

One of Joe Wolf’s first assignments in his NBA playing career landed him in Denver, where he was tasked with backing up a young Nuggets rookie center named Dikembe Mutombo.

“I spoke a little French, and one of the many languages Dikembe spoke was French, so every once in a while we’d throw in some French to each other,” Wolf said. “Not that mine was nearly as good as his, but I could throw him an alley-oop every once in a while.”

Wolf played with the Nuggets from 1990 to 1992, then signed with Denver for a second stint during the 1997-98 season. Eight years after that, Wolf was coaching in anonymity, guiding the Idaho Stampede of the Continental Basketball Association, when an opportunity to return to Colorado arose. Gary Hunter, who at the time was the commissioner of the CBA, was taking a new job as the president of Broomfield Sports, the entity that would manage operations of a new minor-league basketball team getting set to move into a brand new arena and play its first season in the growing D-League, which had launched in 2001.

When Wolf arrived in Colorado to take the job in August of 2006, the 6,000-seat Broomfield Event Center was still a couple months away from its November opening. So he set up his office inside Weins’ FirsTier bank.

“So I wasn’t only focusing on basketball, but I was doing loans and mortgages, too,” Wolf joked.

The wait was worth it. When Wolf first walked into the new arena, he was blown away by the accommodations.

“I was coming from the CBA, where I was taping guys’ ankles, sweeping the floor and getting the clocks set up,” Wolf said. “My assistant coach and I were doing it all. We got to a much nicer establishment in Colorado. What an arena it was for a minor-league team. To have our offices right in between the arena you play on and a huge practice floor, which had a full court and two full-length side courts. You had room for one set of bleachers on one side so that you could run some kind of exhibitions there. It was just a phenomenal arena.”

Von Wafer drives to the hoop against the Los Angeles D-Fenders at Staples Center January 26, 2007. (Photo by Noah Graham/NBAE via Getty Images)

It didn’t take Wolf long to realize the talent he had on his 2006-07 team. There was Von Wafer, who was trying to resurrect his career after the Los Angeles Lakers, who selected him 39th overall in the 2005 NBA Draft, cast him aside after one season. There was Lou Amundson, who had played his prep basketball at nearby Monarch High School before attending UNLV. He earned the D-League’s rookie of the year award that season, a jumping off point for an 10-year NBA career. And then there was P.J. Tucker, a second-round pick in 2006 by the Raptors.

“He was tough, no question about it,” Wolf said of Tucker. “He was also in the stage where he couldn’t understand why he was playing in the D-League and not for the Raptors. It took him three or four games to realize that the guys in the D-League are extremely hungry and want your spot with the Raptors. Nothing is given. Every time I see P.J., he comes up and thanks me for the fact of giving him the opportunity to understand who he was and what the process was for him at that point. It made him a more mature player. He didn’t like being down there. It didn’t sit well with him the first couple weeks. And after he adjusted to the fact that his responsibility as a professional athlete is to go out there and compete, boy, he got a lot better.”

The 14ers began hitting their stride just as the playoffs approached in 2007. Back then, the postseason format featured eight teams, with single-game elimination in each of the three rounds. Wins over Albuquerque and Idaho put the 14ers, in their debut season, into the championship game, where they faced a Dakota Wizards team coached by Dave Joerger.

With seven seconds left in the regulation, the 14ers held a three-point lead. Problem was, that meant Dakota still had time to get the ball in the hands of Darius Rice, who was in the midst of one of the greatest individual performances in D-League history.

“Darius Rice went for 52 points on us,” Wolf said. “He had never had a game like that. He hit 11 3s. And he wasn’t even starting. It’s one of those games where you just say, ‘Maaaan!'”

When the inbound pass went to Rice a few feet outside the 3-point line, he pump-faked a 14ers defender and launched, burying the shot that tied the game. Rice, a former University of Miami star, never reached the NBA. But he added eight more points in overtime to wrestle the championship away from 14ers.

“That 3-pointer that we gave up at the end regulation, to this day I still have a hard time with it,” Wolf said. “You wonder what you could have done differently. But it was a heck of a year. Our guys improved and we gave ourselves a chance. Unfortunately, we just came up one possession short.”

By the time the 2007-08 season rolled around, the 14ers had an almost entirely new roster. For Wolf, that was a source of pride.

Many of the players on that first 14ers team caught on with bigger opportunities the next season. Wafer had been signed by the Nuggets. Tucker signed a big contract with a team in Israel, the start of a lucrative overseas career before he returned to the NBA in 2012. Amundson was beginning a productive two-year run with the Phoenix Suns. Pooh Jeter was in Ukraine, starting a successful run overseas that has continued to this day in China.

“When you take a young team — I imagine I had eight to 10 rookies in 2007 — and you give them all enough quality reps and they show what they can do, our responsibility as minor-league coaches is to make them better so that they can go make more money as a professional, whether that be in the NBA or overseas or wherever that may be,” Wolf said. “That’s what I always stress to my young team. Our job is to make you guys better. We had guys that just blew up throughout that year and became phenomenal players. They went on to make a lot of money. That’s what you love as a coach. Now, do you have to re-tool every year? Yeah, but that’s the fun part of it.”

The 14ers, led by Elton Brown and Eddie Gill, who played 187 games in the NBA, finished 29-21 in their second season, but their playoff run ended with a first-round loss to the Los Angeles D-Fenders.

When the season ended, Wolf was ready to pursue his own NBA dream. When he began coaching as an assistant at William & Mary in 2003, he had given himself a five-year window to make it to the NBA. As much as the D-League was and is still considered a pit stop for players on the way to more lucrative opportunities, the same is true of coaches, general managers, referees, PR officials or anyone else working in the minor-league system.

“On literally the last day of this five-year plan, (then Milwaukee Bucks head coach) Scott Skiles called me while I was in the equipment room taking inventory, shutting it down for the end of the season,” Wolf said. “He says, ‘I think I might have a position for you.’ I said, ‘Your timing couldn’t be any better.'”

For more than one reason.

As Wiens, the co-owner of the 14ers and the manager of the city-owned arena, began looking for a new coach for his basketball team, he already knew his endeavor was on the ropes. The idea that he and co-owner John Frew had when constructing plans for the arena and the surrounding residential development was a minor-league version of what Stan Kroenke had done with Pepsi Center, populating it with teams he owned and filling it with concerts on nights the Nuggets and Avalanche weren’t playing.

The problem was Broomfield Event Center wasn’t attracting the big-ticket concert acts it had hoped it could book. Many nights, the arena sat empty as Wiens and his team struggled to cement rapport with promoters. When the venue opened in November 2006, with a Bonnie Raitt concert, music fans struggled to find parking. It wasn’t even clear how to pull into the arena off the US 36 highway.

Then there was the matter of the built-in competition. The Broomfield Event Center sat just 15 miles away from the Pepsi Center in Downtown Denver, and with the Nuggets in the middle of their own resurgence behind superstar Carmelo Anthony, Weins and his team were losing the battle for the area’s entertainment dollars, which were already shrinking due to the economic crisis.

“I think Tim at that time he interviewed me for the job (in the fall of 2008) knew it would be the last year for the 14ers,” said Bob MacKinnon, who was hired to replace Wolf. “But he didn’t tell me that at the time.”

Dominique Coleman wasn’t approaching his tryout with the 14ers in 2008 with much optimism. One year earlier, at a tryout in front of Wolf, Coleman was sure he had nailed it. Having just completed his final season at the University of Colorado, the 6-foot-3 guard from Oakland, Calif., felt he had been the best player on the floor in the workout.

He was going to make the team, spend a few months in the D-League and the launch himself into the NBA.

“I’m thinking, ‘I just whooped everybody’s ass,'” Coleman said. “So I’m good.”

Instead, Coleman got the call that he hadn’t made the cut. He was dumbfounded. He settled on a last-minute deal with a team in Finland during the 2007-08 season, but he struggled to gain traction. Tryouts with two other D-League teams came up empty. Coleman’s career already appeared to be on the ropes.

“I was just looking for my shot,” he said.

On Nov. 6, 2008, Coleman’s name was one of many on the board for MacKinnon and his lone assistant, Casey Owens. MacKinnon’s new role with the 14ers meant he was also the team’s general manager, so he was faced with constructing the mostly brand new team he was about to coach.

“We got the last list of players — and it’s 300 players — at about 11 p.m. the night before the draft,” MacKinnon said. “So Casey and I were literally in our locker room making our draft board up until about 5 in the morning. Then, we were doing a fan thing where we actually had our draft at our bar. We did giveaways and things like that, and Casey and I ran the whole thing. And we still managed to have a great draft.”

In the sixth round, MacKinnon selected Coleman, impressed by his workout a month earlier. Coleman was relieved but frustrated. He was convinced he should have already had a year of experience in the D-League. And being drafted so late, he wasn’t sure he’d have a real chance to put up the kind of numbers that would lead to a career promotion.

Then Coleman and the rest of an almost entirely new batch of 14ers gathered at the Broomfield Event Center days after the draft. MacKinnon, who had begun his coaching career as a college assistant in 1982, was entering his first year coaching in the professional ranks. He shared a simply philosophy with his new group, a plan that galvanized the players immediately.

“When I got the job, I sat down and said, ‘OK, why do guys play in this league?'” MacKinnon said. “They do it because they want to get a better job. So in order to do that, they need to get numbers. So my whole philosophy behind the way we played was that I wanted us to play fast enough and with enough tempo that each guy had a chance to get his individual numbers so that they don’t have to worry about that.”

The 14ers in 2008-09 led the D-League in pace, scoring an incredible 123 points per game. They pressed and trapped the entire game and sent four players to the offensive glass. If the Nuggets down the road were known for moving at a Ferrari-type pace to tire opponents and rack up points, the 14ers were a Bugatti.

“Being in an environment like that, players could easily get 15 or 20 shots,” said Joe Dabbert, a veteran on the 2008-09 time who grew up in nearby Platte Canyon, Colo. “You’re one through eight guys were going to get a lot of shots, so you didn’t have anybody worrying and saying, ‘I need to get my points. I need to get my shots.’ There were shots to go around. Coach MacKinnon had a goal to get up 100 shots a game or whatever it was, as a team. That was his goal. Let’s push the ball and get up as many shots as you can.”

The 14ers fully leaned into their high-scoring ways with an in-arena promotion that was right out of the movie Semi-Pro. Anytime Colorado scored at least 30 points in a quarter, beers at the concession stands would cost just $1.

“The way we played, I think there were only two quarters all year where we didn’t hit 30 points,” MacKinnon said. “One of players, Josh Davis, who is from the area and still lives in the area, he had a bunch of buddies who came every game and they would say, ‘This is the best happy hour in town.’ They would just wait until the end of each quarter. You’d look up at the start of each quarter and there’s be nobody in the stands because they’d all be in the beer line.”

Coleman was at a nightclub after a 14ers win one night when he was approached by a young woman, who simply said, “Thank you so much!”

“I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’ She’s like, ‘I went in there with 15 bucks and I got drunk because you guys keep scoring,'” Coleman said, laughing at the memory.

The select fans who showed up weren’t the only ones having fun that year. The D-League may have been a pit stop, and each member of the 14ers was trying to get somewhere better, but that didn’t stop that group from developing a special bond. They’d spend many nights after games shooting pool at a bar near the arena.

“Later on in my career, the teams that did things like that were always the most successful during the 10 years I played,” Coleman said. “Those were the biggest moments. I remember Kansas was into town and I brought all those guys to the game in Boulder. CU lost, but it was good to bring those guys to my school and just see the atmosphere. It was just a good experience. It felt like home.”

The good times rolled even when players knew they were about to face the punishing affects of minor-league travel.

“Those flights were unreal. You’re talking about 5 a.m. flights. Depending on what city you’re in, you’re going to step out after a game. So you’re talking about getting on the plane and just passing out,” Coleman said.

But as the 14ers kept winning, the franchise kept losing money. Attendance was dropping despite MacKinnon’s herculean efforts to get people in the stands.

“I was trying to save the franchise,” he said. “I was going to 5Ks and running and giving away tickets afterwards. I’d go speak at community breakfasts, go to malls with players and stand there giving out tickets to games. I did all that kind of stuff.”

“He and Casey did a lot of stuff that coaches that level shouldn’t have to be doing,” Dabbert said.

In January of 2009, with the 14ers cruising, Wiens went to the city of Broomfield and asked to be let out of his contract as the arena’s manager. Broomfield Sports had been unable to pay its utility bill the previous two months, and the group had no more resources to invest.

Coleman was at a restaurant about a month later when he heard two men talking nearby about how the 14ers and the Rage, the minor-league hockey team that shared the building, were probably staring at the end.

“We heard these rumblings and then started looking around and saying, ‘Well, the owner isn’t here much,'” Coleman said. “Our coach does all the transactions. There’s never any oversight. What he says goes, which wasn’t an issue with us. But it made you realize maybe this was the end. Nobody on that team even let it play a factor because the goal was championship and get out of here. It shouldn’t be anybody’s goal to do really well in the D-League and come back.”

Whether they were oblivious or indifferent to the impending doom the franchise faced, the 14ers never slowed. They racked up the best record in the league (34-16) and easily won their first-round playoff game against Erie.

Then came a harder-than expected semifinals matchup with the Austin Toros, coached by current Utah Jazz boss Quin Snyder. With the clock ticking down in the fourth quarter, a magical season appeared to be cooked.

“We were down eight with about six minutes to go,” MacKinnon remembered. “I got T’d up and I remember (point guard) John Lucas walking by me and saying, ‘Coach, we got this.’ They made the two free throws to go up 10 and then we went on a run.”

It began with perhaps the most unforgettable play of the season.

Sonny Weems had spent most of that season driving back and forth between Denver and Broomfield, spending part of his time with the Nuggets and part of it with the 14ers. When he was in the D-League, Nuggets general manager Mark Warkentien would call MacKinnon with the number of minutes they expected Weems to play while he was with the 14ers.

“We told our guys the first day, ‘If the Nets, Nuggets or Raptors assign guys to us, they’re going to play and start,'” MacKinnon said. “And until they leave, you’ve just kinda got to suck it up.’ So Sonny, the first couple times he came, started and played right away and all that stuff. The last time he came we were in our playoff mode. He comes into my office and says, ‘Coach, you’ve got this thing rolling right now. You don’t have to start me. I’ll come off the bench. I know you’ll get me the minutes the Nuggets want me to get anyway, so just bring me off the bench.'”

Weems may have come off the bench against the Toros, but he closed the game in an unforgettable way. After the two technical free throws, he picked up a steal and headed toward the paint. As two defenders tried to greet him in the paint, Weems launched from just inside the free-throw line and dunked over both of them.

“The whole building kind of stopped,” MacKinnon said.

Behind that burst from Weems, the 14ers authored a comeback that pushed into the best-of-three championship series against the Utah Flash. In Game 1 in Orem, Utah, the 14ers led by 20 points at halftime before the Flash forced the game into overtime, where Colorado held on behind a clutch performance from Billy Thomas, setting up a chance to win the title back home in Broomfield.

MacKinnon was determined not to have his players compete for a hard-earned title in front of an empty arena. On the morning of April 25, 2009, he set out early, visiting stores, restaurants and the nearby FlatIrons Mall to hand out tickets to anyone he could find.

“I think there were about 4,000 people there, but probably 3,200 tickets were given away,” he said. “I knew it was coming to an end.”

The hearty crowd that showed up for free entertainment was gifted with a grand goodbye. The 14ers cruised, punctuating a memorable season with a 123-104 win behind 25 points from Weems and 21 points on perfect 10-of-10 shooting from Dabbert.

“I’ve always said and felt that to win a championship on any level is saying something,” said Gill, who is now an analyst for Indiana Pacers broadcasts. “There are so many people trying to accomplish that within a given league, so many players who are trying to get it done. There are so many adverse moments throughout the season, and so to be the last one standing is a huge accomplishment, especially at the professional level. That game in particular, it was the clincher and we ran away from them pretty fast. It was a relief to know you put in all that work and achieve that ultimate goal.”

As the 14ers partied in the locker room after the game, popping champagne bottles and making postgame celebration plans, MacKinnon interrupted the revelry.

“Everyone is jumping around and everything, and I gather the players and say, ‘Hey, guys. This is going under,'” MacKinnon said. “‘This won’t be here in a couple weeks. When I leave tonight, the equipment room door will be open.’ So when I came in the next morning there may have been two socks left.”

The Colorado 14ers pose for a photo with the D-League Championship trophy after defeating the Utah Flash in Game 2 of the D-League Finals at the Broomfield Events Center on April 24, 2009. (Photo by Garrett W. Ellwood/NBAE via Getty Images)

Two months after that scene, Wiens and his co-owner, Frew, sold the 14ers to a group backed by the Dallas Mavericks. They became the Texas Legends, which is now the affiliate of the Mavericks and plays its game in Frisco, Texas. In 2016, seven years after he led the 14ers to that memorable title, MacKinnon became the head coach of the Legends, coaching them for three seasons.

He thinks often about that year in Broomfield where it all started.

“There’s nothing better than when a guy gets a call-up or when a guy buys out his contract for a bigger one overseas,” MacKinnon said. “That means being in that league served its purpose. Our philosophy was that we were going to go in and work every day to get better so that you can get out of here, and we had so many great guys who did that.”

Coleman spoke for more than an hour about his memories of his season with the 14ers. He talked about seeing Wolf, the coach who cut him in 2007, at a game in Ukraine years later. After some pleasantries, he got down to the question that had burned at him ever since.

“I said, ‘Why didn’t you guys sign me,'” Coleman asked Wolf. “He said, ‘Understand, you were a great player — you are a great player — you just weren’t ready.”

The simple explanation brought some closure and peace for Coleman. After all, things had worked out. He said he went from making $22,000 that year with the 14ers to a $90,00o payday the next year as forged what became a solid overseas career.

“For me, it was the best thing,” Coleman said. “A lot of people say, ‘Oh, the D-League? I don’t want to do this.’ But if you stick it out and play a whole season and have a good season, man, your money just magnifies. I had offers from everywhere after that.

“It all started with the 14ers. What a year.”

(Top photo of Sonny Weems by Melissa Majchrzak/NBAE via Getty Images)

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Championship and get out of here: The zany, true story of the Colorado 14ers

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