Hubris, Sulking, And The Edge Of Oblivion
Denver faces a cliff with a Blockbuster abyss below.
This Era of Nuggets Basketball probably ended on Saturday night.
There is always the chance that because of injuries to Anthony Edwards (who has been limited and ineffective throughout this series) and Donte DiVincenzo that Denver can snake its way out.
After that, it’s 0-0 vs. the Spurs (or Blazers). A new chance to tell a story.
But it is impossible to escape how this moment feels.
There will be time for autopsies to find the cause of death for the Nuggets’ era, and per haps I should wait.
But I can’t help but think of Blockbuster.
In 2000, Blockbuster was dominant. There was a movie rental store on every corner. And honestly, it was pretty great. You’d get your friends or significant other and go wander the aisles looking for movies you wanted to watch. It was comfortable.
They dominated the market share. They were the movie rental store.
That year, Blockbuster took a meeting with representatives from a small company whose model was different. They had a “modest” subscriber base built off the ability to ship DVD discs directly to consumers. They offered to sell their business to Blockbuster for $50 million.
Blockbuster CEO John Antioco “laughed them out of the room.”
It was Netflix.
Antioco’s response is probably very high on his list of things-I-wish-I’d-never-said: “The dot-com hysteria is completely overblown.” Blockbuster general counsel Ed Stead then explained how the business models of Netflix and just about every other online business were not sustainable and would never make money.
The problem was that Blockbuster thought that what they did would never not work. They couldn’t see anything beyond the moment. They were lazy in how they approached their success.
They were bankrupt within 10 years.
That hubris is rampant with this Nuggets team.
