Ranking the Denver Nuggets’ logos #4 1974-1981
This is cool, a little miner dude with a pickaxe and a ball. I think if Rocky the Mountain Bear wasn’t such an awesome mascot, there’d be a lot of fans calling for this guy to come visit the Pepsi Center.
When it comes to design, you can see how far the world has progressed though as the miner is pretty detailed and hard to replicate on smaller surfaces. Yeah, it looks neat at center court, but how does it look on a jersey?
The answer is quite well. The jersey boasts a large pickaxe sitting inside a red oval with a small nugget of gold. It’s a bit crowded but the idea’s there. I’m not rushing to the store for one though.
I would actually love to see this design in a re-retro for an alternate jersey and court design, I think it’d be pretty mint.
In terms of ‘iconicness’, this logo saw a lot of winning, the Dan Issel, David ‘Skywalker’ Thompson teams won a handful of division titles. These teams preceded some of the most explosive scoring teams in NBA history so it’s a hard act to open for.
The Issel number 44 jersey with the condensed ‘Denver’ font on the front is pretty neat but if you’re buying a jersey from this era of Nuggets basketball then you’re almost definitely grabbing something from the next time frame (it’ll be appearing later on this list).