Back in the Saddle: Bruce Brown returns to the Denver Nuggets

The following appears in The Winter Issue of Mile High Sports Magazine. Get your copy here.

Jhett leaps from the trailer hitch where he’s been eating his lunch, his tiny, five-year-old body lurches like it’s been shot out of a cannon, his oversized cowboy hat suddenly covering his eyes.

“Hey!” he yells, pushing the hat back onto his head and pointing at a slender, taller-than-most cowboy.

“What?” the cowboy says, shrugging in an “it wasn’t me” kind of way.

Jhett glares, then grins, then slowly reaches his hand behind him and into his britches. He pulls out the fistful of ice and holds it out toward the man as if to say, “You did this! Didn’t you, mister?!”

The cowboy shrugs again.

Jhett tosses the ice into the dirt.

He nonchalantly moseys toward the cooler and discretely – or so he thinks – reaches in to grab some ice of his own. He takes a meandering path back toward the scene of the crime. He’s going to get even.

“I see what you’re thinking. But I didn’t even do it. If I saw who did, I’d tell you,” the cowboy says with a
serious tone.

Jhett stops. He ponders this assertion momentarily, trying to decide if this is the truth or just a tale to throw him off the scent. He looks closely at the man, then surveys the area for other potential suspects. He knows who did it. A smile emerges as he tosses the ice to the ground, knowing that unless he’s able to pull off a surprise attack, he has no shot at returning the favor.

Heck, Jhett couldn’t reach past Bruce Brown’s belt if he wanted to.

That’s okay. He likes Bruce.

Everybody likes Bruce.

Michael Malone sure does like Bruce Brown. And why wouldn’t he? After all, in many ways, Brown was the arguably the missing piece that brought Malone – and the city of Denver – the Larry O’Brien Trophy, a piece of hardware that neither had held before.

When a slightly inebriated Malone grabbed a microphone on stage at Denver’s Civic Center Park and screamed that there was no way Brown could possibly be leaving the Nuggets following their championship run, the crowd roared with delight.

“Ya’ll tell me,” Malone slurred. “Is Brucey B going anywhere?”

The crowd surged.

“Helllll no!” Malone insisted. “Hell no! Hell no!”

Seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand Nuggets fans loudly agreed. They, too, liked Bruce Brown. The notion that No. 11 could play elsewhere was unthinkable, inconceivable, balderdash.

A shirtless Brown egged on the crowd.

Inside, however, he knew better. This story wasn’t going to go the way Malone and the fans wanted.

“Going through my head, I was like, ‘There’s no chance I can come back. There’s no cap space,’” Brown says of the moment he stood next to Malone in front of a sea of Nuggets fans.

“I was just laughing. Obviously, I would’ve loved to stay, but on the business side of it, there was literally no chance of the (Nuggets) retaining me. I would have to take a lot less than I got.”

The Indiana Pacers apparently liked Bruce Brown, too.

A lot.

Not long after the Nuggets’ championship parade, the Pacers inked Brown to a two-year, $45 million contract. It was a number that Denver had zero chance of matching.

It was a number that made Brown himself do a double-take. It was a number that escalated beyond what most NBA pundits had forecasted, largely because of closed-door conversations with Pacers All-Star Tyrese Haliburton — who viewed Brown as a crucial piece toward Indy’s pursuit of a title — led the organization to pony up for the premium.

Twenty-four months after courting him to Indy, Haliburton and the Pacers nearly earned that title, but Brown wasn’t along for the ride.

He was along for the ride on September 13, 2025, however. Tyrese Haliburton wasn’t there for this one. But Jhett was.

Bruce and Jhett – along with a dozen other cowboys and cowgirls – have been tasked with driving 133 steer calves and their mothers across seven miles of pasture – give or take, depending on the cows’ willingness to cooperate – to a set of working corrals. Once there, the calves will receive their pre-weaning vaccinations, be returned to their mothers and then driven back to the pasture from which they came. It’s a job that must be done, so the outing is anything but a dude ranch, trail ride experience. The cows, unlike a long string of old, broken-down trail horses, do not walk on the same, single file path they’ve been traveling for years. The cows on this particular ranch aren’t necessarily wild, but in order to get them where they belong, a sizable crew is required. Every rider is necessary, each responsible for their area alongside the herd.

Prior to the roundup, it is explained to Brown that the strategy is not unlike playing a zone defense in basketball – only instead of preventing the opposition from getting to the basket, the team will work to push the entire herd in a controlled fashion, dictating both speed and direction, the entire way to the pens. Think of late UNLV coach Jerry Tarkanian’s famed “Amoeba Defense” – but for cattle. This comparison, naturally, makes perfect sense to Brown.

Jhett, riding a horse named Player, is doing a fine job; he’s an integral part of this line of defense. He does, however, have a tendency to rein his horse toward wherever his friend Bruce is riding. Jhett has a tip or two – and perhaps a story or three – for Bruce, who has seemingly reciprocated this newly formed friendship.

For the better part of a crystal clear, oddly windless, Eastern Colorado morning, the mission goes perfectly as planned. The cattle are successfully and safely penned, vaccinated and returned to pasture. There’s a lot about
the job that Brown truly likes – and, atypically, understands. For never really having done any true ranch work, Brown is a quick study.

Breaking into the culture on a ranch isn’t easy, but his willingness to learn and ask questions quickly breaks down the barriers to entry. Brown says he became good at “learning” through basketball. Wanting his career to last as long as it possibly could, the 2018 second-rounder has melded natural ability, work ethic and curiosity into a career that’s entering its eighth season.

“I wasn’t a great student, but once I got to the league, I wanted to be a sponge and learn from the guys on my team at the time,” he says. “Blake Griffin was the best on the team, so it was just trying to learn what he
did to get there.”

Over miles and miles of pasture, there’s plenty of time for observation and conversation. Brown notes the way in which cowboy and horse work to return a cow to the herd if and when she tries to break out. He asks questions, confirms his own mental notes, and as luck would have it, gets a chance to apply the lesson. During the drive a cow does her best to slip away, right in front of Brown. As if he’d been doing it for years, he trots his horse quickly around her and correctly points her back toward the others.

Daryl Waite, the ranch’s former foreman and the maker of the saddle in which Brown sits, considers how the outsider has just handled the situation.

“There’s just something about a good athlete,” he says. “When there’s an understanding of team sports, I think athletes tend to pick up on this stuff better than others.”

Brown sees the parallel, too.

“It’s like teamwork. If one or two people are not doing their job, the cattle can take off and go wherever they want,” he says. “So, everyone is always on the same page. Everyone is keeping an eye on the cattle. It’s teamwork.” Brown isn’t just along for the ride. He’s part of it. All told, one of the NBA’s best 3-and-D swingmen, along with Jhett, has spent more than eight miles and three hours in the saddle.

“I was ready to get off Pete by the end of the drive,” Brown would later say. “I could feel it the next day. You’re using muscles you don’t use in basketball.”

A little about Pete, whose legal name, according to the American Quarter Horse Association, is, interestingly and appropriately enough, “Pistol Pete.”

First, foremost and above all else, Pete is gentle.

In the summer of 2024, Pete was on a packing trip along Colorado’s Continental Divide and a storm surged over the mountains in the middle of the night, cracking lightning and spitting rain. Pete didn’t like it much, so he decided to split from camp. Waite, a saddle maker, Jhett’s “papaw” and the owner of Pete, woke up only to find his horse missing. For days, Daryl and his son Chance searched in and around the mountains near Breckenridge for Pete, but had no luck. Ironically, Ring camera footage of the big sorrel gelding began to surface. Luckily, he was fine – just curious about what took place in the middle of the night in Breckenridge.

Finally, a woman who’d seen the missing signs around town came across Pete on a hiking trail. She found a piece of string, put it around Pete’s neck and began the process of bringing him back toward civilization. Anyone who’s ever led a horse with a halter knows that it’s a much slower process than simply walking alone; eventually, the woman tired of this slow decent and decided it might be easier, maybe a little more fun, to ride Pete instead. Not knowing much about the horse at all, she eased alongside of him, scratched him on the neck a few times, slowly crawled up on his back and proceeded to ride him all the way back to Breckenridge – without a saddle on his back, a bit in his mouth or incident.

That’s how gentle Pete is.

This is a key point, as nobody wants to see an NBA player, especially one so critical to the Denver Nuggets’ championship aspirations, get bucked off some half-broke bronc while fooling around on a real-deal cattle ranch. There’s an unspoken responsibility, assumed by every single member of the day’s working crew, to keep Brown from getting hurt. On a ranch, no one buckaroo is more important than another. At the same time, there’s an understanding amongst the crew – a group that has collectively yet to earn what Brown did just last season – that it would be a shame if Bruce couldn’t do his day job because he was hurt doing this job. Plus, everyone here likes Bruce, too.

Thus, Pistol Pete is the optimal horse for a Denver Nugget, especially Bruce Brown.

Besides, Pete and Bruce go way back.

In the summer of 2024, not long after Brown split from Toronto and just before Pete’s Breckenridge adventure, the professional hoopster decided to try his hand at being a cowboy instead of just dressing like one.

He had wanted to get out to the ranch sooner, but a summer following a championship run tends to get away from a guy. But after a season in Indianapolis and Toronto, Brown wanted to reconnect with the West. So sometime in June, a big, black Cadillac Escalade with tinted windows pulled over the cattle guard and into the driveway of the Withers Ranch in Hugo, Colo.

Knowing that Brown was on his way and looking out over the dirt roads that are often misrepresented on Google Maps, the rancher awaiting his arrival stood outside and waived to the car. From the back window of the SUV, a hand waived back; Brown had hired a driver to take him from Denver to Hugo, some 125 miles away.

That’s the day when he met Pete. Ever since, they’ve become buddies.

At some point during the upcoming season, Brown will appear on the jumbotron inside Ball Arena for one of the Nuggets’ timeout skits. Someone from the Nuggets in-game entertainment team will inquire about Brown’s interest in being a cowboy. They’ll ask him to draw a horse on a whiteboard. He obliges. Above the drawing, he writes “PETE.”

That’s Pete.

In 33 games with the Pacers, Brown started in all 33, averaging 12.1 points, 4.7 rebounds and playing the same stingy defense that lifted the Nuggets the season before. He was still traded to the Raptors in mid-January. Later, the Pacers told him they never wanted to trade him, and offered multiple packages that would have kept him in Indianapolis, but Toronto insisted that Brown be included in a swap that ultimately sent Pascal Siakam to Indy. Brown liked what Indy was doing. He understood the business behind the trade. There are no hard feelings.

“But being traded from there, the last two years… sucked,” Brown says.

That first season in Toronto, his minutes were down, his points were down, his rebounds were down. He liked what the Pacers had in mind for him, but the situation in Toronto wasn’t as easily defined. The next season, his minutes continued to dip, and his averages looked more like his second year in the Association. Before the trade deadline, he was shipped to New Orleans, where the Pelicans were an utter mess.

When he got there, he never looked for a place to live and rarely left the hotel unless he was practicing, playing or squeezing in a round of golf, the best way he could take his mind off basketball.

“I definitely was not having fun,” he says. “When I got to New Orleans, they were going through injuries and really weren’t trying to win at the time. They were just trying to figure a lot of stuff out. I wasn’t playing well, and I was just getting back from injury. There were a lot of things that went into it.

“I definitely started thinking about how I can finish the season playing really well – because you know, it’s a contract year and I (need to) try to get paid again. And if not, if teams are worried about me only playing 42 games, (I’m asking myself), ‘Where can I go to make an impact and win again?’

“And Denver was obviously at the top of the list.”

Just ahead of Game 2 of the Nuggets’ first-round playoff series against the Clippers last spring, a tall man in a black cowboy hat subtly strolled out to a corner courtside seat at Ball Arena. Not everyone noticed.

But when the man under the hat was discovered by the jumbotron – and subsequently everyone else inside – the damn place erupted as if the Nuggets had just hit a buzzer beater.

Brucey B. was in the house.

No, he wasn’t playing; he was just there to watch his old – and hopefully new – team.

“It felt great,” he says of the ovation that lasted far longer than the cheer most former players might get – if they get one at all. “I went to the game just supporting them and trying to show that I wanted to come back – if there was a chance that they wanted me back.”

Seventy-one days later, he inked a one-year deal that said they did.

It could be argued that in the history of sports, a stronger relationship between athlete and city has never been formed in such a short amount of time than the one that marries Bruce Brown to Denver.

Before leaving for Indiana, Bruce Brown spent less than a year as a resident of Denver, Colo., playing in exactly 100 games for the Denver Nuggets – 80 regular season and 20 playoff games. Thousands of contributing athletes have come and gone from the Mile High City, some with longer stints, few with shorter, fewer yet that made the kind of impact Brown did in such a small amount of time.

A lot happened in that short timeframe. He found a fit, friendships and a ring. Teammates found someone they trusted to do the dirty work. Fans embraced a pro athlete who proudly embraced them right back.

“I just missed the locker room,” he says. “Everyone’s connected. Everyone can talk to everyone. Everybody can hold each other accountable, and no one takes it personal.”

He adds one more thing: “This cowboy life that I try to live, in other places it really didn’t fit much. But here it’s perfect.”

When he played in Denver the first time around, despite how important he was to the Nuggets first-ever title, Brown played without a shoe contract – a rare scenario for an accomplished NBA veteran. In fact, that season, he earned more formal arrangements with cowboy boot companies.

“The reason why I really didn’t have a shoe brand at the time is I was with Adidas and with Nike before that. Adidas paid me after I left Nike, but I didn’t really love being with the brand or love putting the stuff on,” he explains. “So, I was like, ‘You know what, I’m going to take a year off and just see if I can find a brand that I actually love and want to put their stuff on and represent.’”

Not long after the Finals, Jordan Brand came calling. The Nike spinoff signed him to a two-year deal. Not long after signing with the Nuggets this summer, Jordan tacked on a three-year extension. Over the summer, Brown spent a week in Greece with His Airness and a host of other Jordan Brand athletes, including the NFL Defensive Player of the Year, Denver Broncos cornerback Patrick Surtain II.

The point isn’t that Brown currently wears the coolest brand in sports, or even that that Michael Jordan deems Brown cool enough to wear his shoes. The point isn’t that Brown will often be seen wearing a pair of Tecovas cowboy boots, either.

The point, actually, is that Bruce Brown is not always motivated by money.

“When I was growing up, my parents told me to go in the backyard, get off the (video) game, go have fun, go play football outside,” he says. “Kids nowadays, they’re not raised tough. (The little kids on the ranch), they were super tough… they don’t even know what a tablet is, they don’t have video games, none of that. And nowadays all the kids are on social media. The (ranch kids) fall, they don’t cry, they get up, wipe the dirt off – just like the way I was raised in the city, but they’re raised out in the country.”

Kids, who are clearly drawn to him, seem like a likely component in the future Brown currently envisions. He can see this all unfolding at some quiet piece of land, maybe even in Colorado. He’s fascinated that more than one of the cowboys helping out have no idea what he does for a living, finds it funny that they “Googled him later,” and loves the fact that they quickly accepted him as just one of the crew while working a bunch of cattle.

“Me being a city boy,” says Brown, who grew up in inner-city Boston, “you would never think about riding a horse or going to a ranch and helping out. Once I did it, I think I just fell in love with it. If I do get the opportunity to (own a ranch) one day, I don’t want to go into it blind. I actually want to know what I’m doing and know why I’m doing it.”

Brown says he doesn’t spend a ton of money. He’s got good people around him who help manage what he’s already earned.
When he had to chance to play golf with Lance Armstrong this summer, the two of them spent a lot of time talking about finances – what to do, what not to, where to make and lose money outside of the lines.

To anyone paying attention, it appears that when Bruce Brown wants to do something, he doggedly learns as much as he can in order to do it. In other words, if he’d like to own a ranch someday – and raise his kids there – he’ll do it.

Before all of that, though, Brown aims to help the Denver Nuggets win another championship.

The last time Brown appeared on the cover of Mile High Sports Magazine, a photo that was taken just a few days before the 2023 NBA Playoffs commenced, Brown confidently told the writer that the Nuggets were going to win it
all. He believes it can happen again. Add that to the list of reasons he’s back in Denver.

“Yeah. I think – again – we can win it all,” he says matter-of-factly. “Anytime you have Joker and Jamal and Aaron Gordon, you have a chance… We’re super deep. The guys that don’t get talked about coming off the bench can all play. Now, in the NBA, you want to have at least 10 to 11, maybe 12 people that can play. We have that.

“I think this could be another special year for us. Hopefully we can get Number Two.”

Bruce Brown is back in the saddle.

Perhaps his new friend Jhett can come watch.