The Denver Nuggets opted to have their yearly training camp out east in Omaha, Nebraska, and it appears that they really love it out there.
“I wish we could take it back to Denver,” head coach Michael Malone told Jon Nyatawa of Omaha.com. “This is a state of the art, beautiful (facility), very, very excited to be here in Omaha. … This allows us to have a great training camp. Everything here is just perfect and what we’re looking for.”
The Championship Center cost roughly $13 million dollars to construct, and it is truly beautiful.
“I haven’t been in too many collegiate facilities like this,” Nuggets guard Jammer Nelson said. “It’s one of the reasons why we’re here. They did a great job with this. I saw the locker room. The player lounge. It’s beautiful, man.”
The reason the Nuggets hiked up to Omaha was due to the lack of space in their own practice facility back home. The Nuggets’ current facility is within the confines of the Pepsi Center, and is a regular sized court with a few hoops on the sides.
It’s less than feasible for today’s game.
The idea of a new state-of-the-art practice facility is something the Nuggets organization has discussed before, and is something that could materialize in the future.
“Yes,” Kroenke said on if they had discussed a new facility. “I think state-of-the-art is very relative term. State-of-the-art is moving faster than state-of-the-art ever has I think. When this building was built and when this practice facility was built in this building, it was state-of-the-art. Things have evolved since then, and I’ve had a few conversations with a few people to start thinking about something like that for the Nuggets and for the Avalanche as well. With these guys’ help sitting next to me (Michael Malone and Tim Connelly) I think we’re going to be able to do that in the near future, and I look forward to providing an update on that when I have the opportunity to.”
If the Nuggets want to help boost their chances of attracting star caliber players to Denver, they need to have top-notch facilities to help put the team over the top. That — mixed with the fact that the better the facility, the better the practice, the better the product — is something the team needs to take to heart.
Let’s see where this goes.