Take that L on the way out: The inside story of one of the most iconic quotes in Nuggets histo

As soon as the laughter had subsided, a jolt of panic set in for Michael Malone.

It was Nov. 27, 2018, and the head coach of the Nuggets had just uttered seven words — well, six words and one in-your-face letter — that would become a cultural flashpoint for a team and fan base longing for national respect.

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The Nuggets had just blasted LeBron James and the Lakers by 32 points to improve to 14-7, disappointing large swaths of the Pepsi Center crowd that had shown up in purple-and-gold jerseys to root for the visitors. It had been a similar feeling for supporters of the Warriors and Celtics, two fan bases that showed up in droves in the early days of last season only to watch their favorite teams get washed away by the Nuggets.

So Malone was asked by Denver Post columnist Mark Kiszla whether the coach believed those impressive performances against marquee franchises in prime time had earned the Nuggets any converts.

“We don’t want any converts. You’re either with us or against us,” Malone said with a grin, warming up toward a mic drop. “We understand that LeBron is arguably the greatest player ever, and when he comes to town, the Lakers, their fans carry. As long as their fans go home disappointed that’s all I care about. So the Warriors fans can come in here, the Celtics fans can come in here, the Lakers fans can come in here, but …”

Then, Malone delivered the goods.

“Take that L on the way out.”

Take that L on the way out? He said what?

There is nary a media member out there who hasn’t been guilty at some point or another of throwing a cheap chuckle at a coach or player who makes a joke that wouldn’t pass the muster at any amateur open mic night. But the reaction to Malone’s quote was something different, a visceral response illustrating an immediate awareness that what he had just said would reverberate well beyond the crowd assembled in front of him.

As he walked through the hallway and toward Denver’s locker room, Malone realized the same thing. Only his awareness was born from a coach’s perspective, and that’s where the brief panic set in.

“It wasn’t a prepared speech. You know me. I’m off the cuff; I’m ad-lib,” Malone told The Athletic ahead of the Lakers’ visit to the Pepsi Center on Tuesday night, their first since the quote. “Right when I said it, my first concern was: ‘How are the Lakers players and coaches going to take this?’ It wasn’t meant for them. So I reached out to (then Lakers coach) Luke Walton and I said, ‘Just to make sure, this wasn’t a shot at anybody. This wasn’t bulletin board material.’ He was great. He completely understood. But as soon as I said it, I thought this might have some legs.”

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Malone may have been concerned about potentially disrespecting an opponent — he even circled back to reporters in Denver’s locker room afterward to emphasize he was talking about opposing fans, not teams — but that didn’t lessen his very real feelings that spawned the quote in the first place. When he took over the Nuggets in 2015, Denver was hovering near the bottom of the league in attendance. On more nights than he cares to remember, Malone would look around before games and see more opposing jerseys being worn than Nuggets threads.

And that was if people were showing up at all.

“I often go back — a little nostalgic maybe — to my first year here and coming into the arena being half-filled,” he said. “I remember (Danilo) Gallinari when we’d come home from a big road win and we’d play a game and it’d still be half-empty. He’d say, ‘You see, Coach? They don’t care.’ But I always go back to “Field of Dreams.” Build it and they will come.”

Andy Juett is one of the most well-known and respected figures in Denver’s local comedy scene, but he grew up in Detroit as a fan of the gritty Pistons teams of the late 1980s.

“So when I played, I was definitely a hustle, rebound, nasty defense type player,” said Juett, who co-founded the High Plains Comedy Festival in Denver in 2013, the city he has called home for the better part of the last two decades. “So I appreciate the style of play Malone brings to the table.”

Juett, who was an executive producer on the film “Super Troopers 2,” now lives across the street from the Pepsi Center and has adopted the Nuggets as his own. He has season tickets in the seventh row of Section 106, behind the visiting bench. It’s a good enough perch to allow Juett to take in his favorite scene outside the lines: Malone’s hot-under-the-collar coaching style.

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Juett sometimes looks at Malone and sees Joe Pesci in his role as one of Martin Scorsese’s characters — “Do I amuse you?” — but he understands what Denver’s coach is always driving at when he calls a rage timeout, his team up 20 in the fourth quarter.

“The relentless pursuit of playing the game the right way is his whole deal,” said Juett, who attended Michigan State and says he sees a great deal of Tom Izzo in Malone. “The fire that comes with that is what’s different with these Nuggets. To me, ‘Take that L on the way out’  has sort of become his rallying cry for people to root around. For a long time when you went to the Pepsi Center, it was sad. You’d go there and it was pathetic because the Boston fans or the Lakers fans or whoever, it was like their arena. So ‘Take that L on the way out’ was some tribal shit. This is our house and I’m going to put a stake in the ground. It’s the nastiness that we kind of needed. We don’t need to be pretty or cool. We need to be good.”

Take the L became a magnet for Denver sports fans who may have been still sitting on the periphery one month into last season, an invitation to dive into something that felt different than what had come before. Now there was a voice pushing back against the little-guy complex that the Nuggets have fought for much of their existence.

The fact that the voice was coming from the coach of the team made it reverberate that much louder.

“It brought some life back into the fan base,” said 32-year-old Denver native Ron Greco, whose earliest memories of his Nuggets fandom were wrapped around Dikembe Mutombo and the team’s playoff upset of the Sonics in 1994. “I’ve attended several home games over the last seven years and the atmosphere lately has been amazing. I love dropping the ‘Take that L on the way out’ slogan. I literally use it after every win.”

It wasn’t just fans who were juiced by Malone’s quote. It also sparked something for the Nuggets themselves, who won 18 of their next 19 home games after “Take that L” was born and have the best home record in the league over the last calendar year.

“I think it gave us a little swagger,” said forward Will Barton, who recalled sparse Pepsi Center crowds when he first arrived in Denver via trade in 2015. “I was glad Coach did that. It let people know this is a new regime of the Nuggets organization. You’re not just coming in here easy and getting wins.”

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“It said that Coach had our back,” Monte Morris said.

“It was great,” Jamal Murray told The Athletic last season, “because it seemed like something I would usually say.”

When Malone took the Nuggets job back in 2015, a new start after being unceremoniously fired by Sacramento a year earlier, he was arriving at the base of the Rockies during one of the biggest population booms in the city’s history. More than 1,500 people per month were moving to Denver at the time.

Those were the potential converts who mattered.

“They didn’t grow up Nuggets fans,” Malone said. “You have to earn their fandom and earn their respect. I think because of how we play and the young players we have — kind of like how this is a young city that’s growing, we’re a young team that’s growing. The people have bought in, and people are only really going to buy in when you win at a high level. We’ve been able to do that, and that’s really helped the buy-in.”

Malone still gets goosebumps when he thinks back to Game 1 of Denver’s first-round series against the Spurs last April. The same arena that featured a low hum of casual conversation a few years earlier was now pulsating with basketball hunger.

It was Malone’s Kevin Costner moment.

“I felt like, ‘Wow, this is really special what we’ve done in five years,’” he said. “We’ve built this up. So now when you have these great teams come in and their fans try to get their chant going, and our fans step up and drown it out? That gives me so much pride because, yes, it’s wins and losses and, yes, it’s developing players and, yes, it’s getting to the playoffs, but it’s also about building a following, building a fan base. The fact that we had the best home record in the NBA last year and the GMs say we have the toughest place to play in the NBA, yeah, that’s what we do, but our fans are a huge part of that in making this.”

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The Nuggets left on a five-game road trip after that win over the Lakers last November. By the time Denver returned home, Malone was stunned to see his quote emblazoned on T-shirts — created by local designer D-Line Co. — and being worn throughout the arena. Denver’s game production crew created a crowd cam that followed people wearing memorabilia from an opponent as they walked out of the arena once a loss to the Nuggets was assured. The capture on the Jumbotron bit read: Take that L on the way out.

“I didn’t think it was going to be on T-shirts by any means,” Malone, who was gifted one of the shirts, said last week. “It created its own identity.”

Then, Malone unfurled a sly grin.

“I’m still waiting to get some residuals from all that,” he deadpanned.

When the Lakers visit the Pepsi Center on Tuesday night — a matchup of the first- and second-place teams in the Western Conference — there will undoubtedly be a heavy dose of purple and gold in the seats.  That part hasn’t changed. The league’s iconic franchises will always be a draw in any road arena.

What has changed is six words and one letter. Malone’s year-old quote may have made waves and ignited a culture shift. But he was really just speaking in facts.

No team in the league since that iconic quote has dished out more Ls in its home building than the Nuggets.

“When I first got here, there were barely people at the games,” Barton said. “Now we’ve got one of the best home crowds in the NBA.”

(Photo: Matthew Stockman / Getty Images)

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