Doug Moe, legendary Nuggets coach who made Denver basketball fun, dies at 87

Doug Moe, the profane, hilarious and utterly original coach who turned the Denver Nuggets into the most entertaining show in basketball during the 1980s, died Tuesday. He was 87.

Moe coached Denver from 1980 to 1990, winning 432 games — a franchise record that stood for more than 30 years — a number that still hangs in the rafters at Ball Arena. His teams made nine consecutive playoff appearances, reached the 1985 Western Conference Finals and, most importantly, made Nuggets basketball appointment viewing for an entire generation of fans.

Moe’s run-and-gun squads packed McNichols Sports Arena. He made the Nuggets more than basketball but a show and he was one of the act’s main draws.

His “passing game” offense drove opposing coaches insane and scorekeepers to exhaustion.

“You can’t diagram it, you can’t put a pencil and paper to it. If you do, you’re doing an injustice to the system”, said former Nuggets assistant Allan Bristow to Sports Illustrated back in the day.

Moe simply said, “The passing game is basically doing whatever the hell you want.”

The pass and cut play style led to relentless motion which had the Nuggets routinely cracking 100 points by the third quarter. His teams led the NBA in scoring for most of his decade in Denver, and at altitude, they were nearly untouchable: 295-100 at home.

“While never getting a stamp of approval from the ‘NBA Association,’ the passing game drove the rest of the league crazy,” the Colorado Sports Hall of Fame wrote when inducting Moe in 1997. “Somehow, this mad scientist won more games than all but 11 ‘certified geniuses’ to have ever coached in the NBA.”

Born September 21, 1938, in Brooklyn, Douglas Edwin Moe grew up playing playground ball in Flatbush and became a two-time All-American at North Carolina. A point-shaving scandal he was never proven to have participated in blackballed him from the NBA despite being a first-round draft pick. So Moe went to Italy, then to the ABA, where he became a three-time All-Star and won a championship with the 1969 Oakland Oaks.

He transitioned to coaching under his friend Larry Brown after a knee injury, eventually landing his first head job with San Antonio in 1976. But Denver was where Doug Moe became Doug Moe.

His iconic look with his gray hair in a suit adorned by colorful language. All while he led stars that are still among the Nuggets top players ever to this day in Alex English, Kiki Vandeweghe, Fat Lever and more.

In 2002, the Nuggets raised his “432” to the roof in his honor, one of only a handful of coaches in NBA history to receive such recognition.

Michael Malone eventually surpassed that number and brought Denver its first championship in 2023. But it could be argued that Moe, with David Thompson, Dikembe Mutombo and Nikola Jokic are the four most important names in Nuggets history.

He once said of the ABA’s lasting influence: “Hell, the ABA might have lost the battle, but we won the war. The NBA now plays our kind of basketball.”

He was right and nobody played and still plays the ABA style better than Moe’s Nuggets.

There will never be another like Moe and because of him, here in the city of Denver, we’re all proud to be stiffs.

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