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Chris Haynes of TNT Sports reported during Thursday’s Inside the NBA that the Denver Nuggets will skip their scheduled trip to the White House on March 18 and instead will focus on a matchup with the Minnesota Timberwolves the next night.
Chris Haynes @ChrisBHaynes
Sources: With Denver Nuggets prioritizing No. 1 seed and a pivotal matchup at Minnesota upcoming, I explain on @NBAonTNT why the champs have elected not to visit The White House. pic.twitter.com/cjc4fwGE0O
The team was supposed to be celebrating its 2022-23 title with the customary trip to the White House. Instead, it will spend a bit more time preparing for the current top seed in the Western Conference.
The Nuggets (42-20) are third in the West standings but just one game behind the Timberwolves (43-19).
The Nuggets lost the first matchup with the Timberwolves this season but play them three more times. With such a tight race in the West, those games could very well decide the top seed or give one of the two contenders the tiebreaker.
The Nuggets were initially scheduled to visit the White House in January when they were in Washington D.C. to face the Washington Wizards, but scheduling issues on the White House’s end nixed the event.
Skipping the White House visit became the norm during the presidency of Donald Trump, given his regressive stances on player activism and freedom of speech. That dated back to Colin Kaepernick’s decision to take a knee in protest of police brutality and racial discrimination back in 2016 and Trump’s inflammatory response to it.
But the practice became commonplace again once Biden took office, and both the Milwaukee Bucks and Golden State Warriors made visits after their NBA titles.
The Nuggets have begun to resemble the team that won the championship last season, going 6-1 since the All-Star break. While the Eastern Conference is all about the NBA-leading Boston Celtics (48-13) at the moment, the West has four teams within 2.5 games of one another atop the conference and six teams within four games of one another battling for the last two automatic playoff berths.
It promises to be an exciting finish to the season out West as teams jockey for playoff positioning. The Nuggets aren’t taking any chances in the effort to win the top seed, even if it means snubbing the President of the United States.
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