The Nuggets almost won a title in 1976. Denver can now make history.

Eight-year-old LJ Jones thought his grandfather Ralph Simpson had been hiding something from him. So he demanded answers.

“Grandpa, can I ask you something?” Simpson, 73, recalled his grandson saying, imitating the serious tone of the young boy.

“Grandpa,” said the boy. “Someone told me you were famous.”

Simpson laughed. After all, he’s not the most famous Ralph; that could be Ralph Lauren, or Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nor is he the most famous member of his family; that would be his daughter, the Grammy Award-winning soul singer India.Arie.

“Grandpa isn’t famous,” Simpson told his grandson. “I played for the Nuggets and played professional basketball.”

Still, LJ wanted to know, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Simpson started on the 1975-1976 Denver Nuggets in the American Basketball Association. They were the only Nuggets group to make it to a championship round until this year’s team reached the NBA Finals. The 1975–76 squad lost the ABA championship series to Julius Erving’s New York Nets in six games. The ABA and NBA merged before the 1976-77 season, and the Nuggets spent the next 47 years in basketball purgatory, with a few teams instilling confidence but none reaching the Finals.

Now the Nuggets are one win away from winning the first championship in franchise history. As they look to close out the series at home on Monday in Game 5 against the Miami Heat, they will be cheered by some of the men who played for that ABA title.

“It was so cool because the Nuggets currently making the Finals has brought back a lot of memories for people who didn’t realize Denver had an ABA team going to the Finals,” said Gus Gerard, 69, a backup player of the 1976 finals team. Laughing, he added, “The only frustrating thing for me is that they show all these highlights and it’s always the same one from Julius Erving, the great Dr. J, dunking us left and right.”

Like today’s Nuggets, the 1976 team routinely demoralized opponents with its nearly unstoppable offense, but often felt like the underdog. The older Denver team also toiled in obscurity for much of the season.

a Sports Illustrated article on May 29, 1976, complained that “Denver games aren’t nationally televised” and that “Denver box scores don’t appear on most sports pages.” The article noted that some “major media outlets” still referred to the Nuggets as the “Denver Rockets,” which was their name until 1974. The franchise changed its name because it planned to move to the NBA, where the Rockets name had already been used to be. taken by Houston.

The 1975-76 Nuggets had the best record in the ABA. They were led by three future Hall of Famers: Bobby Jones, Dan Issel and David Thompson. Nicknamed Skywalker, Thompson had been the top choice in 1975 in both the ABA, by the Virginia Squires, and the NBA, by the Atlanta Hawks. But he chose to sign with the Nuggets instead.

“David Thompson, man, I used to get myself to watch him when I was in the game,” says Byron Beck, 78, who played all nine ABA seasons for Denver and his first in the NBA. “You know, you catch yourself going, ‘Oh!’ and he is already doing something spectacular.”

They were coached by Larry Brown, who won an ABA championship as a player in 1969 with the Oakland Oaks, a 1988 NCAA Division I men’s basketball championship as a coach in Kansas, and an NBA championship as a coach in 2004 with the Detroit Pistons.

In 1975-76, the ABA was contracting, having gone from ten to seven teams and only having one division. In the All-Star Game, the Nuggets competed against All-Stars from other teams.

Claude Terry, then a reserve guard for Nuggets, said he remembered going to the All-Star Game in a station wagon with his wife and their two children. He said he was “probably wearing old Levi’s and shoes that haven’t been messed with in the snow.”

He added, “I don’t recall even being interviewed during the game.”

That season, the Nuggets packed their new McNichols Arena, which opened in 1975 in view of the impending NBA merger and was demolished in 2000. Gerard recalled being swamped for autographs and invited to free meals at restaurants, such as the Colorado Mine Company.

“They had the best sirloin steak you’ve ever tasted in your life,” Gerard said.

Along with the excitement, there was also uncertainty. The preparation for the merger with the NBA weighed on the players, who knew that only four of the seven ABA teams would survive. The Nuggets, Nets, Indiana Pacers and San Antonio Spurs continued in the NBA

“Most of us didn’t have a discounted contract,” said Terry, adding that players “weren’t nervous, just trying to figure out what’s next.”

Terry said the upcoming changes prevented players from appreciating what it meant to play in the last ABA season. If there had been social media at the time, Terry said they might have paid more attention to the meaning.

The Nuggets played the Kentucky Colonels in the first round of the playoffs and won in seven games. Then they faced the New York Nets, who had the best player in the series in Erving. Denver lost Game 1 at home. They were knocked out at home in Game 5, winning despite 37 points from Erving. Simpson and Issel led the team with 21 points each and Gerard had 12 off the bench.

If they could force a Game 7 in Denver, they were sure they could win it. But Erving led a furious fourth-quarter comeback in Game 6 to win the game and the championship.

“We should have beat them,” said Simpson. “We had a better team. Even Julius Erving thought so. But they came out on us.”

While they kept in touch as the years went by, some members of that Nuggets team became increasingly disconnected from the franchise. Most of them left Denver and had careers outside of basketball.

Thompson and Gerard went through much publicized battles with drug addiction. Gerard later became an addiction counselor. He now works for the Fayette County government in Pennsylvania and continues to help people recovering from addictions. Thompson participates in Nuggets fan events and attended Game 2 of the finals in Denver. He and Jones, who played for the Nuggets until 1978, started a nonprofit religious organization in North Carolina.

Issel remained the most connected to the franchise. He played for the Nuggets until 1985 and returned as a broadcaster a few years later. Issel coached the Nuggets twice, the second time he also served as the team’s president. He apologized in 2001 after using a racist nickname against Mexican people in response to a fan’s taunt, and resigned shortly after.

This year, with his five grandchildren in tow, Issel entered Game 1 of the Finals, which Denver won at home 103-94.

Simpson has been watching the games at home and invites his grandchildren to a pizza party to watch with him. He was not allowed to play for Denver in his debut NBA season because he was traded to Detroit, but the Pistons traded him back the following season. He keeps in touch with ABA and NBA alumni by being active in the National Basketball Retired Players Association.

Denver’s 47-year drought before returning to the Finals is baffling to him.

“We’ve had some really good players,” said Simpson, who briefly coached a small school and used to be a pastor in Denver. “I’m really surprised we haven’t won a title yet.”

To win the franchise’s first, this year’s Nuggets have tried to focus closely on the task at hand. Much like how the ABA Nuggets didn’t think about history, these Nuggets don’t use the franchise’s long drought as inspiration.

“I don’t know much about it,” said Bruce Brown of Denver. “Who was on that team?”

He said he tries not to think about what a championship would mean for the franchise and for the city of Denver.

“Then I get too happy, too anxious,” Brown said. “I just try to stay in the moment.”

The team’s 1975-76 attempt at making history has been obscured by the years, but Brown and his teammates are about to complete the journey they started.