MEETING THE MAYOR
Players push for change in city
When Nuggets coach Michael Malone said his team wanted to find actionable ways to improve race relations in Denver and work with the city’s police department, those weren’t hollow words.
On Saturday, Nuggets players and staffers held a Zoom call with Denver Mayor Michael Hancock as an introductory step toward facilitating impactful change.
The majority of Nuggets players were on the call, along with Malone, Nuggets president of basketball operations Tim Connelly, assistant general manager Calvin Booth and director of team operations Amy O’Brien.
A second Zoom call with the Mayor’s office is being planned, along with a future town hall meeting with Denver’s chief of police Paul Pazen. Ideally, the team would like to have that meeting in person.
Among the most vocal players on the introductory call were Gary Harris, Paul Millsap and Jerami Grant, according to a team official. Harris said he was moved by protests he attended in Denver, according to Theresa Marchetta, the mayor’s director of communications who was also on the call. Grant had recently protested in Washington, D.C.
As an example of the candor on the call, Millsap asked the mayor pointedly: What can we, as African-Americans, do to protect ourselves and our families?
Marchetta said Mayor Hancock was thrilled with the engagement and was particularly impressed with Malone’s passion surrounding the conversation.
The goal of the call was to establish how Nuggets players could utilize their platforms in conjunction with the mayor’s office. The team also wanted to hear Hancock’s perspective in the wake of the civil unrest that unfolded after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody.
More immediately, the Nuggets plan to help facilitate voter registration in the community, and there are tentative plans to help coordinate with local schools on other initiatives.
One other movement that Malone and the NBA coaches are throwing their weight behind: The “Eight Can’t Wait” policies, whose goals are to address and reform police conduct. Most of the policies the initiative calls for were addressed in last week’s historic bill passed in Colorado.
“If I don’t speak up, I would be doing my players, the Nuggets and our city a disservice,” Malone told The Post recently. “Silence is no longer acceptable, for any of us. … We have to have the courage to dig deep, to really get to the root cause. Education, voting, civilian oversight within the police department, transparency, hiring processes.”