The Denver Nuggets’ championship celebration last week involved a lot of alcohol. It was something that Dan Patrick says has become more of a focus of those parades and parties than the title itself.
“All of a sudden it was like a parades not good enough or a victory speech where everybody comes out. Now it’s got to be over the top,” he said Friday on FOX Sports Radio. “That’s not pretty. It’s not. Okay, those guys are stumbling and not able to speak coherently. I can go to a bar and see that. It just feels like if you’re not in that condition, then you’re letting people down. Performance drinking. ‘Cameras on me. I’m going to chug it!’”
Monday on Sports Radio 610 in Houston, John Lopez said he agreed with Patrick’s point, but he thinks the broadcasting legend is overreacting.
“It’s a party,” the In The Loop co-host said. “It is a very public party in which these guys that have for months upon months, I’m not saying they didn’t go out and drink and go to parties and stuff, but months upon months have been focused on one thing alone, and that is to get to that championship and win the championship. Just let it go, man. It doesn’t happen every day. It only happens once a year per sport – the parades. I don’t think he makes a bad point, but you know what? Just lighten up.”
He agreed with Dan Patrick that these parades and celebrations have turned into a competition unto themselves. The Nuggets likely looked at the Kansas City Chiefs and tried to outdo that party.
Lopez says that a clearly drunk head coach taking the podium and swearing and slurring into the microphone definitely raised the bar on memorable championship parties. Maybe that isn’t exactly what Nuggets coach Michael Malone wants remembered about the title run though.
“I’m sure he had a hell of a good time, but he had to have been a little bit embarrassed,” Lopez said.
Landry Locker, Lopez’s co-host, agreed that Patrick is not wrong that the alcohol has become the focus of the parties. He is a little more matter of fact in his assessment of Patrick though.
“Dan Patrick, man, getting ‘old man get off my lawn’ over the parade,” he said.
