1949–50 Denver Nuggets season

The 1949–50 Denver Nuggets season was the only season for the original Denver Nuggets franchise in the National Basketball Association and their 17th overall season of play when including their sixteen previous seasons of play as a team in the Amateur Athletic Union going back to 1932, as well as their second professional basketball season when you include their previous season that they played in the preceding National Basketball League. During their only season in the NBA, the original Nuggets franchise faced plenty of challenges due to the fact that airplanes were not yet seen as a common way to travel to long distances at a time and that trains were considered the way to travel from one destination to another at the time. Not only that, but some of the bigger markets like New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia saw the city of Denver as something more akin to the smaller cities of Anderson, Indiana, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, or Waterloo, Iowa as awkward locations to play under due to how far away Denver was when compared to the rest of the league's locations at the time. This would eventually lead to the original Nuggets ending their only season in the NBA with an 11–51 record (including a record-low (at the time) 0–15 start to their season, being the worst start to an NBA season ever before the 1970–71 Cleveland Cavaliers and 1972–73 Philadelphia 76ers first tied that record and then the 1988–89 Miami Heat and 1994–95 Los Angeles Clippers ended up breaking that record), as well as resort to them joining the Anderson Packers (who previously withdrew from the NBA themselves two weeks before the Nuggets did), Sheboygan Red Skins, and Waterloo Hawks in their departure from the NBA one day before the 1950 NBA draft was set to begin on April 24, 1950 in order to create what ultimately became the short-lived rivaling National Professional Basketball League as a failed effort to survive beyond the NBA, with the Nuggets first becoming the Denver Frontier Refiners and then the Evansville Agogans during that short-lived failure of a season.

Denver would not see a new professional basketball team until the American Basketball Association saw the Denver Rockets come to fruition as an inaugural team there following a failed creation of an ABA team in Kansas City, Missouri and troubled early starts with finding a team name for them after the initial "Denver Larks" and "Denver Lark Buntings" got canned by an eleventh hour ownership change to help save the franchise early on. Despite those early troubles, however, the Rockets proved to be one of the stronger ABA franchises around before later changing their team name in 1974 to the Denver Nuggets, partially as a tribute to the same Nuggets team that previously played in the NBL and NBA (despite not taking their previous history in the NBA in the process), but also because the Denver Rockets wanted to avoid any team name issues with the Houston Rockets franchise that the NBA had created around the same time once an impending ABA-NBA merger occurred, which eventually did happen in 1976. The new Nuggets franchise still operate under that team name to this day, having recently won the NBA Finals in 2023.