Weeks before the Nuggets left for Orlando, team officials teased one of their weekly Zoom calls with a special guest.
Players were encouraged to hop on without knowing who was waiting for them on the other end of the virtual session.
When they logged on, one box showed the familiar orange-and-white hued stadium of the Tennessee Volunteers. In front of that backdrop? None other than two-time Super Bowl champion Peyton Manning.
The Nuggets had been working on getting the former Broncos quarterback to address the team since last December. When fans were still allowed to attend games, it wasn’t uncommon to see Manning sitting with his family at Pepsi Center and a willing participant in some of Rocky’s skits. Manning remains good friends with Nuggets governor Josh Kroenke and has developed a strong relationship with team president Tim Connelly.
So it wasn’t completely out of the blue when Manning reached out to the Nuggets during the hiatus and asked if they were still interested in having him address the team.
Manning, whose sterling career culminated in a Super Bowl championship with the Broncos in 2016, spoke to the Nuggets for around an hour, according to multiple people on the call. He regaled the Nuggets with funny stories, anecdotes about his views on leadership and insights on the moments that defined his teams.
“He talked about kind of the come-up (with the Colts), which I feel like we’ve experienced here as a franchise,” Nuggets veteran and Indiana native Mason Plumlee told The Denver Post. “He’s like, ‘It’s easy to have bulletin board material when you’re taking L’s week after week, but then you establish yourself.’ … He was like, ‘We’re always at the top. What are you doing then to stay motivated, right? Because you can’t just wait around for the playoffs or the Super Bowl. You gotta be good every week.’”
One takeaway, according to one person on the call, was that Manning challenged the Nuggets to find their own voice and leadership style. He said he wasn’t necessarily a leader from the start of his career, but he grew into his voice.
Plumlee, whose uncle was once the mayor of Knoxville, Tenn., and has long been a fan of Manning’s, said that he even referenced his time as a Volunteer to illustrate his rise from an underclassmen to a Super Bowl champion.
As examples of his growth, Manning discussed multiple playoff losses that helped define and shape his career, even before he got to Denver.
“He referenced (former Colts coach) Tony Dungy in the way that he responded to a loss just very matter-of-fact, and they stuck to their routine and they stuck to their practice habits,” Plumlee said. “The message I took away from it was that they never got too high or too low, but they just stuck with the process of work and really building camaraderie within their organization, especially among the players. It was neat to hear from his standpoint how that develops and what it ultimately became, which was a couple Super Bowl wins.”
Players were engaged for the entirety of the call, asking questions and listening attentively to the future Hall of Famer, multiple people said.
One of the best questions came from Indianapolis native Gary Harris, who was a standout high school football prospect and had offers to play in college.
As Plumlee recalled, Harris asked Manning: “Tell us what was it like to win a Super Bowl? What was it like to bring that back to the city of Indianapolis? What was it like to be on the player’s side of that because (Gary) had been a fan and experienced it as a kid, but tell us about that.’”
Another player asked Manning for suggestions on playing in an arena with no fans, as the Nuggets are set to do in Orlando.
“He was like, ‘I’m just not the one to answer that question,’” Plumlee recalled. “’You’d probably have to ask somebody with the Chargers or one of these other teams.’ …
“It was like talking to somebody in the locker room, which was really cool.”
Manning, who spoke to the team while they were still relegated to individual workouts back in Denver, brought it back to the Nuggets’ circumstances. In 2011, during the NFL lockout, he explained how he and his brother Eli organized group workouts and film sessions to keep their teammates sharp.
“He said, ‘Unfortunately for us in Indianapolis, we never saw the fruits of that because I had my neck injury, but Eli ended up winning the Super Bowl that year,’” Plumlee said. “He was like, ‘Don’t just sit back and say, ‘Well, let’s see what the NBA allows us to do.’ His message was be productive with the time, be proactive and be better for this shutdown than you were before it, and I think that was something that was taken to heart. It was good for us as a team.”
For most of it, Plumlee said, Manning spoke of his time with the Colts moreso than the Broncos. The essence of the talk boiled down to team building and camaraderie, and Manning spent far more time discussing his teammates, like running back Edgerrin James, than he did celebrating his own accomplishments.
“He’s a great storyteller,” Plumlee said. “He couldn’t have been a better speaker for us and what we’re going through with really an unprecedented finish to our NBA season.”
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