Some fans love putting asterisks next to every team that manages to break through and win the NBA championship. The asterisk for the Denver Nuggets, the 2023 NBA champion, is that apparently they did not face the toughest opposition en route to a championship. Setting aside the fact that the Nuggets literally do not have control over which team they come up against, there's an eye-popping statistic that should dispel that notion.

As Twitter user @BroncoSquatch pointed out, the Nuggets faced plenty of players on their way to the NBA Finals with stellar resumes. How stellar, one might ask? Their run to winning the championship included defeating opponents with a combined 85 All-Star appearances among them, setting the all-time record. The team that previously held the record was the 2014 San Antonio Spurs, which had to overcome opponents with a combined 81 All-Star nods.

Of course, it's fair to wonder whether this is the greatest qualifier of opponent difficulty. As one user pointed out in the replies to the original tweet, this standard penalizes the 2014 Spurs for facing a younger version of LeBron James who hasn't yet amassed the number of All-Star appearances he's had through 2023.

This is a fair concern. After all, the aforementioned All-Stars, such as James, could be in the tail-end of their careers by this point. Chris Paul is another example of this, as the Nuggets faced the 38-year old version of the Point God. Nevertheless, @BroncoSquatch responded by saying the 2014 Spurs faced eight-time All-Star Vince Carter, who, by then, was far from the player he was at his peak. So with that in mind, this qualifier may be fairer than one may think at first glance.

This is especially the case when the Nuggets came up against four of the league's premier wings on their way to winning a title. Defeating the likes of Kevin Durant, Devin Booker, LeBron James, and Jimmy Butler, not to mention Anthony Davis and Anthony Edwards is no mean feat.

Even then, the seeding of the teams they beat (eight, four, seven, and eight) may not do much to convince casual fans of the difficult road the Nuggets went through. But this statistic should at least make them think.