Brian Scalabrine is still right a dozen years later.

The 11-year NBA veteran, who was never known for being naturally gifted outside of his 6-foot-9 frame, once challenged a handful of basketball commoners to show up for a set of one-on-one contests after his ability was insulted one too many times on social media in 2013.

Scalabrine outscored the competition 44-6 across four games to 11 and told the competition and anyone else listening, “I’m way closer to LeBron (James) than you are to me.”

After my media cohorts and I lost a roughly 30-minute scrimmage against the Nuggets’ assistant coaches by a 114-16 margin that was more lopsided than the scoreboard reflected, Scalabrine’s words ring truer than ever.

The trend of coaches humbling the people who cover their teams daily gained popularity after Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla surprised the Boston media that their intra-media scrimmage had been replaced by a game against his coaching staff, which included Mazzulla, who played at West Virginia. Former NBA players Phil Pressey and Amile Jefferson also participated.

The Nuggets’ assistants with NBA experience – J.J. Barea, Jared Dudley and Darrell Arthur – did the local media a favor and opted not to play, though it might not have made much of a difference. Former University of Denver captain Cam Griffin turned the scrimmage into a personal dunk contest. Aziz Leeks (Idaho), Rodney Billups (Denver), and Travess Armenta (Northern Colorado) also made the difference between college hoopers and the rest of us abundantly clear in the first minutes of the scrimmage. During my brief stint on the court, getting a shot off before committing a turnover felt like a win. Getting a stop – there weren’t many – felt like a brief blessing from the basketball gods.

Fortunately, the Nuggets media knew what we were getting into when we showed up. The 25 or so of us who laced up and embraced embarrassment joked about scoring more points than the Boston media, which set a low bar with four points, albeit in a shorter scrimmage. The fact that the media had five or six squads of five playing four-minute stretches against the six or seven assistants made absolutely no difference in the outcome.

Denver’s assistants scored the first 40 points before Altitude’s Vic Lombardi got the good guys on the board with a corner 3.  That and another corner 3 from Katy Winge, believed to be the only former Division I athlete playing against the coaches, were among the few highlights for Denver’s media before we started playing more competitive games against each other.

Despite the approximate 27-0 run the coaches went on during my time on the court, I left with not only a stronger appreciation for the ability of elite hoopers but also all that goes into playing at a high level day after day. The few hours of competition left this distance-running 30-something feeling like there was a line of bricks wrapped around my quads when it was time to walk the dog the morning after the scrimmage. Two days later, the soreness persists, and a stairwell remains almost as daunting an opposition as the Nuggets’ coaching staff.

Scal, who managed 3.1 points per game over his career, knew what he was talking about.