Michael Malone wants to be in your living room.



He wants to be there after dinner, dressed in a well-pressed suit. He wants to be able to direct your eyeballs to the screen and watch you enjoy “an exciting year, a big year” for his basketball team.



“I don’t know the last time the Denver Nuggets had this much of a build-up and excitement going into a season,” Malone said. “So if our fans weren’t able to watch it, yeah, I’d be disappointed.”



The threat of such a scenario appears increasingly real. Altitude TV is unlikely to reach a new carriage deal with its three biggest distributors — Comcast, Dish and DirecTV — before Thursday’s season-opening game for the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche. The Nuggets tip off 20 days after that, on Oct. 23 in Portland, and there isn’t a groundswell of optimism, as the landscape currently stands, that a new agreement will be in place by then...