Josh Kroenke is just like any other sports fan. When the dust settles from a seven-game series, who doesn’t love pondering what would’ve, could’ve, should’ve been?
The hypotheticals are more nuanced this year. It was all soberingly simple in 2024. In a series of blowouts, the Nuggets would’ve advanced past Minnesota if they had just protected that 20-point lead in Game 7. There were no other distinct moments that swung the outcome. Just one unambiguous collapse.
As for Denver’s fresh-on-the-mind loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder in seven games, Kroenke understands how easy it is to manipulate the “what-ifs.”
“Took a great team to seven games,” the Nuggets president said. “That series could have been 4-0 the other way. That series could have been 4-1 us.”
Accurate. To put a finer point on it: If Aaron Gordon — a 33% career outside shooter — misses a 3-pointer at the end of Game 1 and a 3-pointer at the end of Game 3, Denver loses both. Two missed shots away from a Thunder sweep. Or, if the Nuggets hold onto their eight-point leads in the fourth quarters of Games 4 and 5, they’re in the Western Conference Finals.
“I don’t think we lost Game 7 during Game 7,” Kroenke said. “I thought we lost Game 7 during Games 4 and 5. These series are very fragile things, and they come down to little moments in time. Certain actions over the course of a few-minute span in games. While I think we were close in some ways, I don’t think it was a 4-0 sweep for Oklahoma City, and I don’t think it was a 4-1 (win for us). And that’s where the series wound up.”
Two stingers for both teams. And in the end, probably a fair outcome.
If this all sounds like a pointless conversation you’ve had with a friend over beers this week, well, it sort of is. Except that Kroenke’s opinion is more important than yours (respectfully). His ruminations factor into the billion-dollar question that can dictate how teams make offseason decisions, how they assess their future: How close are the Nuggets?
It’s a question that Kroenke has “asked myself in about 10 different ways.”
If Oklahoma City steamrolls its remaining competition and raises a banner, what does that say about the Nuggets? Was their ability to trade punches with a juggernaut for seven games a validation of championship mettle? A suggestion to stay the course and avoid drastic change? Or was it fool’s gold? Was the OKC sweep a more realistic result than Denver prevailing in any number of games?
Maybe those are some of the 10 ways Kroenke has asked it.
“We’re close. But I don’t want to be naive in thinking of how close we are,” he said. “But I don’t want to underestimate how close we were either. Shoot, thinking back to the first round, we’re an Aaron Gordon tip-dunk away from perhaps coming back here down 3-1 (to the Clippers). And then what does that series look like? Do we even have the opportunity to go out and try to chase a team as great as the Thunder?
“… I think as a group we feel confident that we can go toe-to-toe with a lot of teams around the league. And now we’re gonna get to work seeing about how we can go toe-to-toe and then overtake them.”
Kroenke made another sneakily astute point during his end-of-season news conference this week, one that almost contradicts his general sentiment that Denver’s “answers are internal.” It’s Kroenke’s belief that the current championship window opened not in 2023 with the team’s first championship, but in 2021 with the acquisition of Gordon.
Five games later, Jamal Murray tore his ACL, causing him to miss two playoff runs.
That would mean the Nuggets have played five postseasons as a contender: Two of them were spoiled by Murray’s absence, one of them resulted in a championship, and the other two ended in second-round Game 7s.
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Getting close is informative. But it will become increasingly dissatisfying every year after this.
“I am proud to say I thought we squeezed a little more out of the season than the direction we were headed six weeks ago,” Kroenke said. “But when you have the roster that we have, anything outside of a championship is not acceptable.”
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