DENVER — Josh Kroenke and Nikola Jokic are aligned with how the Denver Nuggets need to approach this offseason.

After losing in Game 7 to the Oklahoma City Thunder, the MVP runner-up said, “It definitely seems like the teams that have longer rotations — longer benches — are the teams that are winning: Indiana, OKC, Minnesota.”

From the moment Thunder coach Mark Daigneault turned to his bench during that clinching game  — compared to when David Adelman did — the script flipped. The Nuggets led by 11 in the first quarter when their first substitution was made, putting Russell Westbrook on the floor. The former MVP was a minus-34 while leading the bench unit.

While MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander got back to his powerful ways and Jalen Williams also played again like an All-Star, it was OKC’s depth that disrupted Denver. Alex Caruso was a plus-40 and guarded Jokic for big portions of the game. Cason Wallace stuffed the stat sheet and was a plus-38. Aaron Wiggins again hit multiple threes.

And the Nuggets’ bench wasn’t just an issue with the team in the final game of the postseason — it was a problem all year, failing both to score and to play defense. It’s actually been a thing that’s plagued the Jokic era in Denver, but was heightened this year despite the signing of Westbrook in the hope of rectifying things.

Where the Thunder played 11 guys over 700 minutes this season, the Nuggets only used eight that way. In Game 5’s important OKC win that happened as Denver fell apart, the bench scoring went 35-8 against the Nuggets. The Thunder played nine guys for at least 12 minutes in that game, while the Nuggets only had seven players hit a shot.

“I’ll say there’s an urgency to improve the team and the organization everywhere, whether that’s via trade, via draft. Right now, I think that having a cohesive organization from coaching staff to front office is our main goal,” Nuggets owner Josh Kroenke said Thursday. “I think that first of all, yeah, I mean, I heard Jokic’s comments loud and clear and I was thinking that before those words came out of his mouth.”

The Nuggets couldn’t go as deep in any game, and the shallowness also negatively impacted the starters, who began to struggle.

“Just in how the playoffs, if you’re watching the games, you can see it yourself as well as watching our games,” Kroenke said. “You can see where we leaned on a lot of guys for a lot of minutes in big-time moments, and that has a cumulative effect that when you’re playing a seven-game series, that can wear you down.”

So the Nuggets know their bench is their big issue, but their problem is in how to fix it since they are up against the luxury tax’s second apron, they do not have any draft picks, and are already locked into 13 contracts (counting player options) on a 15-man roster.

“To talk about Jokic’s statement and then to look around the NBA, our roster a lot of it, was put together under different rules and we have extended guys under this current CBA which has tweaks to the new rules, especially at the top top end in the tax bracket with your first and second aprons,” Kroenke said. “I know that created a lot of dialogue around KCP last summer, but I think that what see around the league is a lot of successful teams that have developed their benches… we know the rules don’t allow certain exceptions to exist anymore in the same way they did previously for you to go out and get a veteran player, a plug-and-play bench type player, I think those opportunities do exist if you’re smart and can find value where others might not see it but I also think that there whether it’s Oklahoma City, you look at some of the guys on the Pacers roster, these guys have been developed over years, they understand their roles they understand their fesponsibilities and they’re accountable to that and those are the teams that I see having a lot of success, so there’s a lot of ways to improve it, and we’re going to be looking at all of them.”

Seemingly younger guys like Julian Strawther, Peyton Watson, Jalen Pickett and DaRon Holmes will have some big chances to earn roles in strengthening Denver’s depth. It’s what both the boss and the star of the team want.