{"id":53800,"date":"2025-05-24T12:16:08","date_gmt":"2025-05-24T12:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/53800\/"},"modified":"2025-05-24T12:16:08","modified_gmt":"2025-05-24T12:16:08","slug":"how-close-were-nuggets-to-thunders-level-josh-kroenke-weighs-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/53800\/","title":{"rendered":"How close were Nuggets to Thunder’s level? Josh Kroenke weighs in."},"content":{"rendered":"

Josh Kroenke<\/a> is just like any other sports fan. When the dust settles from a seven-game series, who doesn\u2019t love pondering what would\u2019ve, could\u2019ve, should\u2019ve been?<\/p>\n

The hypotheticals are more nuanced this year. It was all soberingly simple in 2024. In a series of blowouts, the Nuggets would\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

As for Denver\u2019s fresh-on-the-mind loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder in seven games<\/a>, Kroenke understands how easy it is to manipulate the \u201cwhat-ifs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTook a great team to seven games,\u201d the Nuggets president said. \u201cThat series could have been 4-0 the other way. That series could have been 4-1 us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Accurate. To put a finer point on it: If Aaron Gordon \u2014 a 33% career outside shooter \u2014 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\u2019re in the Western Conference Finals.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think we lost Game 7 during Game 7,\u201d Kroenke said. \u201cI 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\u2019t think it was a 4-0 sweep for Oklahoma City, and I don\u2019t think it was a 4-1 (win for us). And that\u2019s where the series wound up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two stingers for both teams. And in the end, probably a fair outcome.<\/p>\n

If this all sounds like a pointless conversation you\u2019ve had with a friend over beers this week, well, it sort of is. Except that Kroenke\u2019s 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<\/a>: How close are the Nuggets?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a question that Kroenke has \u201casked myself in about 10 different ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s gold? Was the OKC sweep a more realistic result than Denver prevailing in any number of games?<\/p>\n

Maybe those are some of the 10 ways Kroenke has asked it.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re close. But I don\u2019t want to be naive in thinking of how close we are,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I don\u2019t want to underestimate how close we were either. Shoot, thinking back to the first round, we\u2019re 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?<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026 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\u2019re gonna get to work seeing about how we can go toe-to-toe and then overtake them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kroenke made another sneakily astute point during his end-of-season news conference this week, one that almost contradicts his general sentiment that Denver\u2019s \u201canswers are internal.<\/a>\u201d It\u2019s Kroenke\u2019s belief that the current championship window opened not in 2023 with the team\u2019s first championship, but in 2021 with the acquisition of Gordon.<\/p>\n

Five games later, Jamal Murray tore his ACL, causing him to miss two playoff runs.<\/p>\n

That would mean the Nuggets have played five postseasons as a contender: Two of them were spoiled by Murray\u2019s absence, one of them resulted in a championship, and the other two ended in second-round Game 7s.<\/p>\n

That would mean, logically, there are fewer years left of this.<\/p>\n

Getting close is informative. But it will become increasingly dissatisfying every year after this.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am proud to say I thought we squeezed a little more out of the season than the direction we were headed six weeks ago,\u201d Kroenke said. \u201cBut when you have the roster that we have, anything outside of a championship is not acceptable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Want more Nuggets news? Sign up for the Nuggets Insider to get all our NBA analysis.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Josh Kroenke is just like any other sports fan. When the dust settles from a seven-game series, who…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":53801,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3781],"tags":[877,7,765,250,301,187,3943,766,762,3787,165,4231,252,6,253,302,66,4713],"class_list":{"0":"post-53800","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-denver-nuggets","8":"tag-aaron-gordon","9":"tag-basketball","10":"tag-colorado","11":"tag-david-adelman","12":"tag-denver","13":"tag-denver-nuggets","14":"tag-denvernuggets","15":"tag-front-range","16":"tag-jamal-murray","17":"tag-josh-kroenke","18":"tag-latest-headlines","19":"tag-michael-malone","20":"tag-more-nuggets-news","21":"tag-nba","22":"tag-nikola-jokic","23":"tag-nuggets","24":"tag-sports","25":"tag-stan-kroenke"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/114562766244855131","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53800\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}