Caleb Love made March Madness runs in four of his five years playing NCAA men’s basketball, including one to the national championship with North Carolina in 2022. Watch his career NCAA tournament highlights here.Nikola Jokic didn’t speak publicly about the dysfunction that has plagued the Denver Nuggets this season, but sources tell ESPN that he “wasn’t happy about it.”
“Joker is really good at letting you know how he feels,” a team source said, “without saying anything.”
Jokic has never given any indication he would consider leaving the Nuggets and even gave the franchise a vote of confidence before the season despite losing key veterans like Kentavious Caldwell-Pope over the past two offseasons.
“I think people in general, they always want more and more and more, but they don’t know what they have,” Jokic told ESPN. “I’m really happy we have one title — a lot of very good players don’t win.”
But the Nuggets still operate with urgency in maximizing their title window around Jokic.
“We have the best player in the world,” a Nuggets official said. “We take that very seriously.”
The three-year, $212 million extension that Jokic is eligible for this offseason was one of the factors that led to the urgency of Josh Kroenke’s decision to fire Michael Malone and Calvin Booth.
The ongoing “cold war” between Michael Malone and Calvin Booth became toxic for everyone within the Denver Nuggets. Even before both were fired on the eve of the playoffs, Josh Kroenke wanted to clean house at the All-Star break, sources said, but an eight-game winning streak spared Malone and Booth.
“Everybody in the organization was miserable,” a team source said. “That’s what Josh felt. It’s a bad vibe. You can’t operate like that. He felt that if he removed those two people, everybody could just focus on doing their job. Change needed to happen.”
On Monday, Josh Kroenke talked it through with his father, Stan Kroenke, and Kevin Demoff, who has become a more influential voice in the organization since ascending to the role of president of team and media operations for Kroenke Sports and Entertainment, which also owns the Los Angeles Rams, Colorado Avalanche and Arsenal FC, a little over a year ago.
“There were certain trends that were very worrisome to me at certain points in time, but they would get masked by a few wins here and there,” Kroenke said during an in-house interview released Tuesday afternoon. “In the world of professional sports, where winning and losing is your currency, winning can mask a lot of things.”
Malone and Booth had vastly different opinions on how to sustain the Nuggets’ title window. Malone preferred veterans while Booth kept pushing for his younger draft picks to play.
“They just saw the world completely differently,” a team source said.
Players up and down the Denver roster began to tune out Malone over time.
“The situation was just unsustainable,” another team source said. “Coach Malone and Calvin couldn’t fix it because they made the situation all about themselves.”
Said one player, “The players were freakin’ miserable, man. You could see it. The effort would come and go. I just wish it happened sooner. We wouldn’t be in this mess.”
