They read the defense correctly almost every time and adjusted to everything they encountered. "None of those guys had been in a playoff-type atmosphere before, but they weren't scared of the moment they embraced it. "I saw a flash of something that I thought could be special," Kroenke said. Or rather, the moment Denver knew that Jokic and Murray were the stars it wanted to build around. THERE'S A CERTAIN irony that the end of the Nuggets' championship journey came by beating Jimmy Butler and the Heat, because so many people in the organization point to the final game of the 2018 season when Butler and the Minnesota Timberwolves beat the Nuggets as the beginning of this run. It's a journey, and I'm glad that I'm part of the journey." "There is a process - there are steps that you need to fill - and there are no shortcuts. "You need to be bad, then you need to be good, then when you're good you need to fail, and then when you fail, you're going to figure it out. "If you want to be a success, you need a couple years," Jokic said after Monday's title game. Very few actually have the patience and persistence to see it through like the Nuggets did this season.Įven fewer know how to identify the stars to build around, as Denver did with Finals MVP Nikola Jokic and point guard Jamal Murray, and then stick with them when it takes a while to see results, or there are setbacks like Murray's knee injury, which kept him out of the previous two playoff runs. Find two stars in the draft, develop them, add complementary players, watch the team grow, hope it results in a championship.Įvery new coach or general manager articulates a vision like this when they get hired. It sounds so simple now in the glow of a championship locker room. We needed guys that wanted to be here and guys that played for each other, and over time we eventually found those guys and built around them." "I learned we can't have that sort of instability if we're going to try to grow," Kroenke said. The lessons he learned there, hard as they were, would serve as the foundation for this years-in-the-making championship run. "And my first meeting was to fly to Baltimore where Melo asks to be traded." "I was 30 years old, and my dad had just put me in charge of the team," Kroenke told ESPN from inside the Nuggets' locker room Monday night after Denver closed out its first NBA championship with a 94-89 win against the Miami Heat in Game 5 of the NBA Finals. Nuggets president Josh Kroenke remembers that meeting like it was yesterday. It was a request more than a demand, and it was beneficial to both parties: The Nuggets wouldn't be left with the kind of hole James had left in Cleveland, and Anthony could sign a five-year maximum extension with the Knicks. So much of the next decade in NBA history traces back to that event, whether it be small-market teams trying to protect themselves from losing a star of James' magnitude in free agency or other teams trying to construct a superteam of their own.įor the Denver Nuggets, though, the summer of 2010 was the year their own star, Carmelo Anthony, told them he didn't intend to re-sign when his contract was up the next summer and wanted to be traded to the New York Knicks. How the Nuggets cultivated the NBA's most dynamic duoĭENVER - The summer of 2010 in the NBA is generally remembered as the year LeBron James left the small-market Cleveland Cavaliers to form a superteam in Miami with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. You have reached a degraded version of because you're using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer.įor a complete experience, please upgrade or use a supported browser
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