The Denver Nuggets go into the 2025 offseason needing to bolster their roster, but also having to believe they aren’t that far off from being title contenders again. This was a team that pushed the eventual champion Thunder to seven games in their second round playoff series, and Nikola Jokić remains on a very short list of the best players on the planet.
Team president Josh Kroenke (who is also the son of owner Stan Kroenke) spoke to the media on Tuesday and offered up a few interesting soundbites regarding Jokić. One was confirming that a standard piece of NBA business would happen this summer, which is that Denver would offer Jokić the extension they’re allowed to this summer but that he wasn’t sure if Jokić would accept — this is because he can make much more by waiting to sign an extension in the summer of 2026.
The more bizarre quote regarding Jokić’s future in Denver came in response to a question about their willingness to spend and go into the second apron — something they did not do a year ago when they let Kentavious Caldwell-Pope leave in free agency. Kroenke used his answer to effectively explain why the Nuggets wouldn’t do that by willfully bringing up, unprompted, the disaster scenario every Nuggets fan is terrified of — a world where they trade Jokić.
“I think that, for us as an organization, going into that second apron is not something that we’re scared of. I think that there are rules around it that we need to be very careful of with our injury history,” Kroenke said. “The wrong person gets injured and very quickly you’re into a scenario that I never want to have to contemplate and that’s trading No. 15. And so, we’re very conscious of that pushing forward and providing the resources that we can when the moment arrives. But that second apron, is it a hard cap? I’m not 100% sure, but it’s something that teams are obviously very aware of going forward.”
It’s pretty funny to go from saying the “second apron is not something that we’re scared of” to, two sentences later, bringing up the absolute disaster scenario for the organization as the reason why they are worried about going into the second apron. Executives never want to confirm that they aren’t willing to spend, because no one likes being viewed as cheap, but it’s pretty clear from this statement that there are very few scenarios in which the Nuggets would be willing to cross that threshold.
The challenge this summer is finding ways to upgrade the roster to the degree that’s needed without doing that. There’s been plenty of speculation about Denver trying to trade Michael Porter Jr. to shake things up and restructure their cap sheet, but the challenge there is they need to find a team that views Porter Jr. on his current deal (which has two years and nearly $80 million remaining) as a value worth sending back a positive return. Finding that team is difficult, and it seems most likely that the Denver team that runs out onto the floor to begin the 2025-26 season looks an awful lot like the one that finished the 2024-25 campaign.
The justification for doing so will be not running into a disastrous financial situation in which they have no choice but to trade Jokić, but in trying to avoid that scenario, they could create a different one where he gets frustrated with a team that’s been slowly slipping backward due to its unwillingness to spend ever since winning a championship.
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