When it was over Thursday night in Oakland, Calif., each man in a suit found a nook in the concrete back hallway of Oracle Arena, lost in what-ifs.
Josh Kroenke and Masai Ujiri. The front-office duo that restructured the Nuggets. The team’s biggest fans.
Each man took extremely hard the loss that knocked the Nuggets out of the playoffs. But on Friday, it was back to work. Meetings and media, phone calls and texts. Kroenke and Ujiri are committed to getting the Nuggets deeper in the playoffs, and it appears they are committed to each other as work partners.
Ujiri’s contract as general manager is up at the end of June. Kroenke, the team president, said Friday: “For the fans, they should know that Masai wants to be here, and I think he enjoys working for me. I think we make a pretty good team, along with Pete (D’Alessandro, vice president of basketball operations) and Dan (Tolzman, scouting director) and the rest of our scouting staff. So I wouldn’t anticipate any issues there.”
— Reported by Benjamin Hochman of the Denver Post
