Fielding a series of questions about the future of the Nuggets’ roster and their willingness to pay the NBA luxury tax next season, team president Josh Kroenke said Friday that “everything is on the table” this summer — except for trading Nikola Jokic, of course.
Kroenke, the son of team owner Stan Kroenke, didn’t rule out 貹⾱Բthe costly “repeater tax” when asked directly whether that would drive their decision-making this offseason. But in general, during a 45-minute news conference at Ball Arena, the KSE vice chairman was non-committal about exactly how much money his family is prepared to commit to the 2026-27 team after it underachieved in the 2026 NBA Playoffs.
“I don’t want to be masked in my frustration for how the season ended,” Kroenke said. “I think that anybody that was a fan of the Denver Nuggets should be frustrated. And anything that a fan feels, I probably feel a thousand X. So I think everything is gonna be on the table, outside of trading Nikola.”
The luxury tax is a threshold that requires teams with higher roster payrolls at the end of each season to pay a tax, which is dispersed between the league and teams below the threshold. Essentially, it’s a mechanism designed to punish high-spending owners and reward low spenders.
The Nuggets were a luxury-tax team for three consecutive seasons, from 2022-23 to 2024-25, including the year they won their first NBA championship in franchise history. But what makes this offseason a pivotal moment for them is the additional tax rate known as the repeater tax — a more severe financial penalty based on five-year windows, incentivizing owners not to spend excessively over the salary cap for prolonged periods.
A team pays the repeater if it finishes a season in luxury tax territory after having done so in three of the previous four seasons as well.
That means for the Nuggets to dodge it, they have to finish 2025-26 and 2026-27 out of the tax.
They’re halfway there, after salary-dumping Hunter Tyson to the Brooklyn Nets before the trade deadline in February — a move that ensured their payroll was under this season’s luxury tax line.
“I don’t think we made ourselves any worse, what we did at the deadline,” Kroenke said.
He chalked it up to “preserving flexibility.” Now, the Nuggets have the option to spend luxuriously next season — a choice that would’ve been available to them regardless — or avoid the luxury tax again and . Two consecutive years out of the tax would reset Kroenkes’ repeater clock, allowing them to spend into the luxury tax for another three consecutive years from 2027-28 through 2029-30 without paying the additional penalties.
“I think that the responsible thing to do at that moment in time, if there wasn’t a huge move we saw that could strengthen the roster, was to put ourselves in position to (avoid the tax),” Kroenke said.
It’s a sentiment that was echoed by KSE president of team and media operations Kevin Demoff in a February interview with the KSE-owned radio station Altitude Sports. “Who knows what will happen next year,” Demoff said at the time, “but what’s really penalizing right now in the NBA is if you’re in the repeater tax.”
So what’s the decision three months later regarding that repeater tax, now that flexibility has been achieved?
“If we deem running it back the most competitive thing we can do for the roster, that’s probably what we’re going to be doing,” Kroenke said Friday. “So I don’t want to put words in my dad’s mouth by any means, but he has owned the team for a very long time. We’ve run it aggressively as we can at different points in time. I think that the joke is always, we love to pay for talent on the floor. So leaning into that assessment that people have put on us at different points in time, if we deem that’s the most competitive thing for us, then that’s what we’re gonna be doing.”
Nuggets’ payroll set to spike
The problem for Nuggets ownership is that simply “running it back” with every important player from a wasted 2025-26 season is expensive. There’s the repeater tax, and then there’s the second apron, another payroll threshold introduced in the 2023 NBA collective bargaining agreement that involves increased tax rates and punitive roster-building restrictions. With new contract extensions going into effect for Aaron Gordon, Christian Braun and possibly Peyton Watson this summer, the Nuggets’ payroll is about to spike. They’re projected to be a second-apron team unless they make cost-cutting trades.
And if precedent is any indicator, the Kroenkes have not entered the second apron at any point in its existence so far. They avoided it in 2024 by letting Kentavious Caldwell-Pope walk in free agency. Cleveland is the only team set to finish this season in the second apron.
That’s why several league sources have told The Denver Post they anticipate the Nuggets trading at least one starter this offseason, especially if they retain Watson in free agency.
So when Kroenke uses the term “running it back,” he doesn’t mean running it back completely. That would require signing up for second apron and repeater tax payments.
A more accurate term than “running it back” is “not completely reconfiguring the roster.”
“When I say running it back, you’re talking about a lot of different variations of what ‘running it back’ could look like,” he clarified. “Is it gonna be the exact same team? I don’t think there’s ever the exact same team of the 13 to 16 guys in there. But are you talking about the same core group of players? Potentially. And that could mean re-signing and bringing back certain guys as well.”
The core he’s referring to consists of Jokic, Jamal Murray and Aaron Gordon. Before this season, Kroenke — like most fans and people around the league — viewed those three and Michael Porter Jr. as Denver’s core. Porter was traded for Cam Johnson last summer, a move that enabled the Nuggets to both shed salary and deepen their bench in subsequent trades.
“We had to take a hard look at where we had committed ourselves from a salary standpoint, and understanding that having three max players was probably not something that was gonna be continuous for us going forward,” Kroenke said. “Love Michael as a person. Love Michael as a player. But that was something we felt the organization needed to do to maintain a roster going forward, to establish more depth.”
The question that will loom over the next two months is whether Gordon or Murray might join Porter as salary cap sacrifices.
As Kroenke indicated, it’s on the table.
But trading either of them would double as an acknowledgment that Denver’s current template has gone stale. Kroenke is not entirely sure that’s true.
“I think we need to have running it back as a possibility. I think this season was, in a lot of ways, the season that never was, because this group never fully got a chance to show any kind of rhythm,” he said. “… I think that a microcosm of our season is Nikola before and after the (knee) injury. He was one player before, and when he came back, he was still incredible in so many facets, but for some reason, his 3-point shot left him. Whether or not you believe me, I do believe that basketball is a rhythm game, and the team as a whole never had a chance to fully establish a rhythm. And that truly showed up when the games mattered in April.”
If it’s not Murray or Gordon, then at least one of Braun, Johnson or Watson will likely end up on a new team for money-saving purposes.
Meanwhile, the rest of the NBA is widely expected to be more competitive next season — from the bottom tier, where anti-tanking regulations and a weaker draft class should curb teams’ intentional losing, to the upper echelons, where Oklahoma City and San Antonio stand tall.
If the Nuggets do risk weakening their roster for payroll reasons this summer, can they consider themselves championship contenders anymore?
“It depends,” Kroenke said. “I think the smartest teams can figure out how to stay competitive while having to make some of those cutthroat moves at different points in time. But we’ve developed a lot of things around here organically, and we want to try to hang onto those pieces for sure.”
