Nuggets fans have been whispering: Do the Kroenkes have a favorite child?

There’s a particular kind of frustration that builds in a fan base when the people writing the checks appear to be more invested in their other teams than the one in your city. It’s rarely spoken out loud, but it lingers in every roster decision that feels half-measured, every front-office departure that didn’t have to happen, every offseason that ends with the same nagging sense that more could have been done.

That frustration found a voice on a Tuesday edition of “Stokley and Evans, with Mark Schlereth” on 104.3 The Fan.

Mike Evans laid out the landscape of the Kroenke sports empire, an conglomerate that now includes a Premier League title for Arsenal and a blockbuster trade by the Los Angeles Rams to acquire the best defensive player in the world in Myles Garrett. Both moves represent aggressive, championship-minded commitments to winning.

Both moves stand in stark contrast to how the Denver Nuggets have been operated in recent years. And Evans wasn’t shy about cataloguing the receipts.

“You’ve let a number of very successful executives leave because you didn’t want to pay them. There’s no salary cap there. You haven’t invested in the kind of practice facilities that pretty much every other team can boast. And you had a year in the Nikola Jokic prime – in which you inexplicably left yourself incredibly thin and young on the bench. To a point where you really had no chance to compete,” Evans said.

The departure of key front-office figures wasn’t driven by ambition elsewhere, it was driven by ownership’s unwillingness to compensate them. It’s a trend that continued on Tuesday when Chris MacFarland left the Avalanche for the Predators.

The practice facility issue is a long-running embarrassment for a franchise that just won a title not too long ago. And the bench construction during a season when the team should have been all-in around the best player in the world remains one of the most baffling roster decisions in recent memory.

Evans then drew the comparison that puts it all into sharp focus.

“I think it is fair, especially on the basketball side of things, to ask, ‘Is this ownership as committed to building around their star as they are with their Rams team that’s building around their star in Matthew Stafford?'” he asked.

That’s the question. Not whether the Kroenkes love the Nuggets; every owner loves their teams when they win. The question is whether they are willing to make the same kinds of difficult, expensive, championship-driven decisions in Denver that they are clearly making in Los Angeles and London.

Right now, the evidence suggests they are not. Arsenal got the resources and won the league. The Rams got the resources and traded for a generational defender. The Nuggets got Nikola Jokic, and somehow, that has not translated into the same level of organizational urgency.

The Kroenkes don’t have to play favorites publicly. But the receipts, as Evans laid them out, tell their own story. And Denver is starting to notice.

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