Denver Nuggets boss Josh Kroenke says firings of coach and GM were months in the making

DENVER (AP) — Denver Nuggets boss Josh Kroenke said Monday that he twice balked at firing the winningest coach in franchise history and the general manager who connected the final pieces of the team's only championship puzzle before finally canning them last week with just three games left in the season.

Kroenke held off in November to give the team time to jell and an eight-game winning streak heading into the All-Star break tempered his desire to part ways in February with coach Michael Malone and GM Calvin Booth.

Kroenke finally fired both men last week in a move that stunned the league because the Nuggets had already secured a seventh consecutive playoff berth and were less than two years removed from the city's first NBA championship parade.

“So, what would be crazier, me doing what I did last week or doing it on an eight-game winning streak?” Kroenke asked.

Only one of those eight wins leading into the All-Star break came against a team that would make the playoffs, the Orlando Magic, the No. 7 seed in the East.

“I think that those eight games masked a trend that was going on behind closed doors that ultimately started to really affect the end of our season,” Kroenke said.

Kroenke said he also seriously considered a change around Thanksgiving with the Nuggets off to a so-so start and “I was really feeling like things weren't headed in the right direction.” But he said he held off then to give the team time to settle in.

Despite leading Denver to its first title in 47 years, Malone and Booth long clashed over roster philosophies, a discord that led to a toxicity in the organization that began to affect the team’s fortunes and which led Kroenke to fire them both.

The Nuggets won all three games under interim coach David Adelman to secure a third consecutive 50-win season and the fourth seed in the West, where they'll open at home Saturday against the fifth-seeded Los Angeles Clippers.

Kroenke said he'll commence a search for both positions after the season but he demurred when asked if he wanted to have a GM in place before hiring a head coach: “My thoughts aren't there because this season's not over."

Kroenke also announced he'd promoted Ben Tenzer to interim GM for the playoff run.

Kroenke began his nearly 30-minute news conference, his first since the firings, by praising Malone and Booth: “I want to start off by initially just staying thank you to both Calvin and Coach Malone ... And to be frank, neither one of them deserved it, so for that I apologize.”

Kroenke said he ultimately made the decision to move on from both men “with the hope of kind of rejuvenating the energy of the group and re-establishing some positive thoughts before the playoffs. I think we did that over the last three games ... still have a long way to go."

Nikola Jokic is the gemstone of the Nuggets' roster and the changes at the helm were driven in part by the desire to capitalize on whatever prime playing years the three-time MVP has remaining.

“You have a responsibility when you have a player like that, especially, obviously, in his prime,” Kroenke said. “But I feel an even greater responsibility to the person. ... I'd be the dumbest guy in basketball if I wasn't asking him for his opinion on certain things. But it's my responsibility to make those decisions for the best of the organization and I think Jokic understands and respects that.”

Kroenke debunked the notion that he was unwilling to trade anyone not named Jokic, including fellow Missouri alum Michael Porter Jr., following reports that he nixed a deal for the long-range sharp-shooter at the trade deadline.

“If it wasn't such a serious accusation, I would probably laugh a little harder,” Kroenke said. “I'd say any kind of report that we're not open to trading everybody possible to improve the team is completely false.”

He added: “I'm certainly not going to be green-lighting any trades around here when I don't see complete organization cohesion and we're not maximizing the group we got.”

Kroenke noted that he couldn't always be on hand at Ball Arena to police the winning culture that had started to ebb with Malone and Booth at odds.

“I have a wide array of responsibilities across our businesses at this point,” Kroenke said of the family's sports empire, which includes the Los Angeles Rams, the Colorado Avalanche and English soccer club Arsenal.

“I mean, last Tuesday was the craziest Tuesday that I could have ever imagined. I had the worst morning that I've had in over 10 years with the Nuggets followed by the most amazing afternoon I could have ever asked for with the Arsenal Football Club," Kroenke said. "We beat Real Madrid 3-0 in the quarterfinals of the Champions League ... On a human level, that was a rough Tuesday for me. It was all over the place.”

AP NBA: https://apnews.com/nba

Denver Nuggets team president Josh Kroenke, left, hands off his mobile phone to the Nuggets' media relations manager Nick O'Hayre on the way in to respond at a news conference Monday, April 14, 2025, in Denver to questions about the firing of the team's general manager and head coach last week. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

Denver Nuggets team president Josh Kroenke steps up to respond to questions at a news conference Monday, April 14, 2025, in Denver to questions about the firing of the team's general manager and head coach last week. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

Denver Nuggets team president Josh Kroenke responds to questions at a news conference Monday, April 14, 2025, in Denver about the firing of the team's general manager and head coach last week. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

Denver Nuggets team president Josh Kroenke responds to questions at a news conference Monday, April 14, 2025, in Denver about the firing of the team's general manager and head coach last week. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

Denver Nuggets team president Josh Kroenke responds to questions at a news conference Monday, April 14, 2025, in Denver about the firing of the team's general manager and head coach last week. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

Denver Nuggets team president Josh Kroenke responds to questions at a news conference Monday, April 14, 2025, in Denver about the firing of the team's general manager and head coach last week. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.

West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.

The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.

Decisions are expected by early summer.

President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.

Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.

“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”

She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.

Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.

She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.

Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.

“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.

Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.

The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.

About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.

"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”

But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.

“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”

Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”

“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.

One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.

Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”

The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.

The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.

The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.

The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.

If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.

“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)