When they gathered for Miss Audrey’s 101st birthday party in April, the king and crown prince of the Kroenke sports empire smelled something rotten back in Denver.

“We were together to celebrate my grandmother,” Josh Kroenke told me Wednesday. “Looking at each other, I think we kind of both sensed a new level of concern with the Nuggets.”

During the first week of April, between the NFL owners meetings in Florida and a black Tuesday in Colorado, Josh and Stan Kroenke took time out to toast 101 years of Audrey Walton’s extraordinary life.

She is the widow of Bud Walton, the beloved grandmother of Josh and the grande dame of the multibillion-dollar Walmart dynasty.

Immediately after the celebration, Josh hopped a flight to Denver, where he witnessed first-hand the reeling Nuggets lose 105-100 to an Indiana Pacers team far more dangerous than maybe anyone in the NBA fully realized back on April 6.

“After looking people in the eye, I felt the energy in the locker room was not what it needed to be,” Kroenke recalled. “My role is to provide support in every way that I can, until I make a decision to go in a different direction.”

Within 48 hours, he fired Michael Malone as coach and dumped Calvin Booth as general manager.

It was a swift kick in the pants to a basketball team that had lost its championship mojo.

It was a move that fit with everything I’ve learned about Stan Kroenke over the years. He’s a grinder that not only embraces creative tension, but encourages it.

But Josh Kroenke, the heir-apparent to a sports empire, is a conciliator who would rather hug it out than turn the screws.

Maybe that’s why Wednesday, when David Adelman was formally introduced as the 23rd head coach in Nuggets history, it felt like a big group hug.

“This organization does not need a cultural reset,” the younger Kroenke declared.

Denver settled on Adelman as coach, just as it seems likely Kroenke will eventually elevate Ben Tenzer to general manager from within the organization, because it’s the cheap and easy thing to do.

I wonder if the Nuggets are a team that would rather be comfortable than champions again.

“With success, once you get a taste of it, you only want more,” Kroenke insisted. “It’s like your favorite dessert. I don’t know if you ever get sick of it.”

Dessert is something you order after sipping on mimosas and enjoying the scrumptious $96 buffet at the Four Seasons Hotel.

The Nuggets need lace-up their steel-toed boots, grab a lunch bucket and get to work on rebuilding a roster that can’t produce an All-Star teammate truly worthy of playing alongside Nikola Jokic.

After Denver fell more than halfway short of claiming the Larry O’Brien Trophy for the second year in a row, I asked Kroenke and Adelman if they believe the talent currently residing in the Nuggets locker room can win another championship.

“I think the answer, as ‘Jok’ said after the playoffs ended, was obviously no,” Kroenke replied.

“We need to take a hard look at how we can raise our ceiling going forward, whether that’s internally or externally.”

While Adelman did a solid job in a no-win situation after replacing Malone with only three games remaining on the regular-season schedule, it’s also true he guided the Nuggets to elimination in the second round of the playoffs, which a no-better-than-chalk result for the fourth-seeded team in the Western Conference.

It’s laudable that Denver pushed Oklahoma City to seven games, when by the end of the playoff run, Michael Porter Jr. was trying to shoot and rebound with one good arm; Aaron Gordon was hopping around on one healthy leg, while Russell Westbrook needed surgery to repair torn ligaments in his right hand.

Bad injury luck? Yes indeed.

But we’ve also seen the Nuggets run the bodies of their best players into the ground for two straight years.

What needs to change isn’t a championship culture established by Malone, but the commitment to building a deeper, more balanced roster.

If Kroenke believes that can be done by developing Julian Strawther, Peyton Watson and DaRon Holmes II, then what was the real point of firing Booth?

Jokic is eligible to sign a three-year, $212 million contract extension after the NBA Finals.

While no serious negotiations have begun, “Jok is excited about the team and the direction we’re headed,” Kroenke said. “There are a lot of different scenarios. If he forgoes the extension now, what that could mean (financially) for him if he waits. We’ll be open, honest and transparent with him with that dialogue.”

What Jokic needs isn’t more money, but more help.

“I feel more pressure now than I ever have,” said Kroenke, addressing the responsibility of maximizing the prime years of the best basketball player in the world.

While the irreconcilable differences in the relationship between Malone and Booth was a problem, it wasn’t the biggest issue confronting this team.

For too long, Denver players let Malone fight their battles for them with his take-the-L-on-your-way-out feistiness.

“This business is about cohesion,” Adelman said. “It’s all about just moving forward and winning. That’s it. It’s not about finding your best friend.”

The core four of Jokic, Jamal Murray, MPJ and Gordon got a ring and got paid.

Fat and happy is no way to climb back to the NBA mountaintop

It’s the Nuggets roster, not the culture, that needs a reset.