Josh Kroenke almost hesitated a third time before deciding to fire the winningest coach in Nuggets franchise history and the general manager who helped build Denver’s championship roster.

“There were two moments in time that I identified where I hesitated,” Kroenke said Monday at Ball Arena. “It was either out of personal feelings or belief for the group.”

The moves, made last Tuesday, marked the latest in a season an NBA playoff team has fired a coach. The Nuggets’ team president was aware of what he was doing when he moved on from Michael Malone and Calvin Booth.

“Trust me, I went through all that,” Kroenke said. “I’m like, ‘Am I crazy?’”

Kroenke said the first time he considered an organizational shakeup was around Thanksgiving. The Nuggets were 10-7 on Nov. 27.

“I was really feeling like things were not headed in a direction or up to my standards as an organization,” he said.

Kroenke decided against making a change because he believed Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray were, understandably in his eyes, playing themselves into shape after their offseasons were shortened by representing Serbia and Canada, respectively, in the Olympics.

The second consideration came at a surprising time. The Nuggets won eight straight games leading into the All-Star break, but Orlando, which finished seventh in the Eastern Conference, was the only team Denver beat during that stretch that qualified for the postseason.

“When you have a roster like we do, you have the best player on the planet, it can mask a lot of things,” Kroenke said.

“What would be crazier: me doing it what I did last week, or doing it on an eight-game win streak?”

The final straw was snapped by a post-game trip to the Nuggets’ locker room after last Sunday’s loss to the Pacers. Denver’s four-game losing streak was its longest this season, and a lifeless locker room showed all he needed to see.

“I could feel how flat the room was,” Kroenke said. “On a four-game losing streak heading into the playoffs with a flat locker room, that was when I understood and I internalized how much I had let this room slip and that it was not up to the standards of what Denver Nuggets basketball really is.”

Kroenke confirmed he let Jokic know a decision had been made and offered to engage in conversation. Kroenke said Jokic nodded and accepted the news but declined to offer much input. There will be more conversations between the two as the franchise conducts a search for the next coach and general manager in the offseason, but Kroenke isn’t expecting his superstar to change his outlook anytime soon.

“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,” Kroenke said. “I think ‘Jok’ understands that and respects that very much.”

After consulting the franchise’s most important piece, Kroenke went to have “as positive of a bad conversation as I could have” with Malone and Booth. Malone was with the franchise since 2015 and overtook Doug Moe as the franchise’s winningest coach earlier this season. He finished with 471 wins as coach of the Nuggets. Lead assistant David Adelman led the Nuggets to three straight wins to close the regular season and will lead the fourth-seeded Nuggets into a first-round series against the Clippers Saturday.

“’DA’ knows that group. He knows the type of communication, I think, that they need, especially right now,” Kroenke said.

“While he hasn’t been in that chair …. he’s more than ready for it.”

Booth joined the Nuggets as assistant general manager in 2017 and became the team’s top decision maker in 2022. Ben Tenzer, who most recently served as the general manager of Denver’s G League affiliate, was appointed interim general manager.

Kroenke appreciated Malone and Booth’s contributions to the franchise and took some responsibility for letting his emotions delay what recently became an inevitable decision to move forward without two key parts of the Nuggets’ most successful era.

“Coming out of the summer of 2013, we made a lot of organizational changes, and we helped to reestablish culture underneath coach Malone that I’m very proud of, and one that resulted in a championship grown organically over time,” Kroenke said. “To be frank, I’m very protective of that culture at this point, and that’s why I say that I failed both ‘Cal’ and ‘Mo’ as a leader, because I let certain things slip to a place that they never should have been. To be honest, we wound up making a decision last week that … I hesitated on twice. I needed to be better for the group, checking some personal feelings, my respect for both of them, to be to be a better person for the overall group.”