Nuggets president Josh Kroenke on 2017 draft: "Nobody bats 1.000"

Denver Nuggets president Josh Kroenke has heard the critiques about the way his organization handled the 2017 draft.

In June, the Nuggets traded the rights to the 13th overall pick to the Utah Jazz. Lousville guard Donovan Mitchell went 13th overall. Nine months later, he is a candidate for Rookie of the Year and looks like a superstar in the making.

The Nuggets received Trey Lyles in that deal as well as the 24th pick, which they used to select Tyler Lydon. Lyles has performed well in a reserve role. Meanwhile, Lydon’s rookie season has been derailed by a knee injury. Lyles is proving to be a productive NBA player, and it’s still to early to write off Lydon. But Denver’s decision to acquire two power forwards when it could’ve selected Mitchell only looks worse with time.

“You know, nobody bats 1.000,” Kroenke said on The Woj Pod, the podcast hosted by ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, released Thursday. “We took a lot of heat, and I still see it tossed around, from moving down from where we were in the draft last summer. Because I think the Utah Jazz picked up a heck of a player. I want to give a quick shoutout to Quin Snyder, who I think is doing an unbelievable job this year. Kind of one of the under-the-radar candidates for coach of the year almost. I think he’s doing as good of a coaching job as almost anybody with all the changes they’ve had. But we moved down.

“I remember sitting in the room and talking about it on draft night. We were pretty high on our young backcourt. We still very much are. Jamal Murray and Gary Harris. For us it wasn’t about who we might miss at 13. It was about picking up Trey Lyles and still having the opportunity to draft in the first round. Trey was a guy we had rated very highly coming out of the draft two years prior. We actually tried to jump back into the draft to nab him before Utah did.”

It’s not hard to see why Denver was so high on the Gary Harris-Jamal Murray backcourt. This season, Harris (17.5 ppg) and Murray (16.4 ppg) rank a respective first and third on Denver’s roster in scoring average. Both are efficient offensive players who fit well alongside center Nikola Jokic.

That 23-and-under nucleus of Harris, Murray and Jokic has helped Denver stay alive in the Western Conference playoff race, despite Paul Millsap missing 44 games with a wrist injury. All three players were selected in the Tim Connelly era. In 2014, the Nuggets nabbed Harris 19th overall and Jokic 41st. Two summers later, they used the seventh overall pick on Murray.

The 2017 draft might have been a disappointment, but Kroenke still likes where Denver is at because it’s hit on so many other recent picks.

“I think our roster is still kind of coming together and will be,” Kroenke said. “But when you take a look at guys who are still around the league whether it’s Gary Harris, where he was taken, Jamal Murray, who was taken at seven, and obviously Nikola Jokic is the one you’ve got to mention. …. We’ve got a good group of guys and Tim (Connelly), like you said, was a scout. As long as we nailed those drafts, I was confident we could make it through most situations.”

Listen to Kroenke’s podcast with Wojnarowski here.