DENVER, CO – JUNE 12: Nikola Jokic (15) and Jeff Green (32) of the Denver Nuggets take a moment after a play in the first quarter during Game 5 of the NBA Finals at Ball Arena in Denver on Monday, June 12, 2023. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)
Denver Post via Getty Images
The 75-year-old billionaire controls six pro sports teams, an esports organization and a regional sports network, with four titles in 18 months—but Denver’s victory comes with an avalanche of sweetness.
Stan Kroenke can’t lose.
With a 94-89 victory over the Miami Heat in Game 5 of the NBA finals on Monday night, the Denver Nuggets claimed the first championship in their 47-year history in the league. But for Kroenke, the team’s owner—worth an estimated $12.9 billion—it was his fourth title in 18 months, following championship runs by the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams, the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche and the National Lacrosse League’s Colorado Mammoth.
“Unbelievable,” the understated Kroenke said from the court at Denver’s Ball Arena amid the celebration. “The fans of this town are unbelievable, as you can see, and so it means a lot to us to get this done.”
As chairman of Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, the 75-year-old billionaire owns two other pro sports teams—the English Premier League’s Arsenal FC and Major League Soccer’s Colorado Rapids are the others—plus an esports organization and a regional sports network. Forbes valued KSE’s sports assets at $12.75 billion in January, making it the world’s largest privately held sports empire and the second-most-valuable overall, after John Malone’s publicly traded Liberty Media.
But even with so many teams in his portfolio—and even though the Nuggets, valued by Forbes at $1.93 billion in October, are worth less than the $6.2 billion Rams and $2.26 billion Arsenal—this latest championship must be particularly sweet for Kroenke. When he bought the team in 2000, he told the Denver Post: “One of my dreams was to be involved in a professional basketball team. This is a dream I’ve had for a long time.”
Kroenke fell in love with the sport on a gravel court in tiny Mora, Missouri, a tiny town 100 miles southeast of Kansas City. He eventually played for his high school team as a shooting guard and was reportedly recruited by a few small colleges. Instead, he headed to the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he worked as a busboy at a neighboring college’s dining hall. He got his first break in business when he used a $1,500 loan from his father to buy a share of a local clothing shop.
He went on to make his fortune in real estate—Kroenke now owns some 60 million square feet of properties, as well as more than 1.5 million acres of ranches and a majority stake in StorageMart, a privately held self-storage company. Those assets represent roughly $5 billion of his wealth, according to Forbes estimates.
Aiding his ascent was his 1974 marriage to Ann Walton, the daughter of Walmart cofounder Bud Walton. While Kroenke built his own fortune—Forbes estimates his wife’s net worth separately at $9.2 billion—he went to work in 1975 for a real estate developer who built strip malls that often featured Walmarts and became a partner in 1979, until they parted ways on bad terms in 1985. Even after Kroenke struck out on his own, he continued building shopping centers that often had Walmarts as tenants, and he served on Walmart’s board from 1995 to 2001. According to Bloomberg, he collected $150 million in rents and fees from the company over a decade.
Widely known as “Silent Stan,” Kroenke rarely speaks to reporters, and his representatives did not respond to an interview request for this article.
In the early 1990s, Kroenke was looking for an opportunity to buy an NBA team but ended up leading St. Louis’ bid for an NFL expansion team and, when that effort failed, helping Georgia Frontiere move the Rams from Los Angeles to St. Louis in 1995. He paid $60 million for a 30% stake and then upped his share to 40% in 1997, taking 100% control in 2010 in a deal that valued the team at $750 million.
Kroenke eventually expanded his empire with his purchase of the Nuggets, the Avalanche and their arena in 2000 at a reported valuation of $485 million. (Officially, the Nuggets and the Avalanche are now controlled by a family trust, with Kroenke’s son, Josh, running day-to-day operations, after Stan Kroenke transferred ownership in 2015 to comply with NFL rules about owning sports teams in different markets.)
In 2007, Kroenke added a piece of Arsenal, and he assumed a majority stake in the Premier League club four years later, becoming the sole owner in 2018 while acquiring the team’s Emirates Stadium. In 2017, he expanded to esports as the founding owner of the Los Angeles Gladiators, one of the original franchises of the Overwatch League, and he followed in 2019 with the Los Angeles Guerrillas, of the Call of Duty League; the two teams operate as part of The Guard, Kroenke Sports & Entertainment’s esports organization.
Kroenke’s reign has not been without controversy. He faced backlash—and a lawsuit—after he moved the Rams back to Los Angeles in 2016, with St. Louis arguing that the process violated the NFL’s relocation guidelines and constituted a breach of contract. In a settlement in November 2021, Kroenke and the NFL agreed to pay the city and its lawyers $790 million.
Kroenke has also been criticized during his tenure at Arsenal, which was a key member in the failed plan to form a “European Super League,” and The Guard reportedly laid off nearly all of its staff in February. Meanwhile, most Denver-area fans have been unable to watch locally broadcast Nuggets and Avalanche games for nearly four years because of a dispute between Altitude Sports & Entertainment—Kroenke’s regional sports network—and cable company Comcast, as well as Dish Network.
That has not been an issue during the nationally televised playoffs, though, and Denver fans can now bask in the glow of an NBA championship—at least until next season.
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/brettknight/2023/06/12/denver-nuggets-nba-championship-stan-kroenke/