Each participant was there besides veteran guard Russell Westbrook, who had flown to Los Angeles the place his household lives, a number of sources mentioned. Gamers and assistant coaches made their strategy to Ball Enviornment’s apply courtroom at 10:30 a.m. native time. At that time, unbeknownst to everybody however celebrity middle Nikola Jokic, who had a short one-on-one dialogue with Kroenke beforehand, Malone was packing a few of his belongings in his workplace after being knowledgeable that his decade-long tenure in Denver was carried out. “He instructed me, ‘We decided.’ So it was not a dialogue. It was a choice,” Jokic mentioned Wednesday evening. “He instructed me why. And so I listened. And I accepted it.” As a substitute of figuring out, the remainder of the gamers have been known as to an 11 a.m. assembly with Kroenke, the place they realized that the one coach a lot of them had ever performed for had simply been fired. “It’s just so disrespectful,” one source close to the situation said. “That’s not how you treat a championship coach.” -via ESPN / April 11, 2025
