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Commissioner Adam Silver handed the championship to Denver Nuggets owner Stan Kroenke after defeating the Miami Heat 94-89 in Game 5 of the NBA Finals on Monday.
Matthew Stockman/Getty Images
The 75-year-old billionaire controls six professional sports teams, an esports organization and a regional sports network with four titles in 18 months, but Denver’s win brings a sweet avalanche.
Stan Kroenke can’t lose.
The Denver Nuggets defeated the Miami Heat in Game 5 of the NBA Finals on Monday night, 94-89, to win their first championship in the league’s 47-year history. But for Kroenke, the team, worth an estimated $12.9 billion, was his fourth title in 18 months, following championships with the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams, the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche and the National Lacrosse League’s Colorado Mammoth.
Unbelievable, a subdued Kroenke said from the Denvers Ball Arena field amid the celebration. The fans in this city are incredible, as you can see, and that’s why it means a lot to us to make this happen.
As chairman of Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, the 75-year-old billionaire owns two other professional sports teams, England’s Premier League’s Arsenal FC and Major League Soccer’s Colorado Rapids are the others, as well as an esports organization and a regional sports network. Forbes KSE’s sports assets were valued at $12.75 billion in January, making it the world’s largest private sports empire and the second most valuable of all, after John Malones’ publicly traded Liberty Media.
But even with so many teams in his portfolio and even the Nuggets, who are valued Forbes At $1.93 billion in October, are worth less than the $6.2 billion Rams and $2.26 billion Arsenalth’s latest championship must be especially sweet for Kroenke. When he bought the team in 2000, he told Denver Post: One of my dreams was to join a professional basketball team. This is a dream I have had for a long time.
Kroenke fell in love with the sport on a gravel court in tiny Mora, Missouri, a small town 100 miles southeast of Kansas City. He eventually played shooting guard for his high school team and was reportedly recruited by a few small colleges. Instead, he headed to the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he worked as a bus boy in the dining hall of a neighboring college. He got his first break in business when he used his father’s $1,500 loan to buy a stake in a local clothing store.
He continued to make his fortune in real estate. Kroenke now owns about 60 million square feet of real estate, more than 1.5 million acres of livestock and a majority stake in StorageMart, a private self-storage company. These assets represent about $5 billion of his fortune Forbes evaluate.
His rise was aided by his 1974 marriage to Ann Walton, daughter of Walmart founder Bud Walton. As Kroenke built his fortuneForbes separately estimated his wife’s net worth at $9.2 billion, he went to work in 1975 for a real estate developer who built strips of shopping centers that often featured Walmarts, becoming a partner in 1979 until they parted ways on bad terms in 1985. Even after Kroenke’s divorce, he continued to build shopping centers where Walmarts were frequent tenants, and he served on Walmart’s board of directors from 1995 to 2001. By Bloomberghe collected $150 million in rents and fees from the company over a decade.
Kroenke, widely known as Silent Stan, rarely speaks to reporters, and his representatives did not respond to an interview request for this article.
In the early 1990s, Kroenke looked for an opportunity to buy an NBA team, but ended up leading St.Louis’ bid for an NFL expansion team and helped Georgia Frontiere move the Rams from Los Angeles to St.Louis in 2010. 1995. He paid $60 million for a 30% stake and then increased his stake to 40% in 1997, before taking 100% control in 2010 in a deal that valued the team at $750 million.
Kroenke eventually expanded his empire by purchasing the Nuggets, Avalanche and their arena in 2000 for an estimated $485 million. (Officially, the Nuggets and Avalanche are now controlled by a family trust, with Kroenkes son Josh running day-to-day operations after Stan Kroenke transferred ownership in 2015 to comply with NFL rules on owning sports teams in different markets. )
In 2007, Kroenke added a stake in Arsenal, and he acquired a majority stake in the Premier League club four years later, becoming the sole owner in 2018 when he acquired the Emirates Stadium. In 2017, he expanded into esports as the founding owner of the Los Angeles Gladiators, one of the Overwatch League’s original franchises, and in 2019 he followed with the Call of Duty League’s Los Angeles Guerrillas. the two teams operate as part of The Guard, Kroenke Sports & Entertainments esports organization.
Kroenkes’ reign has not been without controversy. He faced backlash and a lawsuit after moving the Rams back to Los Angeles in 2016, with St. Louis claiming the process violated NFL transfer rules and constituted a breach of contract. In a November 2021 settlement, 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 a key member of the failed plan to form the European Super League and The Guard reportedly almost all of its staff were laid off in February. Meanwhile, most fans in the Denver area have been unable to watch locally televised Nuggets and Avalanche games for nearly four years because of a dispute between Altitude Sports & Entertainment, the Kroenkes’ regional sports network, and cable companies Comcast and Dish Network.
However, this hasn’t been a problem in the nationally televised playoffs, and Denver fans can now bask in the glow of an NBA championship at least until next season.
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