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ESPN Staff Writer- Joined ESPNDallas.com in September 2009
- Covers the Dallas Cowboys and Dallas Mavericks
- Appears regularly on ESPN Dallas 103.3 FM
FOR THE PAST 10 years, Michael Malone had been the lead narrator of the Denver Nuggets' story. He played the tough guy when his team needed it during its championship run. He was the empathetic loyalist when Jamal Murray suffered a devastating knee injury in 2021. He became Nikola Jokic's hype man during each of his three MVP seasons, chiding anyone who didn't appreciate or vote for the Serbian superstar.
Sunday night, after the Nuggets lost their fourth straight game for the first time since March 2023, Malone was at his acerbic best in assessing the team's issues and just how urgent Denver's predicament had become.
"We haven't lost four in a row in a long time," Malone said after a 125-120 loss to the Indiana Pacers. "It's really easy to be together and say 'family' when you win. But when you're losing games, can you stay together? Do you have the balls, do you have the courage to go home and look in the mirror and say, 'What can I be doing better to help this team?'
"I'll start with me. ... How about me, as a head coach? Not doing my job to the best of my ability."
Little did Malone or anyone in the Denver locker room suspect that team president Josh Kroenke had for months been asking the same questions.
Malone's message wasn't landing. Three weeks earlier, after a blowout loss to a Portland Trail Blazers team missing four rotation players, he sat in front of the postgame lectern and lit into his team.
"That was embarrassing. That was just a joke," he said. "Who are we kidding? Eleven games to go, and that's the effort we put forth?"
He talked about rebounding -- the Nuggets had given up 26 points on the offensive glass -- and turnovers, off of which the Blazers had scored 25.
"I don't think we played with any pride tonight," Malone said.
Asked how the team received that message, the longtime coach was blunt.
"I don't really care," he said. "My job is to be honest, sometimes brutally honest. And the guys that are full of s--- won't hear it. They'll say, 'Coach is trippin.' And the guys who maybe do really care will ... they're not going to go back and watch their minutes. Nobody watches their minutes. Nobody watches film. So we'll have to show them the film. And I said, 'If somebody disagrees with me, please speak up.'
"Nobody said a word. I'm not concerned with how they took that message. My thing is, be honest with how we just played."
The Nuggets are a tepid 12-13 since the All-Star break and have lost some of what made them so dynamic just two years ago, even though they remain in fourth place in the West following Wednesday's win against the Sacramento Kings.
There has been more infighting on the bench and the court than Kroenke had ever seen. And every clip of those arguments seemed to go viral, whether it was Jokic's frustration at the team's defense, a heated exchange between Aaron Gordon and Peyton Watson, or Gordon attempting to huddle on the court and Murray ignoring him.
Moreso, the cold war between Malone and general manager Calvin Booth had become toxic for everyone in the organization.
Coaches, front office staffers and support staff felt compelled to choose sides, multiple team sources said. Instead of focusing on how to get the most out of a team with a three-time MVP having arguably his best season as a professional, energy was being spent on determining which side people were on -- and whether they could be trusted.
"Everybody in the organization was miserable," a team source said. "That's what Josh felt. It's a bad vibe. You can't operate like that. He felt that if he removed those two people, everybody could just focus on doing their job. Change needed to happen."
In interviews with more than a dozen team and league insiders, a theme quickly emerged: Not only was this war between Malone and Booth toxic for the two men, but it had infected the entire organization. For the better part of two years, winning had hidden the toxins coursing through the Nuggets. Then they started losing.
Kroenke made the decision to fire Malone and Booth late Sunday night, sources told ESPN. It wasn't the first time this season that Kroenke seriously pondered parting ways with the winningest coach in franchise history and the executive who had put together the final pieces of the Nuggets' championship puzzle. Kroenke wanted to clean house at the All-Star break, sources said, but an eight-game winning streak spared Malone and Booth.
"There were certain trends that were very worrisome to me at certain points in time, but they would get masked by a few wins here and there," Kroenke said during an in-house interview released Tuesday afternoon. "In the world of professional sports, where winning and losing is your currency, winning can mask a lot of things."
On Monday, he talked it through with his father, Stan Kroenke, and Kevin Demoff, who has become a more influential voice in the organization since ascending to the role of president of team and media operations for Kroenke Sports and Entertainment, which also owns the Los Angeles Rams, Colorado Avalanche and Arsenal FC, a little over a year ago.
Tuesday was an optional day for players to report, but during a four-game losing streak, it is understood that the best "option" is to show up and put in some work.
Every player was there except veteran guard Russell Westbrook, who had flown to Los Angeles where his family lives, multiple sources said. Players and assistant coaches made their way to Ball Arena's practice court at 10:30 a.m. local time. At that point, unbeknownst to everyone but superstar center Nikola Jokic, who had a brief one-on-one discussion with Kroenke beforehand, Malone was packing some of his belongings in his office after being informed that his decade-long tenure in Denver was done.
"He told me, 'We made a decision.' So it was not a discussion. It was a decision," Jokic said Wednesday night. "He told me why. And so I listened. And I accepted it."
Instead of working out, the rest of the players were called to an 11 a.m. meeting with Kroenke, where they learned that the only coach many of them had ever played for had just been fired.
"It's just so disrespectful," one source close to the situation said. "That's not how you treat a championship coach."
It was a shock with just three games left in the regular season.
But that's exactly what Kroenke was going for. "We wanted to try to figure out a way to squeeze as much juice out of the rest of the season as possible," Kroenke said. "Let's try to shake this tree and squeeze as much out of it as we can."
Shams Charania explains why Nuggets ownership moved on from head coach Michael Malone and general manager Calvin Booth.
THE NUGGETS HAVE long felt pressure to put Jokic in position to win championships -- plural. Not just the one they claimed in 2023. Booth told ESPN before the season that he felt the Nuggets were halfway through what he hoped would be a 10-year prime for Jokic and his job was to surround him with a roster that could contend in each of those remaining prime years, not simply load up with expensive veterans to contend for one or two more seasons.
In Booth's view, the way to do that was to draft and develop young, cost-controlled players like Christian Braun, Watson, Julian Strawther, Zeke Nnaji and Jalen Pickett.
In Malone's view, the way to do that was to keep as much of the core group -- Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Bruce Brown and Jeff Green -- that had won the franchise's first title in 2023 together and slowly bring along those younger players.
Malone not only resented that Booth didn't retain those players in free agency, but also wondered whether Booth did so as a way to force him to play the younger players he had drafted, multiple sources said.
"They just saw the world completely differently," another team source said.
That tension manifested everywhere.
"The situation was just unsustainable," a team source said. "Coach Malone and Calvin couldn't fix it because they made the situation all about themselves."
Players even questioned whether their playing time was affected by the dysfunction between Malone and Booth, multiple team sources said.
"If you're one of Calvin's guys, Malone doesn't want to play you," a team source said, flatly.
Over time, players tuned out Malone, from the top of the roster down, multiple team sources said.
Said one, "The players were freakin' miserable, man. You could see it. The effort would come and go. I just wish it happened sooner. We wouldn't be in this mess."
Malone is hardly the first veteran coach to be reluctant to give big minutes to younger players. Legendary coach Phil Jackson used to refer to rookies as "lower than pond scum." Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr didn't play the organization's lottery picks as much as the front office and ownership would've liked.
When Malone was reluctant to play Nnaji at power forward, where analytics show he was resoundingly better than as a backup center, more than one staffer wondered whether there was an agenda behind it.
"The numbers are way better [with Nnaji] as a 4 than a 5," one team source said. "But if you play him as a 5, he gets exposed. Who does that make look bad?"
Nnaji was plus-100 when he played power forward and was paired with a center and minus-113 in 235 minutes when he played as a center, according to NBA Advanced Stats.
When Malone put Westbrook into the starting lineup early in the season, pushing Braun back to the bench, even Malone acknowledged it wasn't fair to Braun.
"Never an easy decision," Malone said after a 122-112 loss to the New York Knicks in which he had debuted the new lineup. "Christian Braun has been great for us this year. Not good. He's been great. And he's done everything that's been asked of him. But I just like keeping Russell out there."
In Malone's defense, at the time the Jokic-Westbrook duo had a plus-11.4 net rating on the floor together, fifth among all two-man duos. Jokic-Braun, at 11.3, ranked sixth.
"What else does CB have to do?" a team source said. "Malone even said he's done everything he was asked to do, and now he's being relegated for Russ?"
Jokic may not have sounded off publicly at any of this dysfunction. But he bore witness to it all season and wasn't happy about it, sources said.
"Joker is really good at letting you know how he feels," a team source said, "without saying anything."
Nikola Jokic records his 33rd triple-double of the season to lead the Nuggets to a 124-116 win over the Kings.
JOKIC HAS NEVER given any indication he would look to play anywhere other than Denver. Before the season, he even seemed to give a strong vote of confidence to the organization despite the departure of so many key veterans in free agency over the previous two offseasons.
"I think people in general, they always want more and more and more, but they don't know what they have," Jokic told ESPN. "I'm really happy we have one title -- a lot of very good players don't win."
The only nod that's even resembled an openness to playing anywhere else came Tuesday night, when his longtime agent, Misko Raznatovic, responded on Instagram to a Bovada betting line of where his client's next destination could be.
"It's not hard for @bcmegabasket to accept second place if Lakers are in first," Raznatovic joked, referring to his involvement with KK Megabasket in Belgrade, Serbia. Still, the Nuggets have profound urgency about maximizing what remains of Jokic's prime.
"We have the best player in the world," a Nuggets official said. "We take that very seriously."
That urgency fueled Kroenke's decision, multiple sources said, and it was exacerbated by two factors.
Jokic is eligible to sign a three-year, $212 million extension this summer. The assumption around the league is that he will do so. But if there's even a slight pause in his decision-making, it will be devastating for the Nuggets.
And interim head coach David Adelman is expected to be a candidate in several of the coaching vacancies this summer, sources said. By giving him a chance to coach out the rest of this season, the Nuggets get the inside track on retaining him.
"I think the players respect [Adelman]," a team source said. "They get along with him. I think they'll respond to him. I wanted him to get the opportunity earlier."
THE QUESTION OF why Kroenke fired Booth in addition to Malone is complicated, but also remarkably simple.
When organizational dissension devolves into factions, one team source explained, both sides have to lose.
If Kroenke would've picked a side, the thinking went, everyone on the losing side would've either had to get behind whichever side "won" or lined up behind whomever was brought in as a replacement.
Kroenke held Malone and Booth responsible for allowing their personal issues to negatively affect the organization, sources said.
"I'll put it on both of them," a team source said. "You're the leaders. Both are responsible because they weren't getting along. It's the egos. Then everything trickled down."
Over the summer, Booth was offered a contract extension, sources said. When he did not initially accept it, the Kroenkes had a choice: Improve their offer or do nothing.
For a while, they did nothing. But as the season wore on and the losses mounted, the initial offer wasn't there for Booth to sign or negotiate anymore, sources said.
This was not particularly surprising for anyone who has followed Nuggets front office machinations. The team has found success in discovering executive talent, but less so at retaining it.
Masai Ujiri left the Nuggets when the Toronto Raptors made him a better offer in 2013 and is one of the highest paid executives in the league. He was succeeded by a protege, Tim Connelly, who blossomed as a lead executive and was lured away by a five-year, $40 million offer by the Minnesota Timberwolves before the 2022-23 season.
"The Kroenkes don't pay front office guys," a league source said. "They think they can find another good executive faster than they can find another superstar or great coach. They'll pay players and coaches. But you know that when you take the job in Denver."
Booth was hoping to buck that trend and had seemed well on his way to doing so when his acquisitions of Caldwell-Pope and Brown and drafting Braun helped propel the team to the title in his first season as general manager.
Malone received the credit and an extension after the title run. But Booth and Kroenke didn't greenlight extensions for the assistant coaches at the same time, sources said. And Kroenke never consummated extensions for Booth or his front office staff, which added to the tension within the organization, sources said.
As this season wore on and the time remaining on people's contracts was running out, that pressure increased.
"I put that on ownership as much as anyone," a team source said. "That didn't help the situation at all."
Nikola Jokic reacts to the firing of Michael Malone after the Nuggets' 124-116 win over the Kings.
MUCH HAS BEEN made about Kroenke's meeting with the players and coaches Tuesday morning in Denver after he had told Malone and Booth of his decision.
"I think it was a good thing for everybody to sit in a room together and realize that we have not played up to our expectation as of late," Adelman said before Wednesday's game in Sacramento. "'[It was] really cool for Josh to come down and be around and talk to the players."
But Kroenke also met with the players Wednesday morning after the team's meeting in Sacramento, sources said. This time his message was more personal.
"He said he saw that we weren't having fun," Michael Porter Jr. said. "And that he saw we weren't playing as hard as we could. So he wanted to come in here and help reestablish that as the basis of our culture."
During the team's championship run, that culture flourished. Players trusted each other. There were no ostensible signs of drama or tension. The only real controversy came after Malone expressed dismay at the way Jokic and the Nuggets were being covered after winning Game 1 of the 2023 Western Conference finals against LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers.
The Nuggets needed Malone to speak like that back then, given the softer voices of their two leaders, Jokic and Murray. They responded to his bark by biting back at their opponents. When you're winning, everything falls into place like that.
Over the past two years, however, the Nuggets haven't won like they expected to. Malone narrated it all, as candidly as he always had.
But when you're losing, that barking just becomes noise.
The message gets lost. No one is heard.
No one doubted Malone's ability as a coach, sources said, but his rigid personality and the attention his feud with Booth commanded began to wear thin.
"Contrast that with Joker, who [is] so unselfish and hates attention," a team source said. "At some point, the rubber was going to hit the road."
Wednesday night was a palate cleanser for everyone. The Nuggets jumped to a 10-3 lead and only trailed briefly early in the second quarter before cruising to an eight-point win in Sacramento.
Adelman said he made a point of encouraging the players to speak up in huddles and on the court. He wanted to hear their voices, not his.
"I think as far as communication goes, it was probably our best game of the year," Braun said. "Everybody was into it. We had players communicating to each other instead of relying on a coach to tell us everything."
During huddles, Jokic was engaged and drawing up plays. He talked so much his voice seemed hoarse during a postgame interview with ESPN's Katie George.
"Josh got the response that he wanted," Jokic said. "People say that we are vulnerable. But the beast is always the strongest, or the most dangerous, when they're vulnerable. So maybe he woke up the beast."
The Nuggets have precious little time left to find out.
ESPN's Ohm Youngmusik contributed to this report.