Zach and NBA writer Matt Moore react to the shocking NBA news that the Nuggets have fired head coach Michael Malone and general manager Calvin Booth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why did the Denver Nuggets fire their head coach and GM?
Two days in and we're already doing an emergency podcast because in another event, the second in, I don't know, 10 days where the timing is the biggest surprise more than the substance, the Denver Nuggets, two years after winning a championship, One year after making the conference semifinals and losing in seven to the Minnesota Timberwolves.
And five days before the end of the regular season have fired Michael Malone, who had been their coach for a decade, and decided also not to retain Calvin Booth, the general manager. Everybody is out. All the higher-ups are out. And I mentioned...
Chapter 2: What are the internal tensions between the Nuggets' coaching staff and front office?
The timing is the main source of the surprise because, as our guest knows as well as anyone, the tension between the coaching staff and the front office had been an open secret around the league for, I don't know, two years. I had mentioned it very openly on one of the last Low Post podcasts I did at my previous employer. It had spilled over into every part of the organization.
I don't think it was necessarily like this –
horrible horrible hatred whatever it was just it was just tension about young players veterans directions who controlled what part of the organization but it bled into lots of different parts of it and you could see the nuggets in the middle of the western conference in danger of falling into the play-in if if the end of this season and particularly one critical head-to-head game it's memphis doesn't go their way
Five and nine in their last 14 games. Jamal Murray's health, uncertain. And just – I mentioned in the very first episode of the Zach Lowe Show, just one of those years where it just doesn't feel like things are ever going to lock into place at the same time, which is what you need. You need everything locked into place to do what they did two years ago and just –
It's been one thing, and then that thing gets fixed, and then it's another thing, and then this player pops a little bit, and then that same player regresses. This player gets hurt. That player gets healthy. It's just never quite meshed all together. But this, the timing of this, is absolutely monumentally shocking to me.
Matt Moore, senior writer of the Action Network, among many other jobs, host of Locked On NBA and Locked On Nuggets podcasts. What, what, what, what, what's happening? What, why, why? Like, is the NBA just determined? You know what? We've, we've reached peak crazy with trades with Luca. We've just got to find ways to reach peak crazy with coaches and now GMs too.
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Chapter 3: What role does player performance and strategy play in the Nuggets' current situation?
Yeah, I think it's a combination of the CBA and then the Luka trade, and everyone's just broken. Everyone's just broken with the amount of urgency you feel.
I've been wrestling with this because there's so many teams, it feels like, that are having 45-plus win seasons who feel this immense stress and pressure and this unhappiness with where they are, in part, I think, because flexibility is so limited. You can't make other moves to try and be like, well, we'll give this some time, and we'll try and figure this out, and we moved in the right direction.
With the Nuggets, Zach, thanks for having me on. I think the biggest thing to kind of look at here is for the last two months, the defense has been spiraling. And Malone has come into those press conferences, and I have never heard him as resigned as he has been about the defense, about he did not know how to get it. the players to do the things that they've been told.
And the players have echoed that sentiment. The coaches are doing their job has been a quote that they have said a lot. Jamal Murray, Christian Brown, these players have said, it's not the coaches we have to execute. We've been told what to do and we just don't do it. But once you hear that, you realize this is a real risk of them having tuned out the head coach after 10 years.
On top of all the stress of not having enough veteran options because of the front office's decision to not only go young, but to commit guaranteed multi-year contracts to second round players, to end of first round players, to build around them and lock in your roster spots so you don't have flexibility. All of that contributed. And on top of that, Zach, for the first time since probably 2018,
I've heard a lot about fractures inside the organization, that there's multiple factions, like you hear a lot about in the league. That hadn't been the case under Tim Conley, but it definitely was this year. And there were Malone's guys, and there were Booth's guys, and there were people caught in the middle.
And that made for a toxic situation, I think, that impacted the locker room and the overall direction of the organization. From everybody working in that building, I think was having a hard time getting on the same page. And it was just...
Maybe they'll make a run, and ownership clearly decided for whatever reason, as details are still coming out, that this was the time that they had to make the move, that they had looked at the situation and decided this is what we're doing, and we're going to go ahead and make that move, I think in part because of hope that David Adelman can pull a rabbit out of a hat.
But in general, it's still really shocking to see this done, that no matter what level of success you reach, your job is never safe.
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Chapter 4: How did the Nuggets' roster decisions contribute to their current crisis?
And Calvin Booth made some comments in that piece about X's and O's, including about have we become a little bit too dependent on the Murray-Jokic pick and roll? Have defenses at least figured out tolerable ways to guard that? Do we need to diversify it? And I told the coaches, including Michael Malone, about those comments, said, hey, Calvin said this, do you want to comment?
Michael Malone didn't want to comment. And then I heard subsequently through intermediaries that Calvin's comments did not go over well with the coaching staff. And I'm like, man, I'm caught in the middle of this. This is how bad it was. And to your point, I've heard lots of stories over the last year of not having a job about –
well, this guy has been pigeonholed as a Calvin guy and some people are wary of him. And this guy has been pigeonholed as a Malone guy and some people are wary of him. Maybe that's unfair to the principles involved. Maybe, you know how misinformation can spread through an organization and people are always, always fearful of their jobs in the NBA and any highly competitive industry.
It could all have been bad information, but it's hard to function in that kind of atmosphere at a level that you need to function top to bottom to win the championship, which is still the goal when you have the best player in the world and a roster that's broadly similar to the one that won the championship. And I know I'll get pushback for that. So let's, let's go through that.
Well, you know what, before we get to that, that all of that said, The most logical outcome was the season's over. Like, it's pretty much over. Let's just say that we've decided we don't want to extend Calvin Booth. We're going to move on from him. You know, you could do that in the offseason.
And I thought there was a world where they could have kept Michael Malone, who's a good coach, and had him work with the new GM. And they just – for them to decide to do it all at once now – five days before the end of the season is shocking and actually sort of in a bizarre way, a show of faith from ownership in the actual roster of the team.
It's ownership saying, despite all of this crap that is coming out today and has been coming out all year, we still think this roster, despite the fact that people are going to pick on all the parts we let go in the last two summers, which we'll talk about, this roster we still think can do damage in the playoffs. And, you know, we'll see. But the timing is just...
And people in there, it's not like I've heard from a ton of people because they're all still digesting this. This caught people by massive amounts of surprise from what I've heard so far.
Yeah. And I think there's two kind of lanes here. And one is the hyper optimistic and one is the hyper negative. And so the hyper optimistic path here is okay. We do still have Jokic. We've proven that we can get through. We have all these matchup advantages. The Thunder don't want to see Jokic. There's a lot of teams that don't want to see Jokic.
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Chapter 5: What impact do financial constraints have on the Nuggets' roster management?
a certain level of toughness and resiliency to it, the dating back to like the year they missed the playoffs and they had to win all those games at the very end of the season, 2017, 2018, where they could have thrown in the towel and they fought and they fought and they fought to a winner take all game 82 in Minnesota that they lost in overtime.
And Jokic gets on the plane after that game and is telling people like, thank you for agreeing, going, Tim Connolly told me this story, going seat to seat saying, thank you for the season. We're not going to be in this position again. And the bubble, 3-1 down, win. 3-1 down, win. He has to get some credit for that sort of level of steel and toughness.
Sure, you could have your tactical disagreements with him like you could with any coach, but the guy's a good NBA coach. Calvin Booth. is going to get probably more of the score in here because of the idea that he forced his young players on Michael Malone and let veterans walk away. Sure, there's some objective truth to that.
And Calvin Booth was very proud of his draft picks and very proud of his young players. And like Michael Malone, a strong-willed, some might say stubborn personality who bears some responsibility for the deterioration of the sort of mood within the organization. A lot of those draft picks, Christian Brown's pretty damn good. For where he was picked, Peyton Watson's pretty damn good.
I still have faith in Julian Strother. His sort of unreadiness on defense and inconsistency on offense was a minor theme of the season even before he got hurt. But he's a young player. They're not always going to be ready on exactly the right schedule that you need them to be. Zeke Nagy is a different story.
Although there was like a month where the Nuggets were like, hey, maybe this like three weeks ago where maybe the Zeke Nagy thing was finally happening. And then apropos of the kind of
something's always going wrong season I described earlier all of a sudden Zeke Nagy can't get in the rotation anymore and obviously hovering over all of this are the specters of Bruce Brown and Jeff Green and Contavious Caldwell Pope and the idea that this cheap ownership group the Cronkies won't pay for a championship roster when they have the best player in the world in his prime and what a sin that is and they didn't pay but let's just be clear on some of the facts the
The Nuggets could only offer Bruce Brown, I think, seven point something million dollars a year. The Pacers offered him 20 something million dollars a year. Jeff Green was an important part of their team, is now, let's say, not that important of a part of the on-court product of the Houston Rockets. KCP was a flashpoint. I didn't like it. You may not have liked it. I can't remember.
Do they miss the skill set that he has or had or still mostly has? They do. And is veteran three and D play and Christian Brown's not the same level three point shooter in terms of volume and all that. KCP has not had a good year in Orlando. And they kind of bet against him going forward. And it's hard to say that they lost that bet watching his performance in Orlando.
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