Michael Malone spent a decade on the Denver Nuggets bench. 798 games in total, more than any other coach in franchise history. He also is the first (and currently only) coach to ever win an NBA championship for the franchise as well. No matter what happens from now to eternity, no one can ever take that last part from him. He deserved better than what he got yesterday, but I’m not going to dwell on that right now. I’m going to talk about those 798 games, that first and only championship and who Michael Malone was to me as a Nuggets fan of forty years.
Malone’s story with Denver really starts two years before he was hired when the Nuggets, you’re not going to believe this, shocked the NBA world by firing arguably the most successful coach in franchise history. George Karl coached nine years for Denver and has the highest winning percentage of any coach during the franchise’s NBA history. He received the Coach of the Year award in 2013 after guiding the post Carmelo Anthony era Nuggets to a franchise record tying 57 win season. After his best player, Danilo Gallinari, went down with an ACL injury just weeks before the playoffs, George and the Nuggets lost in six games to the Golden State Warriors in the first round. Masai Ujiri left for the VP job in Toronto and Josh Kroenke fired Karl one week later.
Three days prior to Karl’s firing, Malone was hired by the Sacramento Kings for his very first head coaching gig at any level. His time there was short. After a 28-54 season, Malone was fired just twenty-four games games into his second year on the job. The Kings actually started the season well, going 9-6 before star big man DeMarcus Cousins caught viral meningitis. He missed the next ten games, Sacramento went 2-8 over that stretch and Malone was fired before Cousins ever returned to the lineup.
Meanwhile in Denver? Chaos. Like, unconscious mascots falling from the rooftops chaos. What was viewed as a slam dunk hire at the time in Brian Shaw turned out to be a disastrous two seasons that saw Shaw fired after just 141 games into his tenure as head coach. The team was a complete mess under his watch. From rapping game plans in the locker room to Ty Lawson being arrested three times to hit pieces on ESPN.com, it was an embarrassing two years in Denver that saw them fall from perennial playoff team to the worst lows since Tim Hardaway was throwing T.V. monitors.
The head coach search in 2015 was lengthy. Kroenke & GM Tim Connelly whittled down a long list of candidates to three names: Malone, current interim head coach Melvin Hunt and Mike D’Antoni. D’Antoni was the big name on the list. Things hadn’t worked out for him in New York & L.A. but the dominance of the 7 seconds or less Phoenix Suns was still fresh in everyone’s minds. For most fans, Malone was probably third on their list given he lacked the pedigree of D’Antoni and the familiarity of Hunt, but in the end it was him who go the job.
He started with a mismatched roster of veterans from the bygone Karl era like Gallinari, Wilson Chandler & Kenneth Faried along with a young core as a result of the unexpected rebuilding project that produced Gary Harris, Jusuf Nurkic, seventh overall pick Emmanuel Mudiay and also a 20 year old kid from Serbia named Nikola Jokic. The expectations were low and the team didn’t surpass them by much, but at the end of the year they were three wins better than they ended the previous season. And that was the theme of the next five years for Malone.
He wasn’t as early an adopter of the idea of starting Nikola as some fans would have liked, but eventually he stuck with the idea of making this second round pick with an inexplicable talent for the game the fulcrum of his offense. Connelly rebuilt the roster around Nikola piece by piece while Malone rebuilt the culture in the locker room to a team that ran on offense and played tough defense…or at least that’s what he preached. Like all young teams Denver had their ups and downs and mental lapses. After failing to reach the postseason for the third straight year of his tenure, many thought it was time for Denver to make a head coaching change. Connelly stuck by Malone though, they kept building and after four years of improving their record the Nuggets returned to the playoffs.
Not only did they get there, but unlike so many years of the past era of success, they advanced past the first round of the playoffs. The year after that they made the conference finals in the bubble and the year after that they looked like a team poised for a title run. Then Jamal Murray got injured and everything was put on pause for two years. Malone stuck by his team during that time, stuck by Jamal. He showed loyalty and love to his players in a time when once again many were calling for his job.
At long last he pushed the Nuggets to a point they’d never been and in 2023 reached a title. A moment that he shared with a city as both rejoiced in their first ever NBA championship. We didn’t know then what was going on behind the scenes but the old saying was true: winning cures all and the Nuggets won it all. Malone’s day at the parade was iconic as he reveled in the victory with millions of fans.
The denouement of Malone’s career in Denver saw some great highs like Nikola winning his third MVP award and following it up with his best season ever this year, but the lows ultimately did coach in. The game 7 loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves, a slow start to this season and and even clunkier end saw the end of his time in Denver. Almost as soon as he was let go the rumors of chasm of differences between Malone and GM Calvin Booth started circulating. The stories, if you believe them, say their spat bled into every aspect of the franchise, ultimately poisoning the well throughout. Make no mistake though, Michael Malone is a Denver Nugget and he always will be.
Because it wasn’t just the wins that made his decade long run special. It was that he was a part of us, a part of our legacy as fans. He lived through the empty Ball arena days early in his tenure only to see success not be able to stave off the fans of the most popular teams drowning out Denver’s. He didn’t bemoan the situation, he took it with pride and told those fans they could “take that L on the way out.” When the Nuggets finally got over the hump against the Lakers in the playoffs he not only recognized how important that was to the fan base, he leaned into it and became the biggest Laker villain of this decade. He understood the feeling of just being a “fly over cow town” that is largely ignored by the media no matter how good the team is doing. He was one of us.
Malone just gave one of my favorite quotes I’ve heard since covering this team. Regarding the Lakers fans in attendance: pic.twitter.com/gQYAQAXnki
— Adam Mares (@Adam_Mares) November 28, 2018
Malone leaves no doubt as to who is the greatest coach of all time in Denver history. Like Doug Moe (and hopefully Karl) his name belongs in the rafters. He deserves to be memorialized as one of the best things that has ever happened to this franchise. He is the only championship winning head coach in franchise history…and he deserved better than this. He doesn’t deserve to be known as the coach who was fired later in the season than anyone else. If this season is destined to sink in the playoffs then Malone earned the right to go down with that ship instead of being scapegoated and tossed overboard after everyone could see the iceberg they were going to hit and did nothing.
It was an ugly end to an iconic run. When all the dust settles and over the years to come, I’m sure we’ll hear more about exactly what happened between Malone and Booth and how in the end it cost them both their jobs, but those will be just a footnote in the story of his legacy here. First championship coach ever, that will always be the headline. So thank you to Michael Malone for bringing that to us. Thank you for being with us through the journey from lottery team to the NBA mountaintop. Thank you for being a Denver Nugget.
