Hoops Rumors

Appearing on The Kevin O’Connor Show with Kevin O’Connor of Yahoo Sports, former Nuggets general manager Calvin Booth spoke at length about his time at the head of Denver’s basketball operations department and the factors that led to him and former Nuggets head coach Michael Malone being let go on the same day last April, with just three games left in the regular season.

While friction between Booth and Malone was the the reason most frequently cited as the reason why Denver made such a significant change with the 2025 postseason around the corner, Booth downplayed that conflict to some extent, suggesting it wasn’t unique to the Nuggets and was just one of several factors why he lost his job.

In Booth’s view, another one of those factors that led to his exit is that the Nuggets’ ownership group doesn’t value its front office executives as highly as other teams do.

“Whether it’s Mark Warkentien or Tim (Connelly) or Masai (Ujiri), there’s always gonna come a point where they don’t value executives like that,” he told O’Connor. “I’ll probably disagree with their take on executives, but who am I? They’ve been so successful, so maybe it’s the right way to operate.”

Booth also suggested that he might have made the general manager job “look too easy,” as O’Connor relays.

“Anybody that’s really good at something, when they make it look easy, that was really, really hard to get to,” Booth explained. “(It took) a lifetime’s worth of playing basketball, coaching basketball, having conversations, scouting. For me to go in there right away, assemble a championship team, win a championship.”

While those remarks may open up Booth to criticism, it’s worth noting that his track record in the GM role was pretty strong. After Connelly built the core of the roster, Booth added several valuable complementary pieces in his first offseason on the job in 2022, trading for Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, signing Bruce Brown, and drafting Christian Braun and Peyton Watson outside the top 20. The moves helped Denver win its first NBA championship in 2023.

The Nuggets lost several of their veteran role players in subsequent summers, with Brown and Jeff Green departing in free agency in 2023 and Caldwell-Pope doing the same in 2024. Denver’s front office took some flak for not doing more to re-sign those key contributors, but Booth argues that doing so would’ve impeded the progress of some of the team’s most promising prospects.

“The reality of the thing is if we sign Bruce Brown back, we sign KCP back, or if they leave and we sign veterans … do Christian Braun and Peyton Watson do what they’re doing right now?” Booth said. “Definitely not.”

Despite limited draft resources, Booth continued to bring in young players – including Julian Strawther, Jalen Pickett, Hunter Tyson, Collin Gillespie, DaRon Holmes, and Spencer Jones – and his desire to develop those youngsters clashed with Malone’s preference to lean on win-now veterans, which was a primary source of the tension between the two men.

Still, Nuggets ownership’s aversion to operating deep in the tax meant that Booth had to try to find cheap talent to fill out the roster, and while not every one of his draft picks and UDFA signings was a success, many of those players have since developed into solid NBA rotation pieces in Denver or elsewhere.

“In most situations when somebody’s running a team, I don’t think the expectation is to bat 1.000,” Booth said. “For some reason, I started to get the feeling that that was the expectation for me from whoever was in and around the Denver Nuggets community.”

Here are a few more of Booth’s most notable comments from his appearance on O’Connor’s podcast, which is worth checking out in full for Nuggets fans:

On why his “idealism” might’ve clashed with Malone’s “realism” due to the nature of their respective roles:

“I have to take accountability whatever way that narrative grew legs and my part in it, I’ve learned from that. There’s such a weird paradox with NBA coaches. They’re in the midst of the lion’s den. They’re dealing with players, some of the most formidable size-wise and ego-wise in the world, and they’re managing them. Those guys buy in. And then these coaches have to report to a general manager who maybe doesn’t have the gravitas they do. I just think it’s a human nature thing.”

On the job that Ben Tenzer and Jon Wallace have done running the Nuggets’ front office since last spring:

“They’re great. A lot of (the roster moves they made) we talked about when I was there. We thought we were gonna get (Jonas) Valanciunas at the trade deadline. Obviously, they did their own unique things, but the one thing about the new CBA, there’s only so many trades that can be done. It’s kind of like paint-by-numbers, in that sense. So anybody sitting in that seat in Denver is going to have some kind of Michael Porter Jr. for Cam Johnson concept, because that’s just one of the better deals that was out there.”

On whether he’d like another chance to be an NBA general manager:

“Nobody’s entitled or owed an opportunity to run an NBA team. There’s 30 jobs. All those guys in their own way deserve to be in that seat. I’d be foolish to say that for the right scenario I wouldn’t be willing to work for somebody.

“My door wasn’t knocking down with people waiting to hire me. That’s where this whole thing got blown out of proportion. If you look tangibly at what I did — my win percentage, what I drafted, working with a coach like Coach Malone as a first-time GM — I just don’t know how my door isn’t knocking. … You could put 100 GMs in my position. I don’t know what, three or four of them do as good as I did.”

On whether he thinks Malone wants to find another NBA head coaching job:

“He doesn’t mind commentating games. But he would probably die to coach an NBA team tomorrow. And he deserves it. He’s a championship coach.”