Nuggets coaches and staffers felt compelled to choose sides amid in-season conflicts between Michael Malone and Calvin Booth, according to ESPN’s Tim MacMahon and Ramona Shelburne and previous reports. With the focus shifting away from maximizing Nikola Jokic‘s stellar season, team president Josh Kroenke made the shocking decision to part ways with both head coach and general manager.
“Everybody in the organization was miserable,” a team source said to ESPN. “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.”
Once the team started losing, it made it difficult for the relationships in the organization to remain intact, MacMahon and Shelburne write. As previously relayed, Malone and Booth’s views on the roster were different, with the former preferring to have maintained veterans from the championship-winning team like Bruce Brown and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. Booth, meanwhile, planned to develop young players like Jalen Pickett and Christian Braun around Jokic.
“If you’re one of Calvin’s guys, Malone doesn’t want to play you,” a team source said to ESPN.
As for Jokic’s future, he has given no indication he wants to be anywhere other than Denver. Before the season, he expressed a belief in what the Nuggets had. Everything Denver will do moving forward, per ESPN, is centered around Jokic and even a slight hesitation to sign an extension this offseason would be difficult for the organization.
“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.”
We have more from the Nuggets:
- The Nuggets offered Booth a contract extension during the 2024 offseason, MacMahon and Shelburne confirm. When he didn’t accept, the two sides played out the season to this point.
- Malone and Booth seldom engaged with each other outside of meetings with Kroenke, according to The Denver Post’s Bennett Durando. Kroenke ultimately didn’t want to play intermediary or pick a side.
- On the court, Jokic is putting the finishing touches on an MVP-caliber season. On Friday, he became the third player in league history to officially average a triple-double for an entire season, Arnie Melendrez Stapleton of The Associated Press notes. The only other players to ever do so are Oscar Robertson and Jokic’s teammate Russell Westbrook. Entering the final game of the year, Jokic is averaging 29.8 points, 12.8 rebounds and 10.3 assists per contest. Even if he doesn’t register a single assist, the Nuggets star will finish the season at 10.1 APG.
Sounds to me like Kroenke really botched this situation. He knew what was going down and allowed it to drag on til the playoffs were 3 games away? If he knew Booth wasn’t going to be around after this season he should have fired him months ago and let Malone run things til the season was over for bad or good and evaluated then. So he allowed the team to become completely poisoned and then turned everything upside down? Absolute negligence on his part. Kept the team from getting anyone before the deadline and caused them to collapse down the stretch.
Reads like the owner was tired of both of them.
It’s because his son wanted to play fantasy basketball and impress his rich friends
Should have just fired Booth. Especially with him not signing an extension.
I’m starting to think that the Kroenke’s wanted Malone gone for whatever reason and this was their way out.
Malone is a solid coach, but he also got way big-headed. It’s kind of what happened to Mark Jackson. In a huge organization, you have to work with people with different personalities. We could bad mouth Booth all we want, but he also earned his stripes within the organization. Malone’s job was to work with his GM and even take orders. I know it’s tough to believe this but which GM is going to hire him if he thinks he’s better than the GM and won’t take any recommendations? Well, at least he has 2 yrs at $12m per to vacation with… Maybe we see him back in Sacramento and even in GS after Kerr retires.