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Less than a month ago, the Denver Nuggets beat the Oklahoma City Thunder on the road. Nikola Jokic put up 35 points on 15-for-20 shooting, plus 18 rebounds and eight assists. Jamal Murray put up 34 points on 11-for-22 shooting, plus four rebounds and six assists. Together, the two of them played a total of 80 minutes and turned the ball over only once.
The win meant the Nuggets had split the season series with the top-seeded Thunder. "I couldn't be more proud of them," coach Michael Malone told reporters. After a rough fourth quarter against the same opponent the previous night, this was a "big-time response," he said.
At the time, Denver had won 14 its last 18 games. It was second in the West and had the second-best offense in the NBA. Malone took the opportunity to make a case for Jokić to win his fourth MVP award in five years.
That may have been the 2024-25 Nuggets' signature win, but it's safe to say they failed to build on it. At home against the Minnesota Timberwolves in their next game, they lost by 20 points, and that was wasn't even their most disappointing effort of the week. In danger of falling into the play-in with three games left in the regular season, Denver fired Malone on Tuesday and announced that general manager Calvin Booth's tenure is effectively over, too.
Malone is the franchise's all-time winningest coach. He's the only coach Jokić and Murray have had at the NBA level. The team's current core won a championship just two seasons ago, albeit with a stronger supporting cast. There is no precedent for a good team firing a coach at any point even close to this stage of the season, aside from the Memphis Grizzlies axing Taylor Jenkins 11 days ago. Typically, if a team's upper management is thinking about cleaning house like this, it at least waits until after the playoffs.
I'm not sure there is a way to make this pivot -- and particularly the timing of it -- make sense. To understand how the Nuggets got to a place in which this sort of shake-up was even a possibility, though, it's worth examining their last four weeks, and what Malone himself has said about the team during that time.
Malone frustrated by Nuggets' poor defense
After that letdown against Minnesota, Malone said that the team was "really tired" and "didn't play much defense all night long," but didn't crush the players for it.
"I just felt that we were a step slow," Malone told reporters. "And that's understandable. That's what I was telling myself. You look at what I've been asking, especially our main players as of late, that's a lot."
Malone said they had to figure out how to make sure their players were as rested as possible heading into the back-to-back they had coming up against the Los Angeles Lakers and Washington Wizards. Ideally, given that the Lakers were shorthanded and the Wizards have been woeful all season, the stars wouldn't even have to log too many minutes. Instead, though, Jokić and Murray logged a combined 77 minutes against an LA team that was missing LeBron James, Luka Doncic, Dorian Finney-Smith, Rui Hachimura and Gabe Vincent.
Austin Reaves lit up Denver for 37 points and 13 assists. Rookie wing Dalton Knecht added 32 points. The Nuggets escaped with a 131-126 win, thanks to an 8-0 run in the final minute, but Malone wasn't pleased with their defense, their rebounding or their turnovers.
It was "another game," Malone told reporters, in which the Nuggets "showed up and kind of tried to ease our way into it, and they jumped all over us. And that's a recipe for disaster. We can't do that."
The Wizards game was worse. Denver built a 16-point lead in the first quarter, but allowed Washington to get back into it and hang around. Despite a 40-point, 13-rebound, nine-assist performance from Jokić, the Nuggets found themselves in a tight game down the stretch. In the final four minutes, Denver committed two live-ball turnovers and the Wizards scored on seven of their nine offensive possessions. Jordan Poole alone scored 12 points in that time, including the game-winning 3, a 35-foot bomb that he launched comfortably, with Russell Westbrook playing a few feet off of him.
"We're fooling ourselves if we think we can just show up and not play any defense," Malone told reporters afterward. He cited the Nuggets' No. 8-ranked defense in 2023-24 and lamented that they were down to No. 26 in the 13 games since the All-Star break. He brought up their 18 turnovers, too, then said: "It's like I'm saying the same things over and over and over again."
Asked if there was belief in the locker room that the team could get to a good place defensively, Malone said: "Good question. You'd have to ask those guys." He added that they had talked about their numbers -- they'd been awful defensively in first halves, but solid in second halves.
"So I think there is a belief," Malone said. "But more important than the belief: Is there a want to? Do you want to go out there and guard for 48 minutes?"
Malone said "it remains to be seen" whether or not the team could get stops consistently. He'd told the players that, when they go home and pack for their upcoming road trip, they should think about the 14 games that were remaining on their schedule, many of which would be against other teams battling for playoff positioning.
"We can't keep saying the same thing every game," he said. "We got lucky last night to beat the Lakers -- we got lucky to beat a team that was severely limited in terms of their normal rotation. And tonight we didn't get lucky. And so if you're going to be a team that's going to be trying to stay out of that play-in and be relevant, we gotta start playing some defense, we gotta stop turning the ball over, we gotta start rebounding. I mean, it's Game 67 and I've been saying the same thing the whole year."
Jokić didn't play in Denver's next five games because of an ankle injury. Strangely, without him the Nuggets managed to beat the two best teams they played -- the Golden State Warriors and Houston Rockets -- but they lost to the shorthanded Lakers, the shorthanded Portland Trail Blazers and the Chicago Bulls. After the game in Portland, in which they trailed by as many as 23 points, Malone spoke to reporters for less than three minutes, but made his feelings extremely clear.
"That was embarrassing," Malone said. "That was just a joke. Who are we kidding? Eleven games to go, and that's the effort we put forth. I'm embarrassed by that game and our approach and how we played."
The Blazers "kicked our butts on the offensive glass," he said, and then he rattled off some stats: Denver gave up 51 combined second-chance points and points off turnovers, and it allowed 18 blow-bys.
"All they ran tonight was pick-and-roll," Malone said. "'Let me get the matchup that I want, I'm going to go one-on-one.' And they beat us every time. And the few times they did miss, they got every offensive rebound. So I don't know what our guys are thinking with 11 to go, and I challenge them to look at the standings, look at our remaining schedule, and if we continue to play the way we're playing, we will be in the play-in tournament. Very simple. That's just the way it is."
Malone said the players needed to approach every game "with the proper mindset and have some pride -- I didn't think we played with any pride tonight."
A reporter asked Malone how the players took this message.
"I don't really care," he said. "It's not my job to evaluate how they take things. My job is to be honest. And sometimes brutally honest. And tonight it was a brutally honest message. And the guys that are full of shit won't hear it, they'll say, 'Coach is tripping.' And the guys that maybe do really care will -- 'cause they're not going to go back and watch their minutes 'cause 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.' And nobody said a word."
Malone said they'd messed around with the game, and they'd come up short in the same areas that he'd been emphasizing coming into it.
"I didn't think it could get even worse, but it did," Malone said.
Where do the Nuggets go from here?
The simplest way to explain Denver's decision on Tuesday is that the team hasn't played well enough defensively for the status quo to remain in place beyond this postseason anyway. The Nuggets' defense ranks 22nd in non-garbage time minutes, according to Cleaning The Glass, and Malone has sounded exasperated about it on multiple recent occasions.
It is stunning, though, that this is the second franchise that seems to have decided, with the playoffs right around the corner, that if it's going to get on the right track it must fire the most successful coach it has ever had. It's worth noting, too, that Malone's tenor had changed in recent games. He has been critical of the team's defensive drop-off, but, given the circumstances, it would have been weird to rip everybody's effort.
Yes, Denver has lost four games in a row, but Murray has been sidelined with a hamstring injury for all of them (and it's unclear when he will return). The first was a heartbreaking defeat at the hands of the Timberwolves, in which Jokić recorded a 61-point triple-double and Westbrook missed a point-blank layup and then fouled a 3-point shooter at the buzzer in double-overtime. The second was the night after that thriller, and none of the Nuggets' regular starters suited up. After their 125-120 loss to the Indiana Pacers on Saturday, Malone said the team "guarded nobody" in the second and third quarters, but pointed the finger at himself.
"I'll start with me," he told reporters. "We've lost four games in a row. And I'm never going to 'this guy, that guy' -- how about me as a head coach not doing my job to the best of my ability? And that's why I challenged all of our guys. We haven't lost four in a row in a long time, and it's really easy to be together and say 'family' when you're winning, but when you're losing games, can you stay together? And 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?'"
Malone said that the Kings, Grizzlies and Rockets -- the three opponents remaining on the schedule -- are not going to feel sorry for them. He said they need to "snap out of this funk that we're in" and "get this bad taste of out of our mouth because I hate losing and I know it's driving me crazy."
He added that he was looking forward "to seeing how we respond." It Denver wins out, it will guarantee itself a top-six seed and avoid the play-in. Now, though, the team is not just trying to get some stops, end this slide and solidify its spot in the standings, it is trying to do all that despite massive organizational chaos.
Interim coach David Adelman has his work cut out for him.
