Cleaning House!

The Nuggets have fired their long-time Championship Head Coach, Michael Malone, and their GM, Calvin Booth. The Booth firing was not very surprising as people were unhappy with his roster construction this year, and seeing the Nuggets lose on days Jokic dropped historic numbers just shows how flawed the rest of the roster is.

As per the Malone firing, I was not entirely surprised that it happened, but I am extremely shocked that it happened in the way it did. Firing him with three games left till the postseason was completely out of left field. Though I thought that the team was not responding to Malone anymore, I believed that they should have moved on from him this offseason as he deserves a certain level of respect as he was the Head Coach with the most wins in franchise history and turned this Franchise around from what they were in 2015 to winning a Championship in 2023. He did not deserve this kind of send-off from the team.

As per the firing itself, contrary to popular belief, I believe this is the right move. As stated before, they should have handled his firing more appropriately, but I think this needed to be done. The first reason is the defense. The team went from the 8th-ranked defense in 2024 to 20th in 2025. Losing KCP certainly does not help in that department because he is a tremendous wing defender. However, losing one player should not lead to this kind of drop-off. So that can only mean one thing. The team no longer responded to Malone, and he had lost the team. When your defense is consistently poor game after game, it means that the team is not 100% bought in. It is unfortunate that this happened to Malone, but it was clear that the team was not responding to his leadership, and ownership had no choice but to make a move.

To make things clear, I am not blaming Malone for the Nuggets' drop-off in play. However, if the players don't believe in the Coach anymore, it is the coach that is going to be canned because you can't trade away an entire team and that is unfortunately what happened here. So just to make things clear, I do not blame Malone and as a matter of fact the blame should be shifted to the players. There have been reports that Malone called out his team for not watching film and called them "full of shit". To me, this feels like old-school coaching and holding players accountable. there could be more to the story but based on what I have heard, it feels like some players in that locker room have the wrong attitude and Malone paid the price.

The Nuggets have three games left to clinch a top 6 seed and avoid the play-in. Can assistant coach David Adelman light a fire in these guys, or will the team fall apart over the next few weeks?