5 Most Likely Reasons Denver Nuggets Fired Head Coach Michael Malone, GM Calvin Booth
The Denver Nuggets fired head coach Michael Malone on Tuesday, according to ESPN's Shams Charania. Shortly thereafter, he broke the news that Nuggets general manager Calvin Booth is out as well.
It's tied for the latest in an NBA season that a head coach has been fired, according to ESPN Research.
Fans and analysts who've followed the Nuggets closely over the last two seasons likely weren't as floored by the news as the rest of the NBA community. But given the timing of the moves, it's only natural to wonder why the Nuggets pulled the trigger at this stage of the season.
Here, we'll break down the biggest and likeliest reasons.
Ownership's Reason
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Josh Kroenke, the Vice Chairman of Kroenke Sports and Entertainment (which also owns the Los Angeles Rams, Colorado Avalanche, Colorado Rapids and Arsenal FC), provided separate statements on the decisions to move on from Malone and Booth.
It'd be more accurate to describe them as little more than thank yous, since you have to comb through the statements pretty thoroughly to find actual reasons.
In fact, there may only be one.
"This decision was not made lightly and was evaluated very carefully, and we do it only with the intention of giving our group the best chance at competing for the 2025 NBA Championship and delivering another title to Denver and our fans everywhere," Kroenke wrote. "While the timing of this decision is unfortunate, as Coach Malone helped build the foundation of our now championship level program, it is a necessary step to allow us to compete at the highest level right now."
That's a hard sell. This level of organizational overhaul with just three regular-season games left figures to affect what the team will do on the court. Kroenke is asserting that things will change for the better, but it typically takes some time for a roster to adjust to a coach (or vice versa), and the Nuggets have almost none.
If we have to boil Kroenke's statement down to a single, articulable reason, it's that ownership thinks the team will be better without Malone and Booth right now. It's just hard to believe that.
Booth's Many Misses
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Tim Connelly, who left for the Minnesota Timberwolves in 2022, put together most of the championship-caliber roster that helped secure the 2023 title, but Booth deserves credit for a handful of solid moves shortly after he assumed Connelly's role.
Adding Bruce Brown and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope in 2022 were undoubtedly wins. Those two were third and fourth, respectively, on the team in 2023 playoff wins over replacement player.
But they're both gone now, and the transactions since then look disastrous when you see them all together.
Booth's philosophical approach made sense under the constraints of the current collective bargaining agreement. Teams will almost certainly need to hit on young players to stay in title contention for extended periods. But Booth let multiple veterans walk and missed on multiple prospects. The few veteran replacements he acquired didn't work out, either.
On top of Brown and KCP, Jeff Green was also a rotation player on the title team. The players who were supposed to replace them in the rotation were some combination of Christian Braun, Zeke Nnaji, Peyton Watson, Julian Strawther, Hunter Tyson and Jalen Pickett. Braun is the only one in that group with an above-average box plus/minus this season.
Braun has ably filled KCP's shoes in the starting five, but the Nuggets didn't have enough talent behind him to make up for the loss.
There's still some debate as to whether Caldwell-Pope would've stayed in Denver with an offer similar to the three-year, $66 million contract he signed with the Orlando Magic. However, his wife publicly stated that the team didn't really try to retain him.
That swap of experience for youth was far from Booth's only issue. He signed Reggie Jackson to a two-year, $10 million deal that he later salary-dumped by attaching three second-round picks to it. All Denver got back was cash. He attached two other second-rounders to a young guard, Bones Hyland, for Thomas Bryant (who was gone months later). He signed Nnaji, who's barely a rotation player, to a four-year, $32 million deal.
The final straws, which happened this past summer, were likely the additions of Russell Westbrook (whose late-game erraticism has been a huge part of Denver's current four-game losing streak) and Dario Šarić. The latter has played only 210 minutes this season despite the Nuggets using their taxpayer mid-level exception on him.
Ultimately, the roster has gotten worse under Booth's tenure, and it's not hard to identify all of the individual moves that led to that result.
Michael Malone's Struggles
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As we did with Booth, we'll start by acknowledging some of what Malone did right as the head coach of this team for the last decade.
He was a culture setter. He's the only coach Nikola Jokić has ever had in the NBA, so he deserves some credit for the three-time MVP's development. Trusting a burly 7-footer to essentially play point guard is not something every coach would do. And he always extracted plenty from the starting five of Jokić, Jamal Murray, Aaron Gordon, Michael Porter Jr. and KCP (or eventually Braun).
However, we're now in the fourth year of the team being an abject disaster when Jokić is off the floor. The coach is responsible for crafting a rotation that works for 48 minutes. And while it's easy to point to Booth's acquisitions as the reason for the struggles in the non-Jokić minutes, the front office could easily turn that finger around and say Malone and his staff didn't develop them correctly.
Some of the players who languished on Malone's bench, like Thomas Bryant and Jay Huff, have gone on to be useful contributors elsewhere. Some, like Dario Šarić, were more useful before they got to Denver.
Even with the roster shortcomings handed to him by Booth, Malone should not have this team on the brink of the West's play-in tournament.
There's also something to be said for the way Denver has looked, pretty much from the moment it won the title. Numbers can tell you a lot, and the Nuggets tied a franchise record with 57 wins in 2023-24. But the team has come out flat in far too many games over the last two seasons. They've seemingly been in regular-season cruise control the entire time, and that's a big part of why they're sliding in the standings right now.
A coach has to bear at least some of the responsibility for a team simply not playing hard enough.
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The Clash Between Booth and Malone
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When you sort through all of the reporting over the next few days, it will likely become clear that the chasm between front office and coach was the driving reason for Tuesday's dismissals.
"What's at the core of the issue was the conflict between Malone and Booth," DNVR's Harrison Wind said. "It was a marriage that, as we talked about all season, there was real conflict there."
Booth wanted sustainability and development of young players. Malone wanted experience and a rotation closer to the one he had in the 2023 playoffs. The philosophical differences between the two didn't just lead to minor arguments.
According to DNVR, there was little to no communication between the two. There were reportedly arguments in front of other staff members and perhaps even some attempts to sabotage each other.
The tension between two of the most important and powerful people in the organization completely spoiled the culture that Malone built, to the point it was almost palpable during games.
The Nuggets were 57-25 last season, but it never felt like they played with the same fervor they had in the 2023 playoffs. That eventually cost them in a Game 7 loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves in 2024. Denver coughed up a 20-point second-half lead that night. This season, it's cost them during this four-game losing streak. It contributed to inexcusable losses to the Washington Wizards (twice) and New Orleans Pelicans.
Vibes and chemistry are tough to measure, but they're impossible to miss when you compare the 2023 Nuggets to the current version of the team.
Denver Simply Isn't Good Enough
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The fifth reason is going to overlap with all of the above. Everything listed and described here contributed to Denver simply not being good enough.
The Nuggets have the best basketball player in the world. Jokić is on track to be considered one of the 5-10 best players in NBA history, depending on his eventual ring count. He's in the middle of his prime and is averaging an impossibly efficient 30-point triple-double, yet he and his team are seemingly nowhere near title contention.
That's unacceptable. And it felt like things were trending toward both Malone and Booth getting dismissed this summer at the latest.
Again, the timing is surprising here, but the decision shouldn't be.
In each of the last four seasons (including this one), Denver has had a point differential around that of a 60-plus-win team when Jokić is on the floor. Over the same span, the Nuggets have gotten walloped when he's off.
The general manager and the coaching staff both deserve some of the blame for that. They just happened to get it at an unexpected time.
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