The Denver Nuggets are all fucked up. After losing four straight games and getting dragged into the Western Conference tar pit in which the current fourth through eighth seeds are desperately trying to escape the play-in tournament, the team's short-term outlook is as bad as its been during the Nikola Jokic era. On Tuesday, the team confirmed that anyone making dour proclamations about the current state of the franchise was not overstating things in the slightest: Both head coach Michael Malone and general manager Calvin Booth are gone with just three games left to play in the regular season.
The departures themselves are perhaps less interesting than the fact that they were announced simultaneously. For the past few seasons, the off-court story of the Nuggets has been about the power struggle between Booth and Malone. Booth, who was always a little too willing to talk up his roster-building acumen, had his mind set on keeping Denver's contention window open by developing late draft picks into useful starters. He envisioned turning players like Jalen Pickett, Peyton Watson, Julian Strawther, and Zeke Nnaji—often sarcastically referred to as the Booth Boys by Nuggets fans—into steady contributors. He believed in this plan so much that he gave Nnaji a four-year, $32 million extension, making him the fifth-highest paid player on the roster.
Malone, crucially, never seemed to be all that into this plan, as has been evidenced by his continued disinterest in finding consistent development minutes for the Booth Boys. There are a few ways that a coach can announce his displeasure with a GM, but none are more clear than simply not playing the GM's handpicked guys. Malone at times seemed to go out of his way to demonstrate just how dissatisfied he was with the roster he'd been given. Every time Justin Holiday got minutes over Watson, every time Pickett and Nnaji got a week's worth of DNPs, Malone seemed to be jabbing a dismissive thumb in Booth's direction. Can you believe the shit this guy dumped on my plate?
Both parties were just as frustratingly in the wrong as they were the right. It's undeniable that Malone's failure to trust and develop the roster has killed Denver's depth and leaves the team finishing up yet another regular season with a top-heavy, exhausted rotation. On the other hand, Booth probably should not have been publicly talking up his draft picks to anyone who would listen and handing out a $32 million extension to a guy who had yet to prove himself as an NBA rotation player. The result of this philosophical disagreement is a roster that currently fails to meet either Booth or Malone's standards. The veteran role players that helped the Nuggets win a championship in 2023 have all disappeared into free agency; the young players who have stepped into those spots are too low on experience and confidence to keep things humming as they were.
What's left is a roster in desperate need of spiritual and physical revitalization. Nikola Jokic is having the best season of his career, and I don't think I've ever seen him as obviously unhappy playing basketball as he has been this year. This is a team that has the distinct look of being ready to give up, and if they play their next three games like they did their last four, they will end up not just in the play-in tournament, but at real risk of getting knocked out of it. It is a crime against basketball for a team with a player as good as Jokic to be in the kind of shape in which these Nugs currently finds themselves, and responsibility for that ultimately rests above Booth and Malone's former pay grades. The Kroenke family refused to push the team's payroll into the second salary cap apron last summer, and now everyone else is feeling the consequences. They'll have a head start on rebuilding both the coaching staff and front office in time for next season, just as soon as they get done watching this one waste away.
