Matt Moore (3:13)

Yeah, I think it's a combination of like the CBA and then the Luca trade and everyone's just broken like everyone's just broken with the amount of urgency you feel. And like I've been wrestling with this because there's so many teams it feels like that are having 45 plus win seasons who feel this immense stress and pressure and this unhappiness with where they are. In part, I think because flexibility is so limited, you can't make other moves to try and be like, well, you know, we'll give this some time and we'll try and figure this out and like we moved in the right direction with the Nuggets. Zach, thanks for having me on. I, I think the biggest thing to kind of look at here is for the last two months the defense has been spiraling and Malone has come into those press conferences and I have never heard him as resigned as he has been about the defense, about he did not know how to get the players to do the things that they've been told. And the players have echoed that sentiment. The coaches are doing their job. Has been a quote that they have said a lot. Jamal Murray, Christian Brown, these players have said it's not the coaches we have to execute. We've been told what to do and we just don't do it. But once you hear that, you realize this is a real risk of them having tuned out the head coach after 10 years. On top of all the stress of not having enough veteran options because of the front office's decision to not only go young but to commit guaranteed con multi year contracts to second round players to end of first round players to build around them and lock in your roster spots so you don't have flexibility. All of that contributed. And on top of that, Zach, for the first time since probably 2018, I've heard a lot about fractures inside the organization, that there's multiple factions like you hear a lot about in the league. That hadn't been the case under Tim Connolly, but it definitely was this year. And there were Malone's guys and there were Booths guys and there were people caught in the middle. And that made for a toxic situation. I think that impacted the locker room and the overall direction of the organization from everybody working in that building. I think was having a hard time getting on the same page and it was just maybe they'll make a run. And ownership clearly decided for whatever reason as details are still coming out, that this was the time that they had to make the move, that they had looked at the situation and decide this is what we're doing and we're going to go ahead and make that move. I think in part because of hope that David Adelman can pull a rabbit out of his out of a hat. But in general, it's still really shocking to see this done. That no matter what level of success you reach, your job is never safe.

Zach Lowe (5:49)

Yeah. In early September, I made sort of a stray comment on a podcast about how the coach and the GM don't really see eye to eye in Denver, and that got some traction in the aggregation sphere. I just thought it was well known and had been publicly written about before. And then I wrote a story about the Nuggets centered around their three point rate and how they were set up to have the lowest three point rate in the NBA. And even if you have the best player in the world, which they do, is there a threshold of threes that you have to get to or else you just can't win four playoff series or another? Offense is incredible anyway because Jokic is just that good. And Calvin Booth made some comments in that piece about X's nose, including about have we become a little bit too dependent on the Murray Jokic pick and roll? Have defenses at least figured out tolerable ways to guard that and do we need to diversify it? And I told the coaches, including Michael Malone, about those comments, said, hey, Calvin said this. Do you want to comment? Michael Mullen didn't want to comment. And then I heard subsequently through intermediaries that Calvin's comments did not go over well with the coaching staff. And I'm like, man, I'm caught in the middle of this. This is how bad it was. And to your point, I've heard lots of stories over the last year of not having a job about, well, this guy has been pigeonholed as a Calvin guy. And some people are wary of him. And this guy has been pigeonholed as a Malone guy. And some people are wary of him. Maybe that's unfair to the principles involved. Maybe, you know how misinformation can spread through an organization. And people are always, always fearful of their jobs in the NBA, in any highly competitive industry. It could all have been bad information. But it's hard to function in that kind of atmosphere at a level that you need to function top to bottom to win the championship, which is still the goal when you have the best player in the world and a roster that's broadly similar to the one that won the championship. And I know I'll get pushed back for that. So let's. Let's go through that. Well, you know what? Before we get to that, that all of that said, the most logical outcome was the season's over. Like, it's pretty much over. Let's just say that we've decided we don't want to extend Calvin Booth. We're going to move on from him. You know, you could do that in the off season. And I thought there was a world where they could have kept Michael Malone, who's a good coach, and had him work with the new gm, and they just for them to decide to do it all at once now, not five days before the end of the season, is shocking and actually sort of in a bizarre way, a show of faith from ownership in the actual roster of the team. It's ownership saying, despite all of this crap that is coming out today and has been coming out all year, we still think this roster, despite the fact that people are going to pick out, pick on all the parts we let go in the last two summers, which we'll talk about. This roster we still think can do damage in the playoffs, and, you know, we'll see, but the timing is just people, people and people in there. I. It's not like I've heard from a ton of people because they're all still digesting this. This caught people by massive amounts of surprise from what I've heard so far.

Matt Moore (8:49)

Yeah, I think there's two kind of lanes here, and one is the hyper optimistic and one is the hyper negative. And so the hyper optimistic path here is, okay, we do still have Jokic. We've proven that we can get through. We have all these matchup advantages. The Thunder don't want to see Jokic. There's a lot of teams that don't want to see Jokic. The WOL are probably the only team that's like, it's fine. They don't enjoy it, but they're probably like, it's fine. All right, we can get this together. Adelman. Every player in that locker room loves David Adelman. They've spoken glowingly about him when he's taken over, when Malone's a very sharp.

Zach Lowe (9:20)

Group of assistant coaches top to bottom. Including David Adelman.

Matt Moore (9:23)

Yeah, including David Adelman. There's been some disagreements with the players on some schematic stuff. And maybe the idea is that Malone is outspoken in his beliefs. Like, he's very confident in how he feels. So maybe there's more flexibility to build in the pathways to get something better out of the defense and maybe they can make a run. The other side of this is on Sunday, Michael Malone said Murray is not. We're not being cautious with Jamal Murray. He's out, he's injured. And I followed up and asked, what do you believe his status is for game one of the playoffs? And Malone kind of tilted his head and said, we're hopefully he can be back. And that set off like a five alarm fire in the media room. So now you have this question of was this decision in part made because you do not expect Jamal back and so you're just like, we're not going to make a run anyway. There was an idea of our expectation. My expectation, I wrote this, a substack I write called the Denver dig was if they lose in the first round, that Michael Malone would not be retained. That seems reasonable. Okay, you've gone two years backwards. There's all this tension. It's. The players have expressed that basically they're not getting. It's not getting through to them. You lost in the first round. You went backwards two years in a row. That makes sense to do it now. Almost seems like we do not see up and a path where there is a good outcome here that unless there is a dramatic redirection, there is not a path. Now, I still kind of believe that most players, once you fire the coach are kind of like, oh, so the season's done. Like that just seems to me, especially at this point, I don't know how you're like, yeah, we can do it. You just lost the guy that helped you win a title. You just lost the. The winningest coach in franchise history. You just fired the front office. So you're clearly moving in a different direction. A lot of guys on that roster have questions about what their individual futures are. So I think there's still all this uncertainty. And so my question is whether it's that super optimistic we can get this done because in Jokic we trust. Or if it's. We're getting ahead of this because we know the ship is going down this season.

Zach Lowe (11:20)

Let's talk about Michael Malone and Calvin Booth because there's going to be a temptation in the media and among fans to paint one or both as bad guys, good guys. You know, this guy had to go. That guy had to go. Michael Malone is the winningest coach in Denver Nuggets history. He won a championship with the Denver Nuggets. He's objectively a good NBA coach. He's actually my standard for the perfect is the enemy of good coaching decision dating back to the Kings deciding, hey, this guy's actually having success with our team, but we're going sideways a little bit because DeMarcus Cousins is ill and we're losing. And you know what? Let's just make a snap decision because we think we can get a better guy than this. And I remember saying at the time, you better be careful because you may be on your ninth head coach in 12 years, and you still haven't got a better guy than Michael Malone. They finally undid that by getting Mike Brown and then they fired him in much the same way. So Michael Bloom's a very good coach. And yeah, he is outspoken, he's tough. He will call the players out directly, both publicly and privately, and I think that was probably good for the team during their period of growth and coming and coming up to. To finding themselves. And in fact, this team had and has a certain level of toughness and resiliency to it. The dating back to, like the year they missed the playoffs and they had to win all those games at the very end of the season, 2017, 2018, where they could have thrown in the towel and they fought and they fought and they fought to a winner take all. Game 82 in Minnesota that they lost in overtime. And Jokic gets on the plane after that game and is telling people like, thank you for agree going. Tim Connolly told me this story, going seat to seat saying, thank you for the season. We're not going to be in this position again. And the bubble, three, one down, win. Three, one down, win. He has to get some credit for that sort of level of steel and toughness. Sure, you could have your tactical disagreements with him like you could with any coach, but the guy's a good NBA coach. Calvin Booth is going to get probably more of the scoring here because of the idea that he forced his young players on Michael Malone and let veterans walk away. Sure, that's there's some objective truth to that. And Calvin Booth was very proud of his draft picks and very proud of his young players. And like Michael Malone, a strong willed, some might say stubborn personality who bears some responsibility for the deterioration of the sort of mood within the organization. A lot of those draft picks are like, Christian Brown's pretty damn good for where he was picked. Peyton Watson's pretty damn good. I still have faith in Julian Strother. His sort of unreadiness on defense and inconsistency on offense was a a minor theme of the season even before he got hurt. But he's a young player. They're not always going to be ready on exactly the right schedule that you need them to be. Zeke Naji is a different story. Although there was like a, there was like a month where the Nuggets were like, hey, maybe this like, like three weeks ago where maybe the Zeke Naji thing was finally happening. And then apropos of the kind of something's always going wrong season I described earlier, all of a sudden Zeke Naji can't get in the rotation anymore. And obviously hovering over all of this are the specters of Bruce Brown and Jeff Green and Ketavius Caldwell Pope and the idea that this cheap ownership group, the Kronkies, won't pay for a championship roster when they have the best player in the world in his prime. And what a sin that is. And they didn't pay. But let's just be clear on some of the facts. The Nuggets could only offer Bruce Brown, I think seven point something million dollars a year. The Pacers offered him 20 something million dollars a year. Jeff Green was an important part of their team is now, let's say, not that important of a part of the on court product of the Houston Rockets. KCP was a flashpoint. I didn't like it. You may not have liked it. I can't remember. Do they miss the skill set that he has or had or still mostly has? They do. And his veteran three and D play. And Christian Brown's not the same level three point shooter in terms of volume and all that. KCP has not had a good year in Orlando and they kind of bet against him going forward and it's hard to say that they lost that bet watching his performance in Orlando now. Are there missed opportunities to build the roster in other ways? Absolutely. Should Dario sarich have a $5 million player option next year? Absolutely not. All that is to say, like, is the, is the cheap thing a real. It is a real thing. They didn't pay. But it had they paid KCP, it would have been 2nd April, 2nd April and 2nd April and all that comes. I guess it's, it's not as easy as just pay, pay, pay, pay, pay. Because then all of a sudden you might become the Phoenix Suns.

Matt Moore (16:07)

Yeah, I think the answer there is probably like the cost saving has to do with probably their approach in the CBA negotiations towards building a CBA that literally restricts ownership from having to spend because hey, can't spend. No flexibility if we do that. And that is probably where that happened in. I've been covering the nuggets here for 13 years and my experience with them is this is that they are, are willing to pay for premium players. They're willing to pay the tax to compete. They're willing to pay for players. Everything else is where the cost savings come in. They have not wanted to pay executives top level. They have not wanted to pay coaches top level. They don't have a practice facility. It's upstairs in the arena and they only have four courts. Something that coaches and players have complained about consistently. They still don't have one. They're one of, I think two teams that don't have a practice facility. So there's all these ways I can, I can point to that. But if we talk about roster building, the contavious Caldwell Pope situation, I thought it was a mistake because I understood what KCP did for them defensively. It was him and AG making the call outs and directions. CB is going to be a great defender in this league. He's had a rough year, but even he's gotten so much better getting over screenshots and the small things, making reads in terms of when they play at level, pick and roll of playing to the short roll and things like that. Christian's going to be a great defender in this league for 10 years. But Casey, he's not allowed guy because he's young. You need a guy like KCP to be the one calling out guys to make calls on the flight in the game, both during the play and after it, to be like, hey, we can't do that. That's what they have really missed. They did not really make any sort of serious bid for kcp, in part because ownership loves Christian Brown and believes in him and they were ready to transition to him as a starter. So that one I do believe, while I do think that both Christian was easy because he was the one thing that ownership, management, coaching agreed on. Everybody was in step of, yeah, Christian's our guy. We believe in Christian so that one gets made there. You mentioned the Bruce Brown limitations on what they could do. They tried to peel Bruce Brown out of the Raptors this year at the deadline, couldn't get a bite on it. Then you look at like, yes, the Dario Sars thing is tough. Jeff Green, he was more of honestly that role. And that's why they have DeAndre Jordan still on this team is to provide that veteran leadership locker room stuff. DJs had to play this year because Zeke once again has really struggled not just with the coaching staff. The players have had their times of frustration. The locker room has had times of frustration with Zeke. They love him and have his back. They want good things for him, but he doesn't have the confidence of some of these other veterans. Dario Sarich was brought in to be that and that was just a whiff. But the idea was, well, even if Dario's not bad, hey, we drafted Duron Holmes, he'll give us a nope Etor's acl. And this is how it is, Zach, where honestly, this is what's shocking about this is a firing and Reese a sweep like this makes you think that things were disastrous like a Phoenix Suns level of bad. And instead it's like it's they were so close. If Russell Westbrook doesn't foul. Naw. Or if he makes that the the layup, this may not have happened. If Jamal Murray doesn't get hurt. This probably hasn't happened like if they don't lose to the Wizards twice. But one of the things I just said unlocked on Nuggets is these losses were a product of the problems underneath and not the problem itself. It's that you can point to all the things that have declined this year with this team as leading to those losses as part of the underlying culture and problem with them in general. This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. It's tax season and we're all a bit tired of numbers, but here's one you need to hear.

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Zach Lowe (20:16)

Yeah, you mentioned the the double overtime loss against the Wolves. They haven't won since then. They're on a four game losing streak. It was a perfect storm of bad events, mostly surrounding Russell Westbrook, who You know, look, I, I wouldn't count on him for the level of role he's had to play for them. I, I, I have to say, like, I, I think he's probably been even a little better for them than I would have expected. I, like, I don't think you can pin this slightly disappointing season on him. It's just not my cup of tea as a signing or as, like, he's started a lot of games for them because he's had to. They're, they are trending the wrong. Your point? The most important reason they're trending the wrong way is their second best player is not playing. And you could quibble like, maybe Aaron Gordon's their second best player and all that, but Jamal Murray is their second most important player. He is the other fulcrum of their offense, the pick and roll dance partner for Jokic. And when he found his game in the middle of the season and started having some scoring explosions and looking like Jamal Murray, the whole league took notice and said, okay, well, last year's playoffs are in the rear view. The Olympics are in the rear view. The beginning of this season is in the rear view. When he was struggling. If this guy's back, this team's back, and all of a sudden he's not back. What, what do we even know? It's, it's the hamstring again. Obviously, it goes without saying, if he's not that Jamal Murray, they just don't have enough to get through the West. And even if he is, too many other things have gone wrong this year. They still may not have enough to get through the West. But that's the, that's the. If you want to boil everything down to one thing right now, it's what's going on with Jamal Murray.

Matt Moore (21:52)

Yeah. And it's hamstring inflammation. Tony Jones of the Athletic has reported that it's affecting quote, some other things. I don't have any more details other than that, but Malone kind of signaled that, that there's been some problems with other parts. And, you know, you wonder if that's. I don't know if that's a back issue. I don't know if that's the knee issue, which he's had soreness with since, since the ACL tear. He's had those kind of problems. I will say that the stretch between January and March is not just some of the best play I've seen out of Jamal Murray in several years. This is the best that he's looked to me physically. He had pop, he had Explosiveness to get separation. And I haven't seen that from him since before the injury. Like this is the best I've seen him look since 2021 pre injury. And so to me this is one of the things that's kind of gotten uncomfortable. And this is part of like, I think basketball discourse now is a connection between availability and your work ethic to see like are you in shape to avoid injury. And some of this is just like guys like people just get hurt. And I think you can make some of those criticisms. And the Nuggets have had those criticisms about Jamal Murray. Like Jamal came into camp in a foul mood because negotiations for his eventual Max Super Max, not super Max, but max contract were not as fluid as he wanted it to be. Now that said, like he kept, he kept his head up and played through all those struggles and he's been fantastic for them and he has been, I think a, an overall real net positive. But this has come to the point of again, under this new cba, availability might be the most valuable thing out there. I don't. Jason Tatum's such an incredible player. I don't know that there's anything as valuable as his availability and floor. You know, when you're, you're getting Jason Tatum and you know you're getting a high level of play out of him.

Zach Lowe (23:35)

Every single night in every part of the game too. Yeah, guys like Tatum, it's defense, it's offense. It's just he might go 8 of 24 and, and you'll still feel like he played well, like he helped our team. And you mentioned the separation. Like Jamal has never been. Obviously he's not an above the rim player. He's not explosive in the way that jumps off your television screen. But when he's right, he just has this sort of funky cadence to his game. The stop and start and change of direction, shoulder fakes, half fakes, half spins where when that stuff is really popping like 10% more, that's where he gets that extra bit of space for his jump shot, for his fadeaway, for the pocket pass to Jokic. Which by the way part of the thing about the Murray Jokic pick and roll and why Murray being at peak. Murray is so important is the Nuggets noticed last season, even before last season, more and more defense is just selling out to take away the pocket pass to Jokic. Like you're just not going to get that pass because his floater became the most dangerous fail safe shot in the NBA. A 60 something percent fail safe. And so they started Loading up on it. The angles on Jokic himself. Basically saying, jamal Murray, you're gonna have to beat us with some drives and some jump shots. And for them to win a lot of playoff series, he's gonna be able to. He's gonna have to do that. And he started to look like he was getting back to that kind of form. And now, now he's out again. Yeah. I don't know. Like, everyone. Where do they go from here? We'll see who the coaching candidates are going to be if David Adelman gets a chance to, to go for the job and all that. Roster wise, I mean, okay, they don't really have extra first round picks. A lot of their own. A lot of their own first round picks are gone. Jamal Murray's extension doesn't even kick in until next season, where it becomes 46 million, 50 million, 54 million, 57 and a half million. Aaron Gordon got extended, you know, like, Christian Brown will be extension eligible after the season. Peyton Watson will be extension eligible after the season. I, I don't. You know, there were all these Michael. There was at some point there was like a Michael Porter Jr. Trade rumor. Where is he going to be the piece to go get Zach Levine? And that was poo poo to me a little bit. And I think Michael Porter Jr. Has had a good year. He slowed down a little bit lately. You know, there's some fungibility there in terms of can we shake up the roster in a. Like, for like talent. For talent trade. But those are really hard to make. Even in the summer when the apron loosens a little bit. Those kind of deals are hard to make, you know, and you do have the best player in the world. And like, I, I just, I don't know where they go. Are there any ideas? Do we have any ideas?

Matt Moore (26:18)

So there's two kind of things here, I think. One is, is Jamal Murray a good enough number two? Option availability, overall talent inconsistency added, like all of those things combined. That leads you into the question of, okay, you can trade him this year because of the extension. Is he on the table? Is he a team? Is he a player that teams will be like, yeah, if he can get healthy, he's exactly what we need. This is speculative, not based on reporting, but like, I would look at Orlando and be like, jamal Murray would be very helpful for what Orlando wants to do with Porter. That was in my. What I heard later was that we, like, on lockdown Nuggets, we had conversations about Porter trades for two months after it was dead because Ownership came in and said, no, the ownership came in and said, we don't want to do this. This is not the move that we want to make. I think the conversations with Chicago were probably wider than just the Levine talks, that it was more like, hey, can we get like a multi team construct with Lonzo? And maybe I would assume new, because what they need is they need more pieces. They built this roster on the previous cba. And I've said this over and over again, the Porter contract, everybody's like, this guy's making 40 million. And it's like, yeah, because it used to be you pay that and you don't lose him and then you can just trade him later. And now we're in a new, new CBA where it's like, no, you just like, trying to move these guys on big contracts is pulling teeth. And so the idea was they talked to Atlanta a lot about a multi piece component would have probably involved DeAndre Hunter with Porter going there. That, to me is the kind of move that makes the most sense here. Porter has had the first three months of the season, he was their second best player.

Zach Lowe (27:49)

I thought he was great. He slowed down a little bit.

Matt Moore (27:51)

He made such leaps in terms of his ability to create off of the drive and those type of things. He's had injuries. The hamstring's been bothering him. The Nuggets listed it as a back and he fought against that very hard. When we talked about him, he's like, they listed as a back, it's my hamstring. And everybody goes like, they're probably related, but that's probably. The move is like, you move Porter for multiple pieces and you make the decision on whether or not you're going to stick with Jamal. I will tell you, there was no bigger advocate in that building for Jamal Murray than Michael Malone. So that's part of this component as well.

Zach Lowe (28:20)

Yeah, he has a deep affection for Jamal Murray. Couple of things totally agree on Michael Bor Jr's first few months of the season. I remember tweeting about it. He's getting to the basket more. He's a little more comfortable off the dribble. I. I don't think I would have traded him for Zach Lavine like in that kind of deal. I just a 610 guy. You can shoot like that. Like, if you're going to trade Michael Porter Jr. And you're the Denver Nuggets and you're already the least voluminous three point shooting team in the league, you better get someone who's an A to A plus shooter back in that trade because you ain't got a lot to lose. Jamal Murray to Orlando. Great theoretical idea. The challenge that you're going to come up with and I realize we're just spitballing, we're going to wrap up here in a second. It's like you have Jokic, you have to make every trade has to be a win now trade. There's no rebuilding trade. There's no Jamal Murray for picks, even if that's available. And so you go to a team like Orlando and you're like, all right, you know, is what are they giving me? Because presumably it's not Paolo and it's not Franz. Is it Suggs and is that enough? Is it. Is it Suggs plus something in Orlando's got to be sold on Jamal Murray's health and availability and all of that. It's just tricky to make trades that have to be win now, talent for talent kind of trades. But that's where the Nuggets are going to find themselves as long as, you know, Jokic's prime continues. And yeah, I think it's safe to say it's continuing for as long as. As long as it. As long as the horizon is because the guy's the best player in the league.

Matt Moore (29:49)

Yeah, I mean he's been so incredible and you can't ask more of Jokic. Like I've criticized some of his defensive stuff this year, but I understand the load that he's carrying offensively and just like how much energy you have. And some of this is because of that though. The you have to play at the level with Yoke. That's where he is most comfortable. He has said that that's where he wants to play, which means you have to have backline defense. And that's been a huge issue for them. MPJ can't play 2.9 and recover to the corner. Just can't do it. If he does that, he winds up giving up a back cut for layup. Jamal struggles with the short roll. Guys score over him or they do a switch and they'll post up Jamal if he's the on ball actor. So like they've got to address the defense. And that to me is why it's like you got to get multiple veteran options. That has to be their way forward is accepting are like, are we going to be a. There's a lot of talk about Jokic hasn't played with an All Star and I don't know that adding an all star unless you're getting a guy that is a top level defender and an offensive all star in his prime helps here. Like I don't know that that helps if you get a name because you need multiple defenders who can shoot around Jokish to provide that spacing. That to me has to be the direction of the franchise going forward.

Zach Lowe (30:55)

Well, and maybe you know, will Peyton Watson's jump shot ever develop? Will Julian Strothers two way game ever sort of balance at the same time where both parts of it are humming? That's life with young players. Sometimes those the bets don't pay off in in time for your incumbent superstars. All right, Matt Moore, thanks for popping on to a little emergency reaction podcast to a truly bizarre, bizarre series of events in Denver. Even if the outcome isn't shocking, the timing is beyond shocking. You can read Matt Moore and listen to Matt Moore all over the place. One of the OGs of the basketball Internet. Thank you, sir.

Matt Moore (31:32)

Hey, thanks for having me, Zach. Welcome back, buddy.

Zach Lowe (31:36)

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