Denver Nuggets Fire Coach Mike Malone Amid Conflict

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00:00The Denver Nuggets. What are we doing here? You look at the Nuggets. The tweet pops up yesterday.

00:04Sham Sharani, a breaking news. The Denver Nuggets have fired coach Mike Malone, sources tell ESPN.

00:10Then digging down a little bit deeper a few moments later, the general manager also fired

00:14from the Denver Nuggets. Typically this happens, Joe, postseason. Hey, we lost. Unacceptable. We

00:20gave you one more year. It didn't work out. Let's go. But sometimes teams try to find lightning in

00:24a bottle and fire their world championship head coach of just a few years ago to create a

00:29spark for the 2025 playoff run. Let's start here, Joe. You hear this news, your initial

00:35reactions. What were they?

00:38I was shocked. It really was. I could not believe of all the organizations. Again, what are we?

00:45Two seasons removed from the organization's first championship in the history, right, of

00:52their existence. And Malone was a big, big part of that. And then you start reading into where,

00:59man, all was not well behind the scenes between Malone and Booth. Booth wanted to, as far as the

01:07roster goes, wanted to center it around the youth, the guys that he drafted, right? But that's not who

01:13Mike Malone is. Mike Malone loves the veterans. He also, Malone, felt that, listen, we have a small

01:20window of opportunity to win a couple of these things. We're not blowing it up and starting to play

01:25rookie and sophomores and start using that. So he used guys like Russell Westbrook a lot this year,

01:33gave him a ton of minutes instead of Jalen Pickett, who was the second round pick a couple

01:38of years ago. Malone is not a guy that's going to invest a whole lot of time and effort into the

01:43younger guys. He's a veteran type of coach. Booth wanted it the other way. And that apparently bled

01:50into all other aspects of the organization. And the owner, well, the owner's just like, well,

01:55neither of you can get along. There's no point in having either of you here since you both have

02:00contracts coming up as well.