When the Denver Nuggets fired their head coach and general manager earlier this week, the average NBA fan was left shocked, confused, and wondering why the front office would make what seemed like a rash decision just ahead of playoffs.
But for those inside the Nuggets organization, it appears the news was far from surprising. In the days since the bombshell dropped, multiple reports have emerged detailing the "cold war" between HC Michael Malone and GM Calvin Booth, and how it had been negatively affecting players and the rest of the franchise for a while.
"Everybody in the organization was miserable," one team source told ESPN's Tim MacMahon and Ramona Shelburne in a piece published Friday. "That's what [team President Josh Kroenke] felt. It's a bad vibe. You can't operate like that. He felt that if he removed those two people, everybody could just focus on doing their job. Change needed to happen."
One of the main sticking points for onlookers has been why now? Why fire two key pieces of your team when the Nuggets, currently No. 4 in the West, are sitting pretty for the playoffs and could ultimately make a run at the title? Surely there was or would have been a better opportunity. Well, per MacMahon and Shelburne, Kroenke had wanted to make this change much earlier, but the team's record slowed him down.
Per ESPN: "Kroenke wanted to clean house at the All-Star break, sources said, but an eight-game winning streak spared Malone and Booth." So, in other words, this could have happened back in February, but the Nuggets were winning, which made it seem like things were fine.
"There were certain trends that were very worrisome to me at certain points in time, but they would get masked by a few wins here and there," Kroenke elaborated in an in-house meeting earlier this week, per ESPN. "In the world of professional sports, where winning and losing is your currency, winning can mask a lot of things."
Moreover, The Athletic's Sam Amick and Tony Jones reported Thursday that the Kroenkes were also "influenced" by the Memphis Grizzlies' recent decision to fire their head coach Taylor Jenkins late in the season.
"There was a shared belief in the logic there, this notion that resetting with less problematic leaders right before the playoffs might spark something special in the weeks and perhaps months to come," Amick and Jones said of the family's thinking.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Nuggets Team President Wanted to Fire Malone, Booth Much Earlier in the Season.
