Nuggets president Josh Kroenke considered firing coach Michael Malone and general manager Calvin Booth twice this season before eventually dismissing them three games before the playoffs, he said Monday in a news conference.
“Neither of them deserved it,” Kroenke told reporters at Ball Arena, “and for that I apologize.”
But as their working relationship deteriorated, Kroenke admitted, he began to hesitate about their futures in Denver, eventually deciding the dynamic was untenable. The Nuggets fired Malone and Booth last Tuesday during a four-game losing streak, sending shock waves through the NBA community because of the dramatic timing as much as the changes themselves.
“Trust me, I went through all that,” Kroenke said. “I’m like, ‘Am I crazy?’ So I fully understand what you guys were probably thinking in the moment.”
His first moment of doubt occurred around last Thanksgiving, when the Nuggets were struggling to gain traction in the early portion of the season. The second moment was around the All-Star break in February — but Kroenke acknowledged the optics would have been awkward then. Denver won eight consecutive games going into the break.
“What would be crazier?” he said. “Me doing what I did last week or doing it on an eight-game win streak?”
Instead, it happened on an off-day when Denver was in jeopardy of falling into seventh place in the Western Conference. Friction between Malone and Booth about the direction of the team had spilled into the Nuggets’ day-to-day operations, creating a divided and paranoid culture, as sources detailed to The Denver Post last week.
“I saw it was reported that I would sit in with meetings with Calvin and Coach at times, which I did. We had great conversations in those meetings,” Kroenke said. “But I need more when I’m not around. My role is not to necessarily be there on a daily basis. I need people that are policing the culture and pushing it forward for me on a daily basis.”
Case in point: Nuggets and Avalanche owner Stan Kroenke also owns Arsenal F.C. of the British Premier League, with Josh serving as an executive for the London-based soccer team. On the same day he delivered the harsh news to Malone and Booth in Denver, Arsenal was playing a Champions League quarterfinal match against Real Madrid overseas, demonstrating the extent to which he’s stretched geographically thin. “On a human level,” he said, “that was a rough Tuesday for me.”
Kroenke described his meetings with Malone and Booth that day as being “as positive of a bad conversation as I could have with each of them. … Coach Malone was wonderful. Calvin was wonderful. I’m sure they had a wide range of emotions afterward.”
The team announced Monday that Ben Tenzer will take over as interim general manager until the end of this season, when the Kroenke family will conduct a full search for both full-time positions. In addition to his Nuggets front office role as a salary cap expert, Tenzer has been general manager of their G League affiliate, the Grand Rapids Gold, since the 2023 offseason.
Kroenke was also asked whether he will be more hands-on with his role in basketball operations moving forward.
“I don’t know if I’ll be any more or less. I think from my perspective, I’ve always been pretty hands-on in a way, maybe more so than some people realize. … I think with my background, it’s natural for me to kind of think about it some,” he said, referring to his past as a Division I college player at Missouri. “I live and breathe this stuff. This is what I do. This is what I’ve done for the last 15 years. And so if anybody has a good read on the group, hopefully it’s relatively me, at my level. But I’m never gonna be somebody that’s saying what player to pick or anything like that. I’ve moved way past that in my career, and in my roles and my responsibilities.
“That doesn’t mean my basketball instincts won’t kick in. … When Calvin is wanting to trade up in the draft and take a guy like Peyton Watson, and we’re gonna use a future asset, in that moment, you’d better believe my basketball instincts kick in, and I know all of the data around one-year former McDonald’s All-Americans and their success level in the NBA. So in that moment, our minds will come together in a way.”
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Kroenke encountered a Nuggets locker room that felt flat to him after their home loss to Indiana two Sundays ago, which turned out to be Malone’s last game on the sideline. As the 44-year-old team president and governor reached his final, franchise-altering decisions in the ensuing 24 hours, he also reached an understanding to look inward at his own role in the situation.
“I failed both Cal and (Malone) as a leader because I let certain things slip to a place that they never should have been,” he said. “And to be honest, we wound up making a decision last week that, like I said, I hesitated on twice. And I needed to be better for the group, checking some personal feelings, my respect for both of them, to be a better person for the overall group. … I apologize to both Calvin and Coach.”
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