David Adelman has shaken himself free of the “interim” label.
The Nuggets have hired Adelman to replace Michael Malone full-time as their head coach, team governor Josh Kroenke announced Thursday afternoon. Adelman, 44, has been on the coaching staff since 2017 and took over the interim position with three games left in the 2024-25 regular season after Malone was fired.
Denver won those last three games, prevailed in a first-round playoff series then pushed the 68-win Oklahoma City Thunder to seven games under Adelman’s impromptu leadership. Multiple starters shared their hope that he would get the full-time job after the team’s season-ending loss. Kroenke said he was impressed by how the players rallied behind “not only a different voice, but a different style of communication.”
He also doubled down on his decision to fire Malone and general manager Calvin Booth when he did, crediting Adelman for the team’s playoff run at a moment of perceived organizational instability.
“I think the real instability would be if I just hid behind the curtain and allowed the plane to continue to go where it was heading,” Kroenke said. “And probably, I think that plane would have landed in the Play-In (Tournament) and probably gone right out then. … From a stability standpoint, I feel way more stable right now than I did six weeks ago.”
Adelman will have the freedom to hire his own staff. Denver’s assistant coaches are no longer under contract as of the end of the 2024-25 season, as The Denver Post previously reported. Terms of Adelman’s deal with the team were not disclosed.
“One of the reasons why we wanted to make the decision now and move forward with him as our coach was to give him the ability to build the staff that he really wanted,” Kroenke said. “That’s on one side of it, and then also to allow direct communication in as short an amount of time as possible for the people we may not want to keep. … I think that we need to reinvent ourselves in a way but not reinvent the wheel, if that makes sense.”
Adelman’s NBA career began in player development. He was an assistant coach for the Minnesota Timberwolves and Orlando Magic before coming to Denver. In his eight seasons under Malone, he was tasked with designing the Nuggets’ offense around center Nikola Jokic, who has won three league MVP trophies and an NBA Finals MVP. Adelman received attention as a head coaching candidate around the league while that offense thrived. He interviewed with the Hornets, Cavaliers and Lakers in 2024.
Before arriving in the NBA, he coached Lincoln High School in Portland, Ore. — his home state — from 2006 to 2011, making one state championship game. He is the son of Naismith Hall of Famer Rick Adelman, who coached the Trail Blazers, Warriors, Kings, Rockets and Timberwolves between 1989 and 2014.
Adelman is the 23rd head coach of the Nuggets, succeeding the winningest in franchise history. Malone won 471 regular-season games and 44 more in the playoffs during a 10-year tenure that included the team’s first NBA championship.
Only six Nuggets coaches have won 100 games. As Adelman prepares for his first season at the helm, he already will have a head start thanks to his 3-0 record at the tail end of last season. He’s also the sixth coach in franchise history to win a playoff series.
“I don’t see this as an audition,” he said after being named interim coach in April. “I see this as: This franchise, this organization already has given me a chance right here. I owe them that.”
Whether he treated it as an audition or not, that’s how team ownership viewed it. Kroenke acknowledged Thursday that part of his rationale behind the timing of the Malone decision was to give Adelman a chance at the helm.
“He’s grown with the group,” Kroenke said. “He understands their tendencies as players, but I think equally as important with where we are right now in our organization’s cycle: He knows them as people. What makes them tick. And I think bringing in somebody from the outside — while I was very open-minded to it initially — I saw the cohesiveness of the relationships on the human side. And I think that’s a big factor in where we’re headed with this group now.”
Kroenke said players were receiving notice of the hire as he was at the lectern Thursday for his end-of-season news conference.
Given Jokic’s status as arguably the best player in the NBA, his role or lack thereof in Denver’s major personnel decisions has been under the microscope recently. He said last Sunday after the team’s season-ending loss that whether Adelman should or shouldn’t get the full-time job was “above my pay grade.”
“Considering what Jok makes,” Kroenke retorted, laughing, “it’s not above his pay grade. I’ll tell you that much.”
Adelman is the Nuggets’ fifth full-time head coach hired under Stan Kroenke’s ownership and the third without prior head coaching experience in the NBA. The other two — Jeff Bzdelik and Brian Shaw — both finished brief tenures with win percentages worse than .400.
Adelman will attempt to overcome that trend as the Nuggets chase a second championship with Jokic entering his 30s.
“Leading them hasn’t felt any different,” Adelman said recently. “… Behind closed doors, I’ve ran a lot of the things in practice with Coach Malone’s blessing — pregame (walk-throughs) and all those things — so I would say 70% of what I’m doing, I already was doing. And the other 30%, I’m learning on the fly. So you can’t learn anything unless you actually go do it. So I’m doing the best I can. I’m trying to learn minute by minute.”
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