If you can’t beat ’em, steal their front office from ’em.
That wasn’t the actual reasoning behind the Kroenke family’s recruitment of Jon Wallace, who started his new job this week helming basketball operations alongside Ben Tenzer. But it was at least an underlying theme of the hire.
The Nuggets and Timberwolves have an increasingly strange and entertaining tradition of plucking coaches and front office workers from each other. And it just so happens that Denver entered this particular offseason on a six-game losing streak against its division rival, dating back to the 2024 playoffs.
It’s no secret. The Wolves have Denver’s number right now. Tim Connelly, Chris Finch and Micah Nori are the NBA’s preeminent Nuggets killers.
So it was with a coy smile that Wallace wrapped up his introductory news conference on Tuesday, perhaps relishing the final question hurled at him: Did he feel like Minnesota identified distinct, exploitable weaknesses in the Nuggets? Maybe something he can fix?
“It goes back to that depth thing,” he said. “We’ll reassess some things and try to get some more pieces in here.”
Wallace takes over as executive vice president of player personnel after spending the last three years in Connelly’s Minnesota front office.
Before that, he was in, well, Denver. Because the cycle is endless.
His role in the Nuggets’ newly manicured front office will be integral. In a summer of change at the bureaucratic level, he’s the first relative outsider to enter the room. Tenzer was an internal promotion. Head coach David Adelman was an internal promotion. The Nuggets needed some measure of balance — a fresh contributor to the brain trust with zero attachment to the ideas of the previous regime.
So what do the Nuggets need, in Wallace’s opinion?
“We have to be really conscious of the margins,” he said. “We’ve gotta be very deliberate, and obviously the time is now. … (Nikola Jokic) elevates the level of play of so many people around him. We’ve gotta make sure that we find some more shooting. Obviously, address some of the defensive concerns. But I think we have both young individuals here that can step up and do that as we continue to develop them, as well as we’ll look outside and see what makes sense.”
With the NBA’s free agency moratorium beginning Monday night, Wallace hasn’t been afraid to tease his desire to acquire newcomers. The Nuggets intend to focus more on free agents than trade opportunities, according to Tenzer. They have three open roster spots, created by the expiring contracts of DeAndre Jordan, Vlatko Cancar and Russell Westbrook.
Wallace said it’s too early to know if any of those three will be back next season, but he also hinted that Denver won’t prioritize re-signing its own free agents if that undermines the larger mission. He stressed the need to be “objective” and address “the immediate needs.”
Those are 3-point shooting, second-unit scoring and perimeter defense.
“If we can,” he said, “obviously you try to find better point-of-attack defenders, try to get that to kind of support our starting lineup.”
Bruce Brown would provide the sort of reinforcements Wallace has in mind if the Nuggets could convince their old friend to take a huge pay cut. There are also veteran minimum contract candidates such as Dennis Smith Jr., who played overseas last season but attended a recent vet mini-camp in Denver, according to a league source.
If the Nuggets do intend to “find some more shooting,” in Wallace’s words, then Westbrook, Jordan and Cancar don’t meet the criteria. Those three bench players combined to knock down 98 of 306 attempts from 3-point range last season, a 32% clip. (The vast majority of those attempts were Westbrook’s.) The half-court spacing around Jokic was a constant topic of discussion as Denver’s three-time MVP faced frequent double- and triple-teams.
Problems also lingered behind Jokic in the frontcourt, where the Nuggets have perpetually struggled to find suitable backup big men. Consider that another position to monitor closely as free agency opens.
“Nikola is going to play a lot of the minutes, so that backup center is going to be used very sparingly,” Wallace said. “But at the same time, you have a different dynamic in that second unit. So it may be more (of a) run-and-jump, rim-protecting big as opposed to a guy that we play through off the elbows and through the center of our offense.”
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After all, it’s a critical discrepancy between Minnesota and Denver.
“The West specifically has gotten younger and has gotten deeper,” Wallace said. “So obviously, depth is one of those things that you have to address. I think the IQ is so high here. The positional size is so high here. You’re further along than what you think you are. I think now it’s just adding a few pieces that can just give these guys, honestly, some rest.”
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