AS AN ALL-TIME MACHINE, NIKOLA JOKIC IS WASTED WHEN NUGGETS CHANGE COACHES
Michael Malone only developed The Joker in 10 years, turning him into an NBA champion and a three-time MVP, but the front office panicked and fired him for an interim coach as the playoffs approach
If Nikola Jokic is the most beautiful player in our basketball sphere, do not forget who developed him. His coach the last decade has been Michael Malone. You can laugh and say Jokic shed his beer belly, improved his vertical leap from a pathetic 17 inches and applied muscle to his anatomy, but who helped convert him into an NBA champion and a three-time Most Valuable Player?
That man was fired Tuesday, which leaves Jokic with blurry vision for a future title and suggests he might be dealt by the Denver Nuggets. The Malone decision comes two years after he helped Jokic and Jamal Murray to glory and seems harder to grasp than the trade that sent Luka Doncic from Dallas to the Lakers. The best way to get dinged in the league is by winning a championship, as four of the last six coaches to conquer the Finals — Malone, Mike Budenholzer, Frank Vogel and Nick Nurse — lost their gigs.
No one with a straight face can suggest a coach beyond Malone is better for Jokic in the upcoming playoffs. Regardless of issues — an imploding defense, the health of Murray and Aaron Gordon and a bench that divided Malone and outgoing general manager Calvin Booth — this should have remained his position at least until the Nuggets are eliminated. Now, an interim named David Adelman will serve on the bench. It means Jokic will be ousted soon when he should be in the trophy hunt every season.
What a waste.
“I don’t know. Maybe we just, maybe we just … I don’t know actually,” said the 6-11 megastar, who again has achieved masterful numbers and will finish as the MVP runner-up only because voters want a shakeup and will choose Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.
What the Nuggets haven’t done is supply Jokic with a No. 2 franchise player. Murray has had moments but not lately, so where is Doncic to join LeBron James, Jimmy Butler to join Steph Curry and everything the Celtics have done? This is a blowup attempt by the Kroenkes, Josh and father Stan, who already decided Malone and Booth would be gone this offseason. Why not just dump them before the playoffs, which is deadly for a 47-32 team with Jokic well within his magnificent prime?
“Play hard and have fun,” Josh Kroenke said as the team’s vice chairman. “Your mind turns to what is the best decision for this group right now. And from that point forward, I became comfortable with the thinking of, you know, let’s try to shake this tree and squeeze as much out of this as we can.”
Shake the tree? Other than Jokic, what’s in the bush? Russell Westbrook at the end of his road? Malone seemed tired of fighting battles with Booth and said over the weekend, “I’ll start with me: We’ve lost four games in a row and I’m never going to ‘this-guy, that-guy.’ How about me, as a head coach, not doing my job to the best of my ability. We haven’t lost four in a row in a long time. It’s really easy to be together and say ‘family’ when you win, but when you’re losing games, can you stay together?”
The league is a nutso place. Malone joined Memphis’ Taylor Jenkins in losing coaching jobs late in the regular season. The Celtics were sold for $6.1 billion as champions. Is Doncic prepared to help James push Oklahoma City and Golden State in the Western Conference? I’m worried about the Thunder’s Mark Daigneault winning a championship.
Won’t he be fired in two years?
“There were certain trends that were very worrisome to me at different points in time,” Josh Kroenke said. “But they would get masked by a few wins here and there, and in the world of professional sports — when winning and losing is your currency — winning can mask a lot of things.”
Thanks for all the work, Michael Malone, in taking a blob from Serbia and turning him into The Joker. At one point this season, Jokic thought about singing “Many Men” from 50 Cent. His teammates pushed him. “No, no, no, I'm not," Jokic said, laughing. “I love the song, I love the song, but I'm not going to rap it.”
Those were the days. What’s next? Denver as Dallas?
A trade to the Lakers?
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.