I don’t know Nikola Jokic, and neither do you. This is true for any NBA player, but It’s even more true with Jokic. The Denver Nuggets’ three-time MVP is notoriously media-avoidant, appearing in only two brief national commercial campaigns despite his elevated pedigree, and refusing roughly ninety-nine percent of non-mandatory interviews; once, he appeared on teammate Michael Porter Jr.’s podcast. There may be a few other optional public discussions he’s participated in, but none come to mind.
So if we want to know how he really feels about the firing of his only NBA head coach, Michael Malone, and the man who built much of his roster, Calvin Booth, we have to speculate. We have to guess what his true thoughts are, about Nuggets ownership doing so with just three games left until the playoffs. My best determination, given all that’s been reported, is that the team approached their superstar and asked him about the possibility of firing Malone, Booth, or both, and Jokic told them that it wasn’t his job to think about these things, or decide upon them. It is his job to play.
What he probably did not say was that it would be bad, and that he would be angry, if such firings took place. If that’s what Jokic said, the firings would not have happened. This is the case unless Denver has bucked the long-standing industry norm of keeping a generational, planetary centerpiece talent happy. But recent visions of Jokic did not show us a man of pleasant temper. Looking manically frustrated on the bench during one of his team’s recent losses, Jokic appeared to be a man whose happiness needed to be created, not maintained.
It seems he’s not alone in his discontent. The rotten acrimony described by journalists, in the wake of the Booth-Malone Explosion, is one of petty factionalism, downstream from an egoistic battle over the division of glory leftover from the Nuggets’ 2023 NBA championship. The fight for credit and control between the organization’s leaders got so bad that a shooting coach was accused of spywork and denied access to team practices. It got so bad that Malone and Booth refused to speak to each for weeks at a time, waging war through the proxy of their employees, who they transformed into bitter pawns.
It makes sense to fire the men responsible for turning Jokic’s team into this. He is producing in ways we’ve never seen, and is a low-maintenance star. Winning with him is supposed to be easy. The Nuggets have generally done it, playing at an average 51-win pace over the nine seasons since Jokic became a starter. That was a promotion that was by no means automatic. Drafted in the second round, the 6'11" Serbian’s unusual talents were discovered gradually, then suddenly—by Malone. An afterthought when his career began, he was a starter by the end of his rookie season, and at the middle of a 46-win team of middle-grade role players by year three.
There are plenty of coaches who may have never discovered the odd, unprecedented excellence of a low-profile backup big. Malone deserves credit for that, and for a lot more too. One of the best head coaches in the sport, he’s likely bound for the Hall of Fame, and will probably go down as the greatest coach in Nuggets' history. Perhaps his greatness was also his shortcoming, though, with a fierce vision turning—in the course of a decade—into a tiring, insensitive one, not properly connected to the personnel at hand.
Malone would argue, as the rumors have it, that said personnel was the problem; that Booth gave him rookies to lecture and assign homework to, not grown men to win more championships with. Peyton Watson, Jalen Pickett, and Christian Braun—Booth’s drafted players, chosen to continue the Jokic Era—are not Jeff Green, Bruce Brown, and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, the veteran trio who filled out the backend of 2023’s championship rotation. Braun has proved more physically dynamic and productive than the departed Caldwell-Pope in the 2024-25 season, a great replacement in the starting lineup in many ways.
Braun, however, cannot at 23 years old replace what Caldwell-Pope brought in terms of knowledge and communication. That’s an adult’s job, not the task of a quick young ascender. The Nuggets have looked lost on defense, this season, without the same depth of on-court schematic deputies, with Malone explicitly commenting on his players’ inability to understand—or even adequately study—the proper defensive strategies. This is what happens when a title team pivots from immediacy to long-term thinking, which always requires building through the draft in the NBA.
It’s this hard, unchanging fact that’s at the root of the all the gnarly Booth/Malone balkanization. The league’s salary cap rules punish you for maintaining the continuity of expensive veterans who really know how to play together, and force you to renew your ranks with youth every few years, at minimum. The Boston Celtics, winners of last year’s championship and contenders for another this season, will face the same unpleasant truth this summer, when their experienced core also becomes too costly to keep together, and hopes for further conquest hinge more on the ability to shrewdly replenish.
It can be said that the NBA's collective bargaining agreement, geared inordinately towards competitive parity, sets all champions on a long dreadful road into an unavoidable brick wall. The Milwaukee Bucks, winner of 2021’s championship, would say as much. They’ve failed to build another title team around two-time MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo since then, despite their boldest efforts. You can crash the car quickly or slowly, but it’s not going to take you much further. The architect of the highways has made sure of that much.
That’s more or less what we’re seeing with the Nuggets, here. Maybe a miracle happens, and they win or even fiercely compete for another title. Winning as many as two playoffs series, this spring, now looks like a distant improbability. It’s that kind of outlying scenario that Denver’s ownership hopes to spark, beginning with this arguably spurious late-season maneuver. You can throw a stick of dynamite at the invading mothership, and hope it lands and blasts just exactly where it needs to, to restart your whole battle back into winnable shape. But that’s probably not what’s going to happen. You’re probably just going to lose differently than you would have otherwise.
