This IS genuinely interesting. People with different sports point of views debating with actual evidence on a topic of substance…could this be real?

https://www.denverpost.com/2025/04/11/michael-malone-calvin-booth-fired-nuggets/

Booth believed Malone was holding back Pickett and using Nnaji out of position to spite Booth, league sources said. Malone believed Booth made roster moves to force him into playing Booth’s unseasoned draft picks.

That power struggle BS is enough for me, if I was an owner, to never want to hire Malone. Grown men not letting other grown men speak to other grown men is some bitch ass shit

It is so frustrating Malone couldn’t rise above this petty war with Booth knowing he had the best player in the world and this was more bs the whole team had to deal with. I’m glad he’s gone as well as Booth and Dener is better for it. As far as Watson goes, the Kroekes cannot let him go no matter what, even if they have to dip into the second apron for a year. They could trade CB because he truly is a Jokic merchant and hesitates to take the open shot unlike Peyton. Cam is just too valuable.

Malone also had hartenstein and Gillespie and never gave them a chance. 

Throwing the CB / Watson convo in here too:

Mares: “I think no matter how we slice it, CB would be my (3rd option rotationally at the moment) between him, Cam and Watson. Some of this is that Cam being a shooter… you know, CB & PWat even though they have shot well in the regular season, I don’t consider them shooters, and you need a guy that has to be guarded out there (with the options this year being Cam and Hardaway).

But with Watson, the big things are:

1. we’ve watched a lot of games where if Watson is guarding a guy, they try and get him switched off. You don’t usually see that with CB. You don’t move heaven and earth to get CB off of a guy, but with Watson it’s been like that. They don’t want to attack him. (Points to Boston game).

2. But the bigger thing is: We’ve already seen a series against OKC, and it’s going to happen again this year, where it came down to, in large part, how many three pointers CB can hit. As good he is, as no matter what the regular season #’s say, teams are going to live with… what happens if CB misses three in a row. They know they can’t stop Denver, but if CB is missing wide open threes, it helps break the system. I don’t think that’s going to happen with Watson. If you leave Watson in the corner 3x in a quarter, he is irrationallly confident and capable of hitting those shots. With CB, I don’t want the season coming down to whether he can hit open 3s. He gets in his head.”

Matt: “So Swiper has been saying that too. But while Watson will take that open shot, CB will drive and re-route the ball to Jokic in the lane. Are you saying you would prefer the open shot”?

Adam: This is an easy one for me. I want the open shot. Against the top defenses, I don’t think CB will get away with it. And this is what happened. He didn’t take that many 3’s in the playoffs because he has a quick leash on himself. And teams know that’s what he is going to do, and they set up (with the best defense in the world) to defend it.

Matt: “The record scratch is the most damaging of all the options to me.”

It’s very funny that people are pretending that Zeke Nnaji is a good player because he had one good week.

But with Picket and Zeke, Malone really broke them. Pickett went scoreless in a summer league game and now is putting up 29 points in a game”.

Pickett’s points per 100 possessions

• 2024: 17.1
• 2025: 14.4
• 2026: 16.8

Just an orgy of post-Malone scoring here.

I really don’t understand the constant brigade against Malone. Booth was a dreadful GM, it took 1 month for a new front office to get Denver the best bench they’ve had since their ring, something Booth didn’t achieve in years.

Malone also gave plenty of chances to Watson, he was a mainstay in the rotation last year, saying ‘he wasn’t developed’ is just bullshit, his shooting & handle have been improving every year he’s been in the league, his counting stats now are good but they’re quite obviously inflated by the massive rise in usage driven by injuries.

Pickett and Nnaji have had one good week and people are trying to paint Malone as the anti-christ, I think it’s fine to think Denver needed a change and Adelman has been great for them, but the way Denver fans & pundits will find as many angles to shit on Malone as possible is psychotic

Adam Mares is a pod host I do like but I think he’s blinded by his priors here. Watson got run with Malone and showed flashes. He’s continued to develop. Pickett was bad and Zeke was even worse.

Also slightly underrated but all those players he mentioned have been on the team 3 years? There’s something to being good enough to spot play (Zeke and Tyson) but not good enough to play regularly when teams plan for you.

Watson should easily see time over Bruce Brown though.

Truly terrible behavior by these two. Perfectly normal to not like everyone you work with, but to play with the careers of players in the middle of this beef? Kinda crazy. Makes perfect sense that Denver moved on from both simultaneously.

Nnaji and Pickett both haven’t been any better. They’re just getting more run and opportunity with all the injuries to put up good moments and those are what have been sticking out rather than the 7 point stickers that still are fairly common from both guys

Watson wasnt ready

They had Justin holiday as 7th best guy on a team that could’ve won a fucking title

Were none of the issues with Bones Hyland exacerbated by this situation?

The dude’s rookie season was phenomenal from a statistical standpoint, even in the non-Jokic minutes when you account for who he was playing with and how they played without him. You had the front office guys (when TC was there) talking about how he was a point guard and then had the coaching staff adamantly state he wasn’t during interviews.

Then his second season he personally gets off to an amazing start in the first month or two of the season (insane 3 point shooting with baffling low 2 point shooting, but is just bombing threes and not taking many 2s) while the unit he’s on is losing their minutes badly.

The lineups he’s in gets tinkered with and tinkered with as his stats steadily dive and the lineups he’s in get worse and worse. The worse the lineup was, the more Malone played it. Bones was the third guard, which meant Jamal and Bruce Brown they both got to play a large number of minutes with the 4 starters. Bones didn’t, unless it was like the Sacramento game he started because everyone else was hurt. His on/off was atrocious but if you looked at who he was playing with and who THOSE people got to play with without him, it made it look much worse. He was in tons of small-ball lineups with 3+ guards for some reason.

He’s only now back with the GM that drafted him and starting to look like the promising player he was. He’s having his worst season ever shooting the three but they aren’t getting killed defensively in his minutes (even without Gobert) and he’s hitting his 2’s at a career high while not turning it over very much.

Still a small sample size on the season, but he’s been a +/- superstar. Just makes me wonder if things might have been different for him had he been in a healthier situation.

That’s not even getting into how weird the Clippers are.

Because ego is always the answer

In the end, Jokic had to carry them all

I am on the side of the Picket Fence then. Fuck Malone.

Zeke is good? Dafuq. Lmao

i try to follow the nuggets pretty consistently so i watch DNVR or locked on whenever i can’t watch a game cos east coast struggles. Matt can definitely have a flair for the dramatic but both podcasts are a fun fun watch/listen.

Also very interesting to see Mares to be so vocal about Malone; i always got the impression last season that he was more sympathetic to Booth but Adam tries to always be pretty measured and he is here too but saying that Malone broke certain players – is the most emphatic i’ve heard Adam sound.

Now Denver is 2 seed even with injuries to Jokic and prior injuires to Gordon and Braun,  maybe it was a good thing they moved on from Malone 

Another really interesting part from the podcast that was kinda glossed over was Matt Moore remarking about a somewhat strained relationship between Jokic and Cam Johnson.

I really wish they went more into that because neither seem like the type to cause any problems.

Not only did Malone help develop Jokic, Murray, and Porter Jr., but he also got the best out of Aaron Gordon.

But now the Nuggets are better off because they have new coaching for Peyton Watson and Jalen Pickett?

You literally can’t be serious with this nonsense…

Mike Malone must’ve rubbed people the wrong way for these types of stories to come out.

Am I the only one that is completely lost as to what this is about? Probably.

I so wanted to hear what Malone would say on ESPN after the Celtics game last week but they talked about Trae being traded instead

I really don’t get these kind of comments when these guys actually watch the games as a part of their job. PWAT averaged 19 minutes for 80 games in his 2nd year out of college where he didn’t even play. Everyone is jumping on the Zeke Nnaji bandwagon now that he is finally not looking like shit but isn’t realising that he is still playing center and not at the 4 which is his ‘natural position’. Pickett was a 2nd round pick that is already on his 4th year and is now 26 years old, he averaged 14 mpg last year which is 2 minutes less than this year and is on track to play the same amount of games. All of these guys were last 1st round picks/2nd round picks and they just weren’t good players when we actually played them which is why Malone played the vets which can provide more stability. These guys were given a massive chance to show that they belong in the NBA but failed and it wasn’t because Malone ‘broke them’ it was because they were late 1st round picks that probably wouldn’t be in the NBA today if the Nuggets could actually sign free agents and not rely on these guys to be their depth.

lol malone is a total asshat.

Hard to work with and makes it a personal vendetta with him and the players.

I’ve seen a handful of Magic fans who are tired of Jamahl Mosley throw out Malone as the obvious next coach candidate.

It’s intriguing to me, don’t think it’ll happen mid season (maybe after this season if things go South), but I wonder if he’s liable to get in another pissing match with a FO like this. And I wonder what the consensus around the league is in regards to his coaching again.

I think that Watson is legitimately good and should have been developed better, but Malone was completely in the right to give Pickett and Zeke the cold shoulder. 

I still think that when everyone is healthy, Denver’s best line up is Murray, Braun, Watson, Gordon, and Joker with three or four players coming in off the bench. 

Damn I didn’t know mares was such a Malone hater

I just cannot fathom how an owner can let things get anywhere near that antagonistic (this and other stuff I’ve heard from the Denver people on podcasts) without firing at least one of those guys.

Im so glad Malone bs is coming to light for people to finally see. That fraud should never be allowed to coach again.

Bones Hyland has also looked really good for the Wolves this year. I know he’s a Connolly guy and not a Booth guy but it’s another young player that Malone ran out of town and kind of broke the spirit of.

Payton Watson averaged 3 ppg at UCLA LOL. Booth was big upping him a year too early; that’s all. Doesn’t have to be a situation whereby Malone “ruined,” him because he didn’t breakout until he was checks notes 23 years old.