If you’re surprised that Michael Malone will be the next coach of the North Carolina Tar Heels, that’s understandable. Unlike Chicago Bulls coach Billy Donovan, another candidate for the job, and unlike Boston Celtics president Brad Stevens, who wasn’t interested in it, Malone isn’t one of the names that is typically tossed around when a major college program has a coaching vacancy. He has worked in college basketball before, having served an assistant coach at Oakland, Providence and Manhattan and the director of basketball administration at Virginia, but that seven-year stretch ended when he joined the New York Knicks‘ coaching staff 25 years ago. Malone has spent the vast majority of his professional life in the NBA.
Malone has a connection to UNC, though. His daughter Bridget is a freshman on the volleyball team, and as a result he has spent significant time in Chapel Hill. He has attended the basketball team’s practices, and, last October, he appeared on the Tar Heels’ official podcast. While he didn’t attend North Carolina himself — he played point guard for Loyola (Maryland) — he said on that podcast that his father, the late coach Brendan Malone, talked to him about Dean Smith from when he was a little kid.
“I’ve always been a Carolina fan,” he said. “And when she decided to come here, that made it even that much more special because now I’m ‘Go Heels’ for everything. I root for all the teams. I have fallen in love with Chapel Hill.”
OK, so Malone loves Chapel Hill. And he won an NBA championship in 2023 as the coach of the Denver Nuggets. What else should college fans know about him, though? Let’s start with the reputation he had long before he got to Denver.
Malone is an old-school, defense-first guy, right?
That was certainly the book on him before he got to Denver. Malone’s father was a disciplinarian, and when Malone was an assistant coach under Mike Brown in Cleveland, Monty Williams in New Orleans and Mark Jackson in Golden State. he was in charge of the defense.
“I would say that even though I’m a young coach in the NBA, in terms of tenure for NBA head coaches, I’d say I also have a lot of old school about me,” Malone told Mike Olsen, then of Denver Stiffs, in 2016. “I value discipline. I know it worked for me when I played, and maybe it’s because I grew up with it in the household, but I responded best to coaches that were hard on me, disciplined me and didn’t take the easy route. That was good for me, and at the end of the day, that’s what I believe in, as obviously that’s my approach.”
In that 2016 interview, Malone then brought up his relationship with DeMarcus Cousins, who clashed with numerous coaches in Sacramento but got along swimmingly with Malone. The Kings’ decision to fire Malone (early in the 2014-15 season, while Cousins was out with viral meningitis) rubbed their franchise player the wrong way and aged terribly. Malone was in the early stages of establishing a culture in Sacramento, and Cousins, who clashed with many other Kings coaches, had bought in.
In 2017, three years after Malone had kicked him out of a practice, Cousins recounted the story to Kevin Arnovitz, then of ESPN:
It’s an afternoon in early 2014, midway through the season, and Mike Malone, first-year coach of the Kings, is conducting a particularly brutal practice. Malone was hired by the Kings the previous June, and Cousins has experienced practices like this before. “Mike has his days,” Cousins says. “You’ve seen him on the sidelines, veins popping out of his head … overly frustrated, mad at the world. This was one of those days.”
Cousins is having one of those days too, dead tired from what seems to have been an almost intentionally sadistic practice. And when Malone yells at the team to line up to run sprints, Cousins turns defiant: “F— this, man. I’m not running!”
And then, as Cousins recalls, “every bit of 5-9 Mike Malone comes up to me and says, ‘Motherf—er, you’re going to run or you’re going to get the f— out of my practice, you big p—y!’ And I say, ‘I ain’t running, Mike!'”
Malone promptly shows Cousins the door.
Cousins went on to tell ESPN that, while Malone could get mad, it was never personal. “Mike was real,” Cousins said. “Mike held everyone accountable, most of all himself. That’s all that matters. That’s all it’s about.” In the same story, Malone said that Cousins “always knew that I cared about him and loved him.” Malone added: “Once you earn his trust, he’ll go to war for you. I think pretty early in our relationship I earned his trust.”
The Nuggets hired Malone in 2015. The year before he got there, ESPN published a feature, also by Arnovitz, entitled “The downfall of the Denver Nuggets,” in which the roster is described as a “menagerie of mismatched parts” and the organization is described as “rudderless.” Malone gave the franchise a sense of stability.
At first, the improvements were incremental. Then, after “Jokmas” — Dec. 15, 2016, the day that Malone decided to make 21-year-old Nikola Jokić the starting center and play through him — everything changed, Malone’s rep included. The way Denver played offensively in the years that followed, it would be inaccurate to describe him as merely a hard-nosed, defensive-minded culture builder.
What was so special about his Nuggets teams?
Jokić, mainly. Also, Jamal Murray. Malone, however, gave them the platform to perfect their two-man game. He earned their trust, empowered them and challenged them. Every year, Denver’s offense got less conventional. As Jokić evolved, so did the Nuggets. By the end of Malone’s tenure, their franchise player was not just the best passing big man in NBA history, he was truly positionless. Unlike other “point-centers” who make plays from the high post, Jokić ran pick-and-rolls like a guard and came off pindowns like a wing.
During Jokić’s first few seasons, Malone had to get on him to assert himself as a scorer. “Sometimes I don’t think [Jokić] realizes how good he is,” Malone said at media day in 2018. “And how great a player he is. There were times last year where we’d talk about other big men in the NBA. He would say, ‘I don’t think I’m as good as this guy or that guy,’ and I’d look at him like, ‘Are you crazy?'” To this day, Jokić is not one to talk himself up, but for years he has played like he knows he’s unstoppable. Malone, who knew opposing coaches would otherwise guard Jokić one-on-one and dare him to beat them on his own, deserves some of the credit for this.
Malone rode a horse in Jokić’s hometown of Sombor, Serbia, in the summertime, and he spent years both getting to know Jokić and trying to maximize his particular brand of basketball genius. By the time the Nuggets were contenders, their movement-oriented offense was a reflection of their superstar’s unprecedented combination of skills. Teammates quickly learned that, by simply cutting to the basket at opportune times, they could feast off of Jokić’s passes. Rather than drilling lots of set plays in practice, Denver worked on concepts. One exercise, as then–assistant coach David Adelman told The Ringer’s Michael Pina in 2023: five-on-zero, 18 seconds on the clock, no pick-and-rolls, no shooting until the clock hits five.
“You get all kinds of cutting and moving, and that in a sense can be its own play,” Adelman said.
Malone’s Nuggets were unpredictable and unconventional. They built an elite offense that stood up to playoff scrutiny despite being one of the league’s slowest and most 3-point-averse teams. They were tough enough to get the stops they needed during their 2023 title run, but they were special because they picked opposing defenses apart.
What are the knocks on Malone?
Well, his relationship with then–Nuggets GM Calvin Booth deteriorated to the point that they were barely speaking, which led to both of them getting fired around this time last year. “Everybody in the organization was miserable,” a team source told ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne in one of the many stories documenting the rift between the two.
Some tension between a team’s coach and front office is inevitable. It can even be healthy. This was clearly not, though, and Malone must take some of the blame for that. He was resistant to playing certain young players Booth wanted him to develop — in hindsight, Booth was right to be high on Peyton Watson in particular — and, year after year, he played his starting five an enormous amount of minutes together, which was good for those players’ chemistry and not necessarily optimal for everybody else.
If it wasn’t already clear by now, Malone is intense. And by the end of his tenure in Denver, many players had reportedly grown tired of his yelling. The team seemed to be tuning him out on the court, too.
Generally speaking, if you think of any negative trait usually associated with a self-described “old school” coaches, it has probably been used to describe Malone at some point. He’s a loud, fiery and sometimes stubborn guy. He is demanding. This can work, and it did in Denver for almost 10 full seasons. But it can also wear thin.
If you’re optimistic about the Tar Heels’ hire, you can point to the success of UConn‘s Dan Hurley, who makes Malone look chill by comparison. Malone has a track record of connecting with star players, which should serve him well as a recruiter. He showed with the Nuggets, too, that he was a more creative offensive coach than he was previously given credit for, and there’s no reason that can’t translate to the college level.
If you’re against the hire, though, you can point to the simple fact that this is not the NBA and he won’t have the luxury of coaching anybody on Jokić’s level. The players he coaches in Chapel Hill will make mistakes and test his patience more than the young pros in Denver did. Maybe he’s ready for that, but it’s definitely going to be an adjustment.