Fellow coaches left stunned by Denver's ousting of Malone

These are the coaches who won NBA championships in the last six years: Joe Mazzulla with Boston, Michael Malone with Denver, Steve Kerr with Golden State, Mike Budenholzer with Phoenix, Frank Vogel with the Los Angeles Lakers and Nick Nurse with Toronto.

Mazzulla is still with Boston. Kerr is still with Golden State.

Everybody else got fired. They packed up their championship rings and left.

Malone became the latest to do so on Tuesday, when the postseason-bound Denver Nuggets — the 2023 NBA champions — fired him with three games left in the season. And around the league, in the hours that followed, coaches reacted in the same stunned, surprised manner.

"Just disappointment," New York coach Tom Thibodeau said. "It's the unfortunate part of the business. I've known Michael for decades. Michael just did a phenomenal job there."

Championships no longer guarantee job security. Same goes for individual awards. Mike Brown was the unanimous coach of the year in 2023; he got fired by Sacramento earlier this year. Phoenix's Monty Williams and Memphis' Taylor Jenkins were, respectively, first and second in the coach of the year voting in 2022; they've both been fired, too.

"I wake up every day saying this could be my last day," Mazzulla said. "You have to have that type of perspective, because it gives you gratitude and it keeps you hungry."

Indiana coach Rick Carlisle knows there's not really any such thing as true job security for coaches. But, he didn't see the likes of Brown, Jenkins and Malone being let go this season.

"If anyone would've told me that any of these three guys would get let go during the season this year, I would've been shocked. It's disappointing," said Carlisle, who doubles as president of the National Basketball Coaches Association. "It's kind of numbing, to be honest. These were head-scratchers."

Jenkins was fired late last month with nine games left to play. Now Malone is out, with three left. Before this season, there had been one other instance in NBA history of a team changing coaches with less than 10 games left in a postseason-bound year — Larry Brown leaving New Jersey with six games left in 1982-83. It's now happened twice in the last two weeks.

More than half of the current NBA coaches — 17 of the 30 — have been in their jobs for less than three years. And in the WNBA, eight of the current 13 coaches (in fairness, one is an expansion team) have had their job for less than one year; seven of the 13 have a career record of 0-0 going into this season, after simply massive amounts of turnover following last season.

"That's a sobering reality of this profession," Miami coach Erik Spoelstra said earlier this season, when told he has the second-longest current tenure in the NBA behind only San Antonio's Gregg Popovich. Since Popovich became coach in San Antonio in 1996, on average, the other 29 teams in the league have all made more than 10 coaching changes.

Milwaukee coach Doc Rivers — who has coached five different clubs — said Tuesday he was livid over what happened to both Jenkins and Malone.

"It's always: 'Whose fault?' And the first guy that gets blamed is the coach," Rivers said. "It's tough. We sign on for it. That doesn't make it fair, and that doesn't make it right. What happened in Memphis, in my opinion, was wrong. What happened today was wrong."

Malone was the fourth-longest tenured coach in the NBA.

And it is puzzling to coaches: Four of the last six championship-winning coaches, five of the last seven winners of the Coach of the Year award and seven of the last 11 coaches to take a team to the NBA Finals all got fired.

Los Angeles Clippers coach Tyronn Lue — who won a title with Cleveland in 2016 and eventually got fired from there, too — half-seriously, said coaches might want to stop winning awards.

"Don't win coach of the year, don't win a championship, because you're going to get fired in two years. The criteria for getting hired and fired, I don't know what it is anymore," Lue said.

And Kerr was even more succinct. Coaches are making more than ever, he noted, but billionaire owners have no problem paying off those contracts if they want to make a change.

"Doesn't seem right, but this is the business we're in," Kerr said. "We're all going to suffer a similar fate at some point. That's kind of the way it is."

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