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As the sweet taste of champagne drenched everybody and everything in the Nuggets locker room, Michael Malone hung up the telephone in his office after calling his 80-year-old mother, sipped on a beer and told a dirty little secret about coaching a championship team:
X’s and O’s are overrated.
“The best coaches are not the greatest X’s and O’s guys,” Malone told me Monday night, after the Nuggets wrestled a 94-89 victory from Miami to win the first championship in franchise history.
And the greatest coach in the history of a team that has employed Larry Brown, Doug Moe and George Karl?
It’s Malone, without a doubt.
As Nikola Jokic dunked teammate Jamal Murray in the team’s therapy pool to celebrate winning the whole thing, 21-month-old Ognjena, a little girl who’s the apple of the real MVP’s eye, danced happily in a chair in Malone’s office. The coach was surrounded by staffers at a conference table turned into a makeshift bar that included a magnum of champagne hand-delivered by the NBA in a box.
“Belief,” Malone said, “is such an important thing in sports … or life.”
A champion is born of the belief anything is possible.
Malone fostered the belief that something the Nuggets have never done was possible. He did it with F-bombs and hugs.
“That’s what coaching is all about,” Malone said. “It sure ain’t about drawing up (bleeping) plays. It’s about building relationships and instilling belief.”
It’s a lesson Malone learned as a child by the example of Maureen and Brendan, his octogenarian parents who watched the championship-clinching victory on television back in New York.
“OK, you do have to know your X’s and O’s to do this job,” said Malone, his explanation frequently interrupted by cigars being passed around the table and spontaneous recollections of how a zoom call with Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning in 2020 contributed to the Nuggets’ championship mindset.
“But there are a lot of great X’s and O’s coaches that never won, because they didn’t have the ability to relate, communicate and get players to believe. I learned this from my father a long time ago: The greatest gift I can give any player is confidence. If (Nuggets rookie) Christian Braun doesn’t think I believe in him, he’s going to be tense in a Finals game. But if that same player knows I have his back, he’ll go out on the court and play free.”
Anyone who watched Thursday’s victory parade, as he dropped an F-bomb while wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “Put This In Your Pipe and Smoke It,” saw the real Malone.
He’s feisty and fiery, although when I told Malone that as the Nuggets took control of the Western Conference finals against the Los Angeles Lakers, the 51-year old son of a longtime NBA assistant coach chuckled and lightly protested: “I’m a lover, not a fighter, man.”
Of course, on that same night at Ball Arena back in May, Malone then immediately launched into a in-your-face diatribe about his team not getting the respect it had earned, before dropping the mic with the put-this-in-your-pipe quote that fits his personality so well.
Gregg Popovich, the San Antonio Spurs curmudgeon who has served as a mentor to the greatest coach in Nuggets history, “told me a long time ago to be myself. Pop told me I can be a fiery Irishman and be brutally honest with players,” Malone said. “But you’ve got to build a great relationship with those players, because if players don’t believe you have their backs, they will stop listening to you.”
There can be no trust established without commitment. Malone is living proof of that. Without the Nuggets’ rock-solid belief in him, Malone would’ve been fired five years ago.
On April 11, 2018, Denver traveled to Minnesota and lost the 82nd game of the regular season to the Timberwolves by six points, a bitter defeat that sent the Nuggets home without a playoff berth for the third straight season in Malone’s three years on the job. At the time, the coach’s doubters in Nuggets Nation shouted louder than his scant die-hard supporters.
In a champagne-drenched locker room, as Nuggets president Josh Kroenke cradled the Larry O’Brien trophy in his left arm, I asked if parting ways with Malone was ever a serious consideration.
“No,” Kroenke said.
“He does know his X’s and O’s. But what I’ve always liked: Coach Malone is a great communicator. He came out of the ground with players that became our core group. If you look at how we’ve done business with the Rams, the Nuggets, the Avs and Arsenal, we’ve tried to put the right people in position and let them do their thing. Our goal with the Nuggets was always to win the whole thing. We knew we had to be patient and do it with the right people to crack that nut.”
The Nuggets refused to stop believing in Malone, a fighting Irishman who learned from his momma to look any obstacle in the eye, then knock it out.
So minutes after he won the first championship in team history, Malone called New York to thank his 80-year old mom.
“My mother was very emotional. She was so mad because she couldn’t be here in the arena,” said Malone, his smile acknowledging the feisty DNA his mother passed along to him.
“I told her: ‘Ma, you were here. You are right here, in my heart.’”