Nuggets coach Michael Malone is still waiting for a sign from his father: “He was my biggest supporter”

In hindsight, one ejection stands out to Michael Malone more than all the others.

It was Dec. 7, 2016, in Brooklyn. Malone was in the second month of the second season of his second head coaching job in the NBA. Most Nuggets fans probably remember that period in franchise history for what happened eight days later, when Malone inserted a young center named Nikola Jokic into the starting lineup for good.

But Malone’s memory takes him to a widely forgotten game, a 116-111 loss to the Nets. Early in the third quarter, he was thrown out for arguing a no-call, but really because he wanted to light a spark with his team trailing by 21. As he stormed off the court, he was trailed by two people: then-general manager Tim Connelly, and his dad.

The three of them watched the rest of the game together in the Nuggets locker room, enjoying a slice of pizza. Denver rallied from down 29 and almost won.

“That might have been one of the last times my father was able to come to a game,” Malone said.

Memories of his father have resurfaced in Malone’s mind constantly the last six months, and they will continue to as the Nuggets embark on another playoff run, starting Saturday. When Brendan Malone died Oct. 9, 2023, it left the ninth-year Nuggets coach without his confidant, mentor and critic. It also left him without the customary postgame text messages or phone calls he’d received for years.

“They were never soft and cuddly,” Michael told The Denver Post. “‘You’re great, son.’ No, what I probably miss most about it was that he was my biggest supporter, but he knew it was unconditional love that he had the ability to challenge me.”

Brendan was a longtime basketball coach at all levels, perhaps best known for developing the Jordan Rules with the Detroit Pistons who won championships in 1989 and 1990. He was known to family as a voracious reader, a proud Irish New Yorker, and a lover of history, baseball, boxing and mob movies.

To Michael, he was a steady, ever-present voice that’s getting more difficult to hear.

The Irish ghost

Michael was nearing the Denver airport when his phone started buzzing. First, a call from his older brother, Kevin. The Nuggets were about to fly to Phoenix for a preseason game. Michael was carpooling with assistant coach Ryan Bowen, as usual. He declined the call and planned to get back to Kevin when he had more privacy at the airport.

Then Michael’s mom called. Then his wife.

“I’m not getting on that plane,” Michael told Bowen. “I think somebody just died.”

It was a complete shock. Brendan hadn’t been in poor health. He wasn’t in hospice. “I think if my father could’ve scripted his own death,” Michael says now, “it would have been exactly that. ‘I don’t want anybody coming to my house. I don’t want anybody weeping.’ The Irish ghost. He said, ‘I’m out.’ Had a heart attack.”

As the team boarded the plane, Michael drove back home to his family. He remained in Denver for a few days before traveling to New York for the funeral service. He read hundreds of old texts from his dad, some funny, others earnest, dating back to 2013. His mom, Maureen, asked him to write the obituary and deliver the eulogy. He had dreaded this for years. As a child, he saw his parents’ tombstones in his nightmares. “How do you give a eulogy?” he thought. He decided he would read a few of his favorite texts aloud.

After the funeral, he flew to Los Angeles to meet up with the team. He’d missed four preseason games. Denver had one remaining against the Clippers. Michael was determined to coach it. He could have taken a week off to grieve, but he had a feeling his father would have rolled over to reprimand him. “He would have been in my dreams every night: ‘Get back to work. Your team needs you. Don’t worry about me, I’m good.’”

And the sideline was a place he could escape, where he melted into his father without even knowing it. “Sometimes Michael will get down into his defensive stance and kind of do this shuffle, like he’s playing on the sideline,” his sister Kelly said. The mannerism reminds her of their dad.

A new season began. Michael is unabashedly unafraid of showing emotion — his popularity in Denver owes something to his heart-on-sleeve demeanor — but even for him, the pain is unbearable if he lingers on it too long. So he keeps his mind moving: to the next piece of film, the next opponent. An 82-game NBA season is one hell of a shield. “I actually think it was a good thing that he passed away in October, because … I still don’t feel like I’ve taken the time to truly grieve and mourn his death,” he said.

He knows the grief is going to hit him at some point this offseason, after basketball comes to a sudden halt, “like someone pulled the emergency brake on a subway car,” as he describes the annual sensation. When that time comes, he’ll have no choice but to be alone with his thoughts.

“I think that’s when I’ll truly come to terms with his passing,” Michael said. “And I know that will be really hard when that happens.”

Waiting on a sign

Not long after his dad died, Michael went for a hike. He was on his own, and he was looking for a sign from Brendan. Maybe he would even hear his voice.

“There’s gonna be some kind of animal, or something is going to show itself to me,” Michael remembered thinking.

The walk was lonely.

“And I haven’t heard a damned thing since my father passed.”

He’s still waiting for a sign, but he eventually realized he can’t actively seek one. That took time. A photo of Brendan sits on Michael’s desk at home. Sometimes, Michael talks to it. Sometimes, he laughs. “And then sometimes I’m pissed off at him. I’m like, ‘Hey, man. I thought we were close. Where you at?’” He reminds himself that he was lucky his dad lived to be 88, to see Michael win an NBA championship.

Often during this regular season, he invoked his father unprompted during postgame news conferences. After blowing a big lead, he would recall Brendan telling him, “You guys are the same old Nuggets.” Texts and calls are no longer a part of Michael’s postgame routine. All he can do is guess what his dad would have sent. You have to be in the foxhole players after a loss. They have to know you love them.

“When I say that I hear him … it’s the many, many conversations that I had. Me replaying conversations. Me replaying his advice, me replaying his criticism,” Michael said. “But I wish I could tell you that I have had a dream where my father was speaking to me and I felt him. I wish I could tell you that I could feel his presence that night we raised the banner and got our rings. I haven’t felt him, seen him, heard him. Not one time.”

A baseball in the face

Michael believes his father is always with him, even if he’s not showing himself yet. That part, like the mourning process, will come in due time, Michael trusts.

Until then, he finds comfort in memories — the ups and downs of a life following in his father’s footsteps.

Memories of a domestic life in Queens. Brendan and Maureen’s first five children were born within two years of one another. That made for fierce evenings playing board games. “We are very competitive people,” Kelly Malone said. “But Michael and my father are probably two of the most competitive people I’ve ever known.”

Memories of joy, before basketball was a family business. Brendan was just a varsity coach at Power Memorial Academy in Manhattan. Michael was the water boy.

Memories of boiling red faces. Brendan also coached baseball. One day when he was teaching his youngest son to pitch, Michael accidentally let go of the ball when Brendan wasn’t ready. It was a fastball to the head. “My father had a face where you knew when he wasn’t happy,” Michael said — similar to his own, as Kelly points out. “And I ran. I took off.”

Memories of wide eyes filled with wonder. Michael can still see himself taking jump shots in front of a packed Carrier Dome at halftime of a Syracuse-North Carolina game, when his dad was on Jim Boeheim’s staff. “Man, I want to be around this sport,” he decided. “I want to be a coach.”

Memories of uncertainty and parental support. Michael lived with his father and mother in Birmingham, Mich., while he was an unpaid volunteer assistant coach at Oakland University. It was an entry-level job his dad helped him obtain because the Pistons practiced in Oakland’s gym back then. Michael saved up by working side jobs for Foot Locker and a cleaning company that assigned him to various office buildings between midnight and 4 a.m.

Memories of rejection and constructive criticism. When the NBA expanded to Toronto, Brendan was named the Raptors’ head coach. Michael begged his dad to hire him, but Brendan hesitated. “He was living in a hotel,” Michael said. “It was one of those where it’s like, ‘Let’s see how this works out. Let me get set up here, and then we could talk about it.’ And then he got fired after Year 1.” Soon they were back in the same city. Brendan started visiting Michael’s games at Manhattan College to offer advice and critiques. Then Michael broke into the NBA as a coaching associate with the Knicks. He and his dad were finally colleagues.

Memories of awkwardness and forgiveness. When Michael took over in Sacramento, he brought his dad onto the Kings’ staff. The reunion didn’t make it to the regular season. Brendan had been Michael’s teacher for decades, and the role reversal weighed on them both. Brendan was also dealing with health issues. “He came into my office one morning early and told me he was leaving. I said, ‘I got it. I understand,’” Michael said. “… I think it was something that bothered him for years because I think he would beat himself up over it, like he left me. But I understood.”

Memories of peace in unexpected places. A greasy slice of pizza in his hand, and a rare opportunity to watch his own team alongside his father in the Nuggets’ locker room. Eventually, Brendan’s knees gave him a hard time, and he could no longer make the trip to MSG or Barclays Center for his son’s games in New York. He watched the 2023 NBA Finals from home. He was Michael’s first call when the Nuggets won.

One of the texts Michael rediscovered and chose for the eulogy was an unprompted stream of consciousness — the kind of reminiscence that’s played for laughs but leaves behind a feeling more bittersweet, more profound.

As Michael paraphrases it now: These are the things I think about when I think of you. I remember you throwing the baseball in my face. I remember you throwing up in my lap in the front seat of our car. I remember you running on the beach in Long Island and admiring your form. I remember you playing basketball with your brother in the backyard, always getting into a fight. 

Keep on moving

Brendan Malone wasn’t much of a modern technology whiz the last few years of his life, so he often enlisted the help of Maureen or Kelly, who lives nearby.

One of the things he’d ask Kelly to pull up on the internet or television for him was video of his son’s postgame news conferences. “He really loved listening to him,” Kelly said. “I think he got a kick out of it. But he also was just really proud. He really thought (Michael) handled and did a really good job with the media.”