More than two months have passed since the Nuggets fired their head coach and general manager in a shocking plot twist to end their 2024-25 regular season.
More than three weeks have passed since their season ended in Oklahoma City with handshakes and hugs, mementos of an admirable lemons-to-lemonade playoff run. Two job openings remained, but one of them was a foregone conclusion. David Adelman was officially appointed head coach four days after Denver’s Game 7 loss.
But the Nuggets still have not replaced Calvin Booth all these weeks later, and Josh Kroenke’s hiring process has been eerily quiet — especially juxtaposed with the recent coaching search conducted by the leak-happy Phoenix Suns.
So, where do things stand as Denver nears the NBA draft without a head of basketball operations? In the interest of transparency, here’s what we know, what we don’t know, and what it could mean.
What we’re hearing
Team and league sources indicated to The Denver Post on Monday that the Nuggets were not expected to have a full-time general manager in place this week. These situations can always change fast — you never want to rule anything out completely — but this one seems to be moving particularly slowly.
The first round of the draft takes place June 25. That date is widely anticipated to be the epicenter of transaction season for many teams around the league, spurred by a bubbling trade market and a relatively dormant free-agent class. And in any case, the end of June and beginning of July tend to be the busiest portion of the NBA offseason, regardless of the landscape of a given year.
The Kroenke family understands this. It’s been characterized by one source as a goal to have a hire in place by then.
But the calendar will not necessarily dictate the timeline, either. The Nuggets are currently the only team without a pick in this year’s draft. Interim general manager Ben Tenzer and the team’s current scouting group have been working on pre-draft prep since Booth was fired (and before then), sources said, in the unlikely scenario that Denver does want to get involved on draft night. The team’s tradeable assets are limited.
What we don’t know
About that Phoenix coaching search: Updates were leaked to NBA news-breakers on a national scale seemingly every day leading up to Jordan Ott’s hiring. The final nine candidates. The final seven. The final three.
Denver’s GM search has noticeably been the polar opposite. Nothing especially concrete has been reported here or elsewhere. If any top candidates have emerged yet aside from Tenzer, they remain a mystery — not just to The Post, but to sources around the league.
Multiple of these league sources expressed confusion about the lack of known interviewees and questioned the drawn-out nature of the search, noting that Denver fired Booth during the regular season, not after the playoffs. Lines of communication from agents and other teams to the Nuggets are relatively unclear as things stand.
What could it mean?
We’re reduced to speculation here, which always warrants caution. But it’s worth mentioning that when up-and-coming front office executives interview for top jobs, their agents usually leak it. Being desirable is good publicity for anyone trying to climb a career ladder.
So, what can be concluded from all of this?
It’s possible that the Nuggets have simply done an outstanding job of staying tight-lipped and demanding their candidates to do the same — though there isn’t any advantage to that, really. The Kroenkes aren’t competing against other ownership groups to hire a head of basketball ops right now, and the optics are weird at the moment entirely because of the information desert.
It’s possible that Denver is singularly targeting a more distinguished “big fish” executive who isn’t as incentivized to leak his candidacy while considering an offer. But that doesn’t exactly add up either. If the Nuggets hope to make an outside hire, the breadcrumbs point to more of a rising star. During his end-of-season news conference, Josh Kroenke bounced around the idea of “hiring a firm that perhaps might be able to give me a list of some of the brightest upcoming minds in the league.” The Kroenkes also have a reputation around the NBA for preferring not to spend big on executives, compounded by the fact that former coach Michael Malone is owed a massive buyout for the next two years.
It’s possible that Denver’s search is still in its infant stages, that ownership just doesn’t feel desperate to make draft-day moves. That would align with Josh Kroenke’s own assessment of the roster that “a lot of our answers are internal.” But again, it’s been more than two months now.
Or it’s possible that all of this leads to Tenzer, the longtime Nuggets front office staple who has received effusive praise from Kroenke during his interim tenure. The order of operations would justify itself in this outcome: Hiring a coach before a general manager was unorthodox, but Adelman and Tenzer already work together in an organization that insists Malone and Booth were the problem. This seems like the most likely possibility. The only hiccup: Why wait so long to make it official if minds are already made up?
Holes can be poked in any of these interpretations, which is part of why there’s so much uncertainty in general about the silence of the search.
Maybe that will change soon.
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