Nuggets Journal: NBA should embrace authentic stars like Anthony Edwards, not fine them

Michael Malone’s inner monologue might be too cartoonishly profane for him to share on live television.

“I was, man, walking off the court at halftime — you should hear some of the conversations I have with myself,” he said Wednesday after Denver allowed 71 points in the first half of an eventual 139-120 win over the Hawks.

And if there’s anything this NBA season has taught players and coaches about talking to the media, it’s that speaking your mind too bluntly comes with a price tag. Timberwolves guard Anthony Edwards has been fined three times in the last month for using profanity during postgame interviews, the bill rising each time to reach a total of $200,000.

When Malone made it to the locker room, he seemingly wasn’t any more filtered in what he said aloud to his players.

“Coach gave us a very enthusiastic, fun talk at halftime,” Nuggets center DeAndre Jordan said after the win over Atlanta.

The gist? “This is embarrassing,” as Malone put it.

The specifics? You may have to defer to your imagination.

I’ve thought a lot about Edwards’ recent tab with the league. It has nothing to do with my day-to-day work on the Nuggets beat, in theory. But then again, it kind of does.

Edwards is an increasingly famous player who just led his team to a breakthrough appearance in the Western Conference Finals; who was marketed as a face of the league during the slate of Christmas games last week; whose appeal is his personality and candor just as much as it is his certified bucket-getting ability. He is must-see television in every sense of the phrase, as much as Nuggets fans might hate to admit it.

And last I checked, the NBA is in the middle of a TV ratings crisis.

I’m on the record as not giving a … hoot about ratings. But it seems to me that a 23-year-old superstar as cocky and straightforward as Edwards is exactly what the NBA needs, now that LeBron James and Steph Curry are nearing retirement. Is the league helping or hurting itself by training that superstar from a young age to repress his natural parlance?

Furthermore, what message does it send other players, especially those paid a smaller salary, when they see the fines incurred by Edwards merely for profanity?

I worry it erodes players’ sincerity and slowly leads to a more guarded, cliché-inclined population of athletes. So, yes, I do selfishly worry this affects my work by extension.

Professional athletes already tend to not enjoy dealing with the media. Constantly fearing financial punishment just for talking extemporaneously with us is another reason for them to detest the obligation. That’s all Edwards is doing when he swears. He’s being himself. It’s not for the cameras. Last spring in Denver, I approached him to ask a follow-up question about something he’d said previously about his admiration for Jamal Murray. He had already finished his postgame media scrum that night, but he graciously gave me a brief one-on-one interview, during which he used multiple expletives.

I don’t mind writing around those, as long as the quote is substantive. “If you can find me somebody that don’t think Jamal Murray is one of the best (expletive) guards in the league, then they’re crazy,” he told me. I think you can probably figure out what he actually said.

If you don’t want to take my word for it, listen to longtime Timberwolves reporter Jon Krawczynski of The Athletic, who tweeted after the third fine: “I honestly believe Ant can’t help himself with the cursing. He’s not trying to sound tough. He’s not openly defiant. He just gets rolling and can’t stop it.”

The league doesn’t publicly police players and coaches for every single swear word in every single interview. (That would be impossible to keep up with, especially accounting for the trend of athletes producing their own podcasts.) If someone drops an innocuous curse word while talking to a beat writer and it appears in an article, that’s generally not getting flagged — although Howard Beck reported for Sports Illustrated in 2022 that the NBA was also issuing other fines and warnings behind the scenes, and that former Nuggets center DeMarcus Cousins was privately “put on notice” for using multiple profanities in an interview with Andscape.

Regardless of whether fines correspond with TV cameras, it’s often all the same to players. The media is the media. An interview is an interview. The message that it’s better to filter yourself is going to get across, whether there’s an ESPN hot mic or just a couple of audio-recording devices present. (While we’re on that, I should point out that cable television seems to be getting more wishy-washy in terms of regulating profanity these days. If it’s no big deal to NBA broadcast partner ESPN when Pat McAfee brings sailor-mouthed guests on his show, then why should the NBA deem it a breach of decorum if a player swears on the same network?)

This isn’t a new topic, and it boils down to the question of where to draw the line. The NBA is making it abundantly clear that Edwards is crossing one this season. He’s an excessive curser, no doubt. But so are lots of people. If you want a product to be more authentic and more appetizing, pearl-clutching isn’t a good way to accomplish that in 2025. There are more important lines to worry about drawing.

Malone is rather famously witty with the media, and he can be equally fiery. Just last weekend, he criticized the Sacramento Kings — his former employer — for firing coach Mike Brown, and for doing it over the phone. Earlier this season, he gave one of the most honest quotes of the year after Denver’s terrible defensive performance against the Knicks: “(Expletive) that. We’re not flushing (the loss). You don’t flush when you get embarrassed.”