The Nuggets fired their coach, college basketball resources matter (to a point), and we finally get around to talking about Bucky McMillan:
1. The Nuggets are playing to win now.
I’m sure we’ll get more at some point on why the Nuggets cleaned house when they did. It’s the NBA, after all. It’s a dramatic league. We don’t always get the full story, but we get a lot of it. So, let me preface what follows with this: IF THERE WASN’T ANY INCIDENT WHICH FORCED THE ISSUE…
If nothing specific forced the issue, firing Michael Malone reads as a short-term decision, not a long-term one. Yes, the long-term piece is there: Clearly, the Nuggets don’t think Malone (or GM Calvin Booth, who won’t be retained) is the guy to get them back into the title-contending caste. But the short-term aspect is what’s so surprising. Yesterday, the Nuggets fired the only coach who’s ever won them a title. They did it one week before the postseason.
The Nuggets are tied for fourth in the Western Conference, but they’re also tied for seventh, which is Play-In Tournament territory. Third is in reach. So is eighth. Michael Malone’s Nuggets would have probably survived the play-in game or games. They probably wouldn’t have even made those games in the first place, favored in at least two of their last three. But two years after winning a championship, nothing would be satisfying about losing in the conference semifinals.
Malone’s floor was pretty high. Floors are good for business. But ceilings are what’s important to the diehard fan. Proceeding with a Malone-built operation minus Malone increases the chances the Nuggets win a championship this year, with Nikola Jokić only 30 years old. It increases the chances the Nuggets do something catastrophic, like lose out, but it increases that championship probability. If this feels confusing, here’s what I mean:
Say you’re playing a card game against 47 other people, and the card game works like this: Every player is dealt one card. Aces are high, and suits are ranked: Spades are best, then Hearts, then Diamonds, then Clubs. Again, there are 48 players, so 48 cards are dealt.
Say you’re dealt the King of Hearts. There are five cards higher than yours, and with a 52-card deck, only four of those could possibly remain un-dealt. You know you can’t win. You’ve got a high floor—the worst you could finish is sixth place in a 48-person competition—but your ceiling is limited. Most likely, you’re not finishing better than fifth.
Say the dealer then gives you and you alone a choice: You can trade your card for a randomly drawn card from the un-dealt deck.
If the only thing you care about is winning or losing the game—in other words, if second place isn’t any better than 48th to you—you should make the trade. Yes, things will probably get worse. But the random situation you accept by turning in your King of Hearts gives you a better chance of winning you the game. There’s at least a chance you’ll pull an ace.
Do the Nuggets think this will work, and that David Adelman will unlock something as interim head coach he couldn’t unlock as Malone’s top assistant? They probably don’t outright expect this. It’s possible, though, that it does work. After 798 games, the Nuggets knew what they were getting from Malone. They want to win a championship this year, and they knew he wasn’t going to win it. If that’s the only thing that matters, then this is a no-risk decision.
2. College basketball’s resource gap is gigantic.
On Monday night, after Florida cut down the nets, a friend reminded me that Todd Golden went 23–22 as a WCC head coach. At San Francisco, he won 23 of 45 conference games. At Florida, he’s a national champion.
Golden’s story isn’t exactly about resources. The stat says more about San Francisco’s place within the WCC when Golden became head coach than it says about NIL budgets and facilities and the power of a brand. But it does say something about resources: Golden ended his USF career strong. His 2022 team earned an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament and finished the year ranked 23rd in kenpom. The team also went 10–6 in a mid-major conference. That was Golden’s third year. In his third year at Florida, he was able to build a national champion.
I don’t know a single thing about San Francisco’s NIL budget. But I can tell you this, since I learned it recently and it put the balance of power in a different perspective: NIL budgets at even some well-known mid-major schools are currently in the five-figure range. I’m not talking about Dayton or the top of the Mountain West. But not far below that territory, you find successful programs whose entire team, combined, is making less than six figures in NIL deals.
This was told to me in the context of explaining mid-major stars’ decisions when they jump to a power conference bench. In those kinds of cases, passing up on the amount offered would be a quixotic “bet on oneself.” Power conference programs are paying their rosters one hundred times as much as some decently respected mid-majors. I’m not in the camp that says that’s automatically bad—Fairleigh Dickinson beat Purdue only two years ago—but it’s a good thing to know at times when the transfer portal breaks your heart.
3. Bucky McMillan is a weird hire for Texas A&M.
Didn’t get a chance to talk about this until today. For more carousel thoughts, reference here and here and here.
I like Bucky McMillan a lot. I like watching his teams play, his story is cool, and I think highly of him as a coach. I think this is true for a lot of college basketball fans cursorily familiar with the SoCon. But just because it’s easy to like a guy doesn’t make Texas A&M hiring him make sense.
In our “head coach score,” an imprecise metric comparing a coach’s performance to that of others at the same school, McMillan does well. He’s behind Buzz Williams, but he’s fractions of a point ahead of Ryan Odom, whom I think everyone would agree is a great college basketball coach. McMillan’s done it for longer and is therefore more proven than Ross Hodge, Bryan Hodgson, or Phil Martelli Jr. But in the same amount of time as Mike Magpayo had at UC Riverside, McMillan made less of an improvement upon Samford’s historic baseline than Magpayo did upon UCR’s. The point isn’t that McMillan’s done a bad job. The point is that others have done just as good a job.
This isn’t a problem about the hire. Just because comparable candidates are probably out there doesn’t mean McMillan’s the wrong one of the dozen to pick. The more concerning aspect is that McMillan’s teams thrived off playing a very specific brand of basketball. He found shooters, made them better shooters, played a pace which generated a lot of second chances, and let the chips fall from there where they may. The sale to A&M is that with SEC resources (and the SEC is the best conference in college basketball—we’re no longer skeptics; it’s on its way to being great), McMillan will find shooters who can already play defense, or that he’ll find shooters who are good enough athletes to, with the right defensive coordinator, dominate the defensive end. Shooters are more abundant now than they’ve ever been. But building a competitive team isn’t that simple. If it was, wouldn’t every SEC team already be doing this? If McMillan’s scheme was really that superior, wouldn’t he have produced one kenpom top-50 offense by now?
I know Samford is Samford, and I don’t disagree that McMillan’s impressive. I also know A&M was cornered by timing, and that not a ton of coaches might want to work at A&M. With such a scheme-based coach, though, I’d like to see the success at a higher mid-major level before buying the guy in the SEC. Or, I’d like to see more success within the SoCon. McMillan only won that conference once.
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