Michael Malone firing and more beg the question: What's up with the NBA lately?

New York Times

08-04-2025

— By John Hollinger, Fred Katz, David Aldridge and Mike Vorkunov
In the past few months, the NBA has seen perhaps the most shocking trade (Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers) in league history, the record-breaking sale of one of its most recognizable franchises (the Boston Celtics) and two respected coaches (Taylor Jenkins and Michael Malone) fired with less than 10 games left in the regular season.
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As the dust settles after the most recent head-scratcher — the Denver Nuggets firing Malone — The Athletic NBA staff got a few writers together to discuss: Are these unusual occurrences part of new trends or just a weird season?
Hollinger: How about 'both?' The Dončić trade, for instance, was almost certainly a once-a-generation thunderclap. That said, there is another trend dragging us toward superstar trades: Midseason is becoming the new offseason. We're used to iconic stars changing teams in late June and early July, not after we get home from the arena on a Saturday night in February.
However, that's not really possible anymore; there is little star movement in free agency thanks to more generous extension rules that keep players under contract. Thus, drafting stars or trading for them is the primary means of acquisition now. Go back and look: Even teams that weren't in the title hunt made significant moves to set up their 2025-26 rosters.
Katz: If we're referencing Dončić-level trades — the type when an organization sends out a 25-year-old, MVP-caliber performer — then no, this won't be a trend. Teams generally prefer to hold onto young, elite talent, especially when the system is rigged in their favor.
The Dallas Mavericks could have offered Dončić more money in his next contract than any other organization. But they chose against that. They could have scoured the league (or at least entered extended negotiations with more than one franchise) to maximize the trade return for him. But they chose against that.
Superstars changing teams isn't new. Trade requests happen. MVPs dart elsewhere in free agency. But giving up great players when they aren't trying to leave and when they are months removed from carrying a team to the NBA Finals will never become the go-to strategy.
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Aldridge: All of this — seismic trades, franchise revaluations (notice how close 'revaluation' is to 'revolution?'), late-season firings — are part of a piece. And that piece is the acceleration of impatience that comes with sports teams increasingly being bought by billionaires and/or billion-dollar corporations. I'm not even talking about the mom-and-pop days, when Bill Davidson or Franklin Mieuli or Abe Pollin owned teams that won championships on shoestring budgets.
A guy like Ed Snider, who became the chair of Comcast Spectacor in Philadelphia, who was a major business and philanthropic player in the city and who was worth more than $2 billion when he died in 2016, could never own the 76ers and Flyers, as he did during different stretches from the 1970s through the early 2000s — or run the day-to-day operations of the NFL's Philadelphia Eagles, as he did in the mid-1960s.
The corporate world has different standards for success and is far less willing to accept sustained non-contending status. The Dončić trade was still a stunner because of its timing and how secret the discussions remained, but we must still come to grips with the fact that the team's new owners did not think it was worth spending a little less than $70 million a season to keep one of the NBA's five or so best players long term. I don't think this is the last time an owner/ownership group is going to make a decision like this about players of Dončić's caliber. From the outside, that seems absurd. On the inside, it will seem … efficient. Or, a logical use of optimization for the most cost-effective outcome. You know, like 3>2.
Vorkunov: The Dončić trade will remain a total black swan event for so many reasons, least of all is that it has gone so poorly so far for the Mavericks that the result may preempt any team that even thinks of something so similarly seismic. But I can see teams continuing to trade players in the next strata of stardom. That isn't unique to this role and place. Different teams can find different evaluations of players and values for them. The most recent collective bargaining agreement may help move things along, too, as it tries to push teams to live in that area between the cap and the first-apron threshold, and a franchise can only fit so many stars on that plane of financial existence.
Hollinger: My answer is the same here. I don't think teams will be firing championship-winning coaches in the final week of the season on the regular, but there's a through line of impulsiveness that connects a lot of these events. Most sports franchise owners are not by nature patient people, and recently, that has been exacerbated by the younger cohort of owners who bought in.
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Orthodoxy is that most in-season coaching changes come early, while there is still time to right the ship. Instead, we've seen two playoff teams evaluate everything else and then move on to the coaching situation. I'm waiting now for another team to one-up the Denver Nuggets and Memphis Grizzlies by changing generals after losing Game 2 in the conference semifinals. (Also: What if the Grizzlies hire Michael Malone and the Nuggets hire Taylor Jenkins this summer?)
Of course, the Malone situation in Denver was complicated by the Nuggets also replacing GM Calvin Booth at the same time. These shocking events always have their unique situational twists. But it's fair to ask if increased impulsiveness and impatience at the top levels of franchise hierarchies were catalyzing ingredients.
Katz: I'll go out on the limb mere hours after Malone's ousting: This could become a trend.
The Jenkins firing may have shocked everyone outside of Memphis, but it's not like the Grizzlies woke up one morning and, without thought, pushed out the man who had led their bench for the previous six seasons. Bad energy was building; the Grizzlies were losing and in the summer of 2024 had paid a seven-figure buyout to hire an assistant coach, Tuomas Iisalo, who is now the interim. Memphis hadn't beaten a winning team in nearly two months. And once management lost faith in this season's team, it figured, why wait?
On one hand, it seemed the Grizzlies threw away their season. They owned the fourth-best record in the Western Conference at the time they fired Jenkins, just as the Nuggets did when they fired Malone. Entering April basketball with a new head coach is a risk.
On the other hand, the Grizzlies didn't believe there was much to throw away. Firing Jenkins when they did gives them a look at Iisalo heading into the offseason. It hands him playoff experience, which could help next year.
I doubt we'll see every organization handle its head-coaching situations this way. People are risk-averse — and lead executives, such as Memphis' Zach Kleiman, need job security to make calls like the one the Grizzlies did. But a postseason-bound team firing a coach with this little time remaining in the regular season is no longer unprecedented, which means other front offices may not be as scared to do it now. And I could see other people justifying firings with the same logic the Grizzlies used.
Aldridge: Maybe the NBA is just catching up to the NHL. Lou Lamoriello, the longtime GM of the New Jersey Devils, Toronto Maple Leafs and New York Islanders, has made a cottage industry out of late-season cashierings of coaches, hasn't he? (Yes, he has!) What's different here isn't a late-season firing, but a late-season firing of very good coaches from very good/borderline great teams. I don't know that we'll see a lot of these going forward; the circumstances that led to Jenkins and Malone getting fired seem unique. I still think most teams will see if their coaches can pull their squads out of whatever perceived nosedives they're in on the eve of postseasons before yanking the plug — if, for no other reason, to save themselves a few hundred thousand dollars they'd otherwise have to spend to bump up the interim coach(es) to the head coach job for the last couple of weeks of the regular season and postseason.
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Vorkunov: This will remain an outlier! Let us not turn two unrelated events into a trend.
There was a reason this happens so infrequently. The upside for these moves are low. The potential for embarrassment is high. It takes a certain kind of general manager or owner to pull a move like this.
What the firings of Jenkins and Malone really reinforce is how little job security winning buys you. Jenkins had a very good run in Memphis, and Malone won a title. But now, three of the last five title-winning head coaches have been fired within two years of winning a ring.
Hollinger: It's a trend until potential buyers get their next 401(k) statement. No, seriously: The thread of impulsiveness above ties into this. Teams are more likely to change hands when the owners aren't locally connected, and we're well past the era when local industrial scions operated a major league franchise on the side for half a century as part of their civic duty. Yes, there are still a few places where something like that is happening (New Orleans and Utah, for instance), but for the most part, NBA ownership is a much different game now. Seeing even a storied franchise like the Boston Celtics go on the market certainly underscores that point.
Katz: The NBA's economy — player salaries, especially — is growing faster than the world's. And a crash of the markets won't help sales of multibillion-dollar businesses. At some point, stars making nine figures annually, which isn't too far away, could scare off potential buyers. But it doesn't seem the league is there yet.
Ratings can trend in the wrong direction, but an 11-year, $76 billion national TV deal, which kicks in next season, provides steady revenue. The hyper-wealthy will seek out teams sometimes as toys as much as moneymakers. Steve Ballmer did not buy the LA Clippers to enrich himself; he bought them to be in the NBA. Yet, the Clippers' franchise valuation has risen well above the $2 billion he originally paid. The demand for teams could grow as the world's economy manufactures more and more billionaires.
The price of an investment matters on only two days: the day you buy it and the day you sell it. And if the latter is continuously higher, buyers will usually emerge, as long as governors can incur the expenses in between.
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Aldridge: As NBA teams increase in value, the potential massive tax implications for ownership families will only get more complicated. So I suspect you'll see more, not fewer, franchises go up for sale in the next few years. If the Grousbecks didn't see a way out that would allow them to keep the Celtics in the family, that does not portend well for less well-heeled and less successful teams. The NBA's tiptoeing around allowing Saudi and/or United Arab Emirates wealth to buy controlling stakes of franchises seems like delaying the inevitable. In many cases, their owners are engaging in sportswashing. But with no limits to the amount of money those owners appear willing to invest in a team or a league, it's just a matter of time before someone crosses the Rubicon and allows a full-fledged international ownership group to buy its way in.
Vorkunov: Umm, hello? Have you not been paying attention to the last few years? OK, I take it back. The Celtics' sale price was so high it even surprised some savvy sports financiers, who had priced it in the $5 billion to $5.5 billion range. Still, that just tells you the bidding war for NBA teams right now. They are a mix of trophy assets and a fast-appreciating multi-billion dollar company uncorrelated to the rest of the market. Experts expect franchise prices to keep going up, though at a slower rate. But that growth hasn't slowed down yet. Eventually, the NBA may run out of super-duper rich folks (technical term: high net worth individuals) who can buy teams, but that's also why they've started allowing private equity and sovereign wealth funds to buy minority stakes. The question is whom will they let into the club to keep those valuations climbing when the people who bought in at strong valuations during the last few years decide they want their exit.
(Top photo of Luka Dončić and Michael Malone: AAron Ontiveroz / MediaNews Group / The Denver Post via Getty Images)