In praise of Michael Malone’s Nuggets Culture

From the opening jump of the 2023 NBA Finals, Denver Nuggets head coach Michael Malone was prepared for anything his Miami Heat counterpart might hurl at his team, and Erik Spoelstra would unfurl anything.

For all the discussion about Spoelstra and Heat Culture through the Eastern Conference finals — and a championship with this eighth-seeded squad would have made a case for the greatest coaching job in league history — we should pause a moment to appreciate the environment Malone is cultivating in Denver.

“They’ve built something that is stable, that’s consistent,” Spoelstra said. “You know what they stand for.”

And now we know where they stand — as NBA champions for the first time in the franchise’s history. Denver defeated the Heat in five games to complete a 16-4 run through the playoffs, second only to the vaunted 2017 Golden State Warriors since the league switched to a best-of-seven series in the first round.

And Malone is far from done. “We want more,” he told the Denver crowd following the title tilt.

Heat president Pat Riley “said something many years ago,” Malone added. “I used to have it up on my board when I was a head coach in Sacramento, and it talked about the evolution in this game and how you go from a nobody to an upstart, and you go from an upstart to a winner and a winner to a contender and a contender to a champion, and the last step is after a champion is to be a dynasty. So, we’re not satisfied.

“We accomplished something this franchise has never done before, but we have a lot of young talented players in that locker room, and I think we just showed through 16 playoff wins what we’re capable of.”

Spoelstra carried his small-ball starting lineup’s success against the Boston Celtics into this series, and Malone punished Miami for it. Given a week’s time to prepare for the Heat, Denver identified Aaron Gordon as an X-factor, since no one but Bam Adebayo could match his athletic force at 6-foot-8, 235 pounds, and the Nuggets mercilessly fed Gordon at the rim against smaller defenders in the opening quarter of Game 1. Four times they went to him, and four times he scored, forcing Spoelstra’s first timeout 5:26 into the series.

Denver never trailed Game 1 after that initial punch, leading by as many as 24 points in a decisive victory, and Spoelstra adjusted to a larger lineup — starting Kevin Love in place of Caleb Martin — for Game 2. The Nuggets took a counterpunch in the first quarter, rode their bench to a 15-pound lead in the second quarter, and then let go of the rope against a team that hits every opponent with a realization it never stops tugging.

When the Heat evened the series, the question was asked: Did they successfully turn Nikola Jokić into a scorer rather than a playmaker? Spoelstra dismissed the notion, and the focus turned to his comments about how that only was the opinion of an “untrained eye,” rather than what his answer revealed about Malone: “That’s not how they play. They have so many…