Mike Malone Comments About Nuggets Players

[Roy H.]

Mike Malone is one of my favorite coaches in the league.  In fact, if I was hiring anybody, I might take him.  He's one of the best at massaging superstar egos -- Boogie was a huge fan, as was Lebron -- while also developing young guys.

Here are his comments about the Nuggets last night:

"I felt we quit tonight, which is something you never want to see," Malone said. "So I guess for Game 3, I'm just going to try to find guys that will at least go out there and leave it all on the line. I may have a hard time coming up with five guys that fill that, but these two games, these second halves have really been disappointing, and that's an understatement."

"I saw one team that wanted to be here, that played with a purpose and urgency, and one team that did not want to be here and played with no urgency," Malone said. "And that's why we got our ass kicked. ... We had a lot of guys play really bad tonight. And then we allowed the impact of not making the shot to affect the other end, and it was really -- this was just an embarrassing performance all the way around, top to bottom."

"That was probably the only silver lining to a really rough night all the way around, was Will Barton, who hasn't played in over seven weeks, in his first game goes out there, gives you 10 and three ... and he hated me when I took him out because he had reached his minute restriction, I understand that," Malone said. "I just told our players it's embarrassing that a guy that hasn't been able to play for seven weeks was out there leaving it all on the line, and I don't think anybody else did."


"This was an embarrassing performance from myself all the way through the last player," Malone said. "We're walking out of here with our heads held down, rightfully so. And there's a reason that their crowd is yelling 'Suns in 4!' and they're calling for a sweep. Because if we play like this back in Denver, this is going to be a really quick series."

"Literally, I saw guys say, 'Hey, I'm not making shots tonight. I'm just going to walk around and mope. And my body language is going to be poor,'" Malone said. "And I felt that was the five guys on the court, that was the 12 guys on the sideline. We had no juice, no energy, no passion, no fight, no urgency, no grit, whatever adjective you want to use, we did not have it.

"And you can't use, 'Hey, we're going home for Game 3,' as something you can rely upon. We have a great crowd, but if we play like this, they're going to boo us off the court, and rightfully so."

The Nuggets faded down the stretch for the second game in a row.  Apparently there were some fingers pointed in the locker room after the game, while other players defended their effort (including Jokic).

How do Celtics fans see this?  Danny and Wyc received some criticism around the trade deadline for labeling the team as not being contenders.  Is this how a coach should publicly react after a tough loss, or not?

[Donoghus]

I really don't have much of a problem of a coach publicly calling out his team in order to light a fire under their butts.

They're grown professionals.  Public or privately, they should be able to handle it.

[PhoSita]

I think this sort of thing really depends on the kind of team you have.

Do you know that you have the kind of team that will understand that you're not trying to foist the blame on them in order to avoid criticism for yourself?  Do they respond to this as coming from a person who believes in them trying to motivate them?

Or do they take it as a personal slight from somebody who is trying to protect himself?

How will the star players on the team respond?  Will they reinforce this message with the guys lower in the hierarchy, taking responsibility and then asking teammates to do the same?  Or will the star players grumble about it and commiserate with the other guys about how the coach is a jerk?