The front office and coaching staff of the New York Knicks -- from Leon Rose to Gersson Rosas to Tom Thibodeau -- likely felt a chill around 1:27 PM ET on Tuesday afternoon.
It was at that moment that Chris Haynes broke the news that the Denver Nuggets were firing head coach Mike Malone. Minutes later, ESPN's Shams Charania added that the Nuggets were also firing general manager Calvin Booth in a "full clean out" for the organization.
A full cleansing of the team's leadership despite the fact that the Denver Nuggets were 47-32, in fourth place in the Western Conference. Despite having a top-two MVP candidate in Nikola Jokic having arguably his best season. Despite being less than two years removed from winning the first championship in franchise history.
How did the Nuggets get to this point? It likely all goes back to that championship. Just a couple of weeks later, the Nuggets revealed that their approach to team-building and defending their title would be dictated by what everything cost.
They were not able to bring back Bruce Brown. They said goodbye to Jeff Green. They invested in three rookie draft picks, one at the very end of the first round and two in the second round, to add cost-controlled talent. A year later, they let Kentavious Caldwell-Pope walk over money. Their roster got progressively worse as they tried to keep costs low.
That task would have been much simpler if they didn't also miss on most of their signings. They waved goodbye to Bruce Brown but signed Reggie Jackson to replace him; that didn't work, and they spent draft picks to dump him. They signed Dario Saric last summer; he has been out of the rotation for most of the year.
They did play their key players; Michael Porter Jr. and Jamal Murray are on max deals alongside Jokic, and Aaron Gordon signed a long-term contract prior to the season. The Nuggets are trying to keep their total costs down while also paying four players massive contracts. The results have not been great.
Jokic remains amazing. Murray has had flashes. Gordon is solid. Christian Braun has taken a leap. But they also have a clear lack of depth and continue to fall apart when Jokic is off the floor. Even when he plays, the Nuggets have sustained inexplicable losses; the Washington Wizards are 15-61 against the rest of the league and 2-0 against Denver.
The nail in the coffin for Malone and Booth appeared to be an 0-4 stretch this past week as they slumped back into the rest of the Western Conference playoff teams. Owner Josh Kroenke decided he was going to fire them this summer, so he decided to get it over with.
The pressure to win in the NBA has been tripled by a second factor: the need to field a winning team without breaking the bank. Get too expensive five years ago, and your owner merely paid more money. The Kroenkes have Walmart money; they may be tight-fisted with it, but they won't go under if forced to pay an extra $20 or $50 million.
The league has now instituted new rules that inflict team-building penalties on top of the financial ones for teams with large payrolls. Cross a certain threshold, and you cannot make certain types of trades, or sign new players, and eventually you even start to lose draft picks. Teams cannot stay expensive year after year, because it will become impossible to maintain a good team.
This reality doomed the Denver Nuggets and their leadership. They tried to balance cost and production, and because they committed so much moeny to their core players they had to try and field a rotation with second-rounders and inexpensive veterans. Most of those decisions busted, and the result was a team that didn't look good enough to win a championship despite having Nikola Jokic at the center. Thus the house was cleaned.
What does all of this have to do with the New York Knicks? Unfortunately, they appear to be strapped to a train heading at high speeds in the same direction.
The New York Knicks could be making the same mistakes
This past summer the New York Knicks signed OG Anunoby to a five-year, $212.5 million contract with an average annual salary of $42.5 million. He will be under contract until 20289. All-NBA point guard Jalen Brunson signed at a discount, but he is still going to be making an average of $39.1 million for the next four seasons.
The Knicks also traded for Karl-Anthony Towns, who makes an average of $55.1 million and is under contract through 20278. Mikal Bridges has one year left on his bargain deal before needing a significant pay raise. And while Josh Hart is making only $20.2 million per season he is on the books for another three seasons.
For those keeping track at home, that's roughly $180 million per season for those five players, before you even factor in the pay raise coming for Mikal Bridges. The salary cap is expected to be $155 million next season, $170 million the next. The Knicks' salaries will grow with the cap, but they are still looking at a team that will be above the second tax apron very soon.
The Knicks are also down most of their draft picks moving forward and don't have a great path to adding talent. That might be livable if they were a title contender, but they are not. They are routinely blasted by the Cleveland Cavaliers and Boston Celtics and don't have a viable way to close the gap. This is a team that is really good, really expensive, and on track to fall short again and again in the coming years.
At what point does James Dolan get exasperated? At what point does he decide a new face is required to steer the ship? At what point do the Knicks have to break up their team to stay viable in a second-apron world, and the result is a team that is even worse and doesn't bring Dolan the trophy he desires?
The Denver Nuggets were on top of the world just two years ago, and now they are in chaos. Michael Malone is the only head coach in the NBA that Nikola Jokic has ever known, and he was ousted 22 months after hoisting the championship trophy.
The Knicks play in New York, at Madison Square Garden, surrounded by fans with expectations and a mercurial owner. Will the new CBA allow them to thrive? Or will their own spending decisions lead to a team not good enough to win and too expensive to keep together?
If it's the latter, no one should feel safe in New York -- not Tom Thibodeau, not Leon Rose. The Nuggets may be the first domino to fall, but the new NBA may be knocking over a lot of dominos. It's hard to see the Knicks not being among those scattered to the floor.