Despite a debut season that ended in disaster, Nuggets coach David Adelman still has the support of the front office.
“I have full faith in Coach Adelman,” team president and KSE vice chairman Josh Kroenke said Friday at Ball Arena. “I think he coached a hell of a season, all things considered.”
Kroenke defended Adelman when pressed during a news conference about Denver’s decision to retain him for a second season. The Nuggets were eliminated by Minnesota in the first round of the NBA playoffs, marking the first time since 2022 that they haven’t advanced to a second-round series and bringing a sour end to Adelman’s first season as an NBA head coach.
“This isn’t an organization that makes changes like we made last year lightly,” Kroenke said, referring to the 2025 firing of Michael Malone. “We don’t take those decisions lightly. So I think the quote from myself last year was that we needed to reinvent ourselves, but not reinvent the wheel. And I think we did that in a lot of ways. I want to give credit to, one, DA, and then (the front office) for pressing a lot of the right buttons last summer to put ourselves in a new kind of (situation to) turn the page without fully breaking apart a true championship team.”
Adelman, who turns 45 next week, was a Nuggets assistant under Malone from 2017-25. He took over as interim head coach last April, with three games left in the regular season, and led the Nuggets to the second round of the NBA Playoffs, where they came within one win of upsetting the eventual champion Oklahoma City Thunder. With the locker room’s endorsement, Adelman was able to shed the “interim” tag.
His first full year at the helm was defined by injury instability. He used 28 different starting lineups in the regular season. He navigated a month without three-time MVP Nikola Jokic, the longest absence of his 11-year career, going 10-6 without the superstar center. And he shepherded the team into the playoffs on a 12-game win streak. The Nuggets finished with a 54-28 record, good enough for the No. 3 seed in the Western Conference.
But they crashed and burned in the first round, losing in six games to their archrivals. By the end of the series, the Timberwolves were missing star guard Anthony Edwards and starting two-guard Donte DiVincenzo.
Jokic stuck up for Adelman after the season-ending loss, asserting that the outcome wasn’t his fault. Jamal Murray also praised the first-year coach in the aftermath of a disappointing Game 6.
“While we’re very proud that we won 54 games, I’m most proud of that stretch (in January), the way that the coaching staff was without Nikola,” Kroenke said. “I think when Nikola is on your roster, you should be winning 50 games probably. So that’s a great accomplishment in most NBA circles, but for us, I think that’s where we expect to be. And we expect to be even higher. I thought that if this group was healthy, that this could be a 60-, 65-win team.”
