David Adelman’s tone-deaf postgame somehow worse than his Game 4 coaching

David Adelman jumped onto the podium Saturday with his team one loss from elimination, his bench having been outscored by 60 points, his three-time MVP ejected with a second left and his offense having just turned in one of its worst performances of the season at the worst possible time.

His response? Pick a fight with the room. It’s basically the only fight, beside his MVP’s temper tantrum minutes earlier, that the Denver Nuggets showed all night.

“You don’t think we were competitive tonight?” Adelman shot back at the very first question, before it had even been finished getting asked. “Yeah, I thought we were very competitive tonight. And again, I think it’s hilarious that the narrative is offense doesn’t matter.”

Hilarious. That’s the word the head coach of a team down 3-1 in the second round chose to describe the way his team is being covered after losing a Game 4 in which the Minnesota Timberwolves were missing Anthony Edwards for the entire second half and Donte DiVincenzo after 79 seconds of basketball.

If you thought “he just missed” was bad after Game 3, buckle up.

Denver lost Game 4 112-96, on a night when the box score reads like the sick, embarrassing joke that the game was. Ayo Dosunmu went 13-of-17 with 5-of-5 from three and 12-of-12 from the line for 43 points off the bench in 42 minutes. Minnesota’s bench outscored Denver’s bench 76 to 16. The Nuggets shot 18.8% from the field in the fourth quarter and got outscored 30-18 in the period.

But sure. Hilarious narrative.

Adelman’s whole bit Saturday was that the loss was, again, just a shooting problem. Same playbook as Game 3. Same deflection. A few days later.

“Our two best players are six for 24 in the second half,” he said. “I would say the majority of those shots were good shots. You know, their actions. We run for Jamal and Nikola and then on the flip side of that, unfortunately, a lot of guys just didn’t have good nights.”

It’s just the second time this season the Nuggets have shot under 40% for a game. The other time? Game 3. The pattern goes back even further, to Game 2, when Jokic and Murray combined to go 2-of-12 in the fourth quarter of that loss. Jokic missed all six of his shots in the fourth on Saturday with the season on the line.

Despite Adelman identifying the shooting the issue and something that will solve itself, his framing leaves out the small errors, the lack of hustle and utter predictability. Minnesota out-rebounded Denver 50-38 with 16 offensive rebounds, and the Wolves piled up 54 points in the paint. They made their bones off transition scoring, taking advantage of the Nuggets not getting back on the rare times they made a basket and the nine times the team turned the ball over in the second half.

It’s not just a shot-making issue, at least not tonight. Not for the third time in a row. It’s a how-the-game-is-being-played issue. It’s the head coach’s job to recognize his team is battering its head against a wall and keeps getting bloodied.

But here are the lines that should cost Adelman his job before he can get on the flight home.

“I’m gonna say this again, they scored two meaningless baskets at the end at 108 points in this game. You know, if we hold the team to 108 in the NBA, you should have a great chance to win the game,” he said. “The competitive spirit question bothers me, because I thought we were extremely competitive…. I thought our guys played their asses off.”

The Nuggets gave up 112 to a team without its best player for 30 minutes. They got blown out by 16. And the head coach is at the podium subtracting “meaningless” baskets to manufacture a moral victory. You can’t make this up.

If they were so meaningless, how come Jokic was upset enough about them to get ejected from the game?

That was just one glaring example of Adelman not watching the same game as everyone else. Asked about possible suspensions for players leaving the bench during the late-game scuffle, the coach said: “No, we watched the film. You know, obviously I didn’t like what McDaniels did. The game is over… No suspensions for us. I didn’t see anything out of line. Obviously, they’ll have the Hawkeye view of the whole thing.”

That was after watching the film — the same video that shows Aaron Gordon, who was not in the game, going all the way across the halfcourt line.

Asked specifically about how Minnesota turned a halftime deficit into a runaway win without two of their three best offensive players, Adelman pointed to turnovers — but couldn’t help spinning even those.

“Only one turnover in the first half again,” he said. “If you said 10 turnovers for 15 points against, I would take it every game, but this one in particular, to your point, to only have one in the first half, end up with 10. Unacceptable stat in the second half.”

Translation: the stat is fine, except when it isn’t, and the second half was bad, but the box score is good. Did he watch the game or just read the stat sheet? His smack-talk back at Jaden McDaniels after Game 2 would suggest he’s looking at a spreadsheet before he’s looking at the floor in front of him.

Adelman didn’t just double or triple down — that defensiveness was his whole take on the game.

“I don’t care what you write, I really don’t, I know what the team feels,” Adelman said. “I know what they felt before the game. The narrative doesn’t matter to me…. I don’t know if you guys are going to come in here and talk negatively about my team when they played that hard.”

Now compare that with the guy on the other bench. Chris Finch lost two starters in the first half — Edwards never returned, DiVincenzo barely got off the bus — and his postgame was a clinic. He praised Mike Conley as a “culture driver.” He praised Naz Reid’s activity. He gave a heartfelt tribute to DiVincenzo, calling him “the heart and soul of so many things that we do.” He credited his assistants by name for in-game adjustments. He expressed how “completely devastating” the DiVincenzo injury was on a personal level.

Finch coached. Then he led. Then he showed up to the podium and modeled what running a team looks like.

Adelman, by contrast, when asked what honest conversations his team needed to have, the answer was, “that we got to win game five.”

You better, because you’re 48 minutes away from something much more meaningful than Jake Shapiro writing about firing you — Stan Kroenke actually firing you.

It gets worse when you put Adelman next to his own MVP. Jokic owned it.

“I’m not shooting the ball really well, especially from the three,” he said. On his passing: “I had couple pass not time on target… I didn’t do a good job with that today.”

Just like Jamal Murray showed accountability after Game 3, Jokic did Saturday. But the Nuggets will need more than just his words. They will need his play to improve.

There’s an argument that whatever Jokic has been up to mentally — which hasn’t been good — is the bigger problem here. I get it. But I think that’s a failure to understand Denver’s star. If he were every other hoops icon in the NBA, yeah, it always comes back to them individually. But, being raised elsewhere, I do honestly think Jokic looks to the sideline for leadership more than his contemporaries.

More than a decade into his pro career, maybe that’s a failure in itself. But, if one thing has been made plainly obvious this series, it’s that Jokic got much of his productive fire from Michael Malone. Look at the body language. Look at the moments he’s looked to the bench this series and found nothing.

The problem is the Nuggets have been all talk as they fall down 3-1. The problem is they had a four-point lead at halftime against a Wolves team that had just lost two of its best players to injury — and they got run off the floor anyway.

The problem is Denver still doesn’t have a defined adjustment two games into watching Ayo Dosunmu pour in points by the bushel. The Wolves haven’t unveiled some master plan. They’ve been physical, screened well, attacked the paint and let their bench cook, all while letting their four-time Defensive Player of the Year, Rudy Gobert, take Jokic himself. It’s much of the same global philosophy that allowed Minnesota to beat Denver in 2024. The Nuggets still don’t have a counter.

And yet the head coach’s takeaway is that the questions are unfair. Defending his players harder than they defended their own basket.

Maybe Adelman is right that there’s something in this group, that the resilience is there, that Game 5 in Denver flips this back. The Nuggets, after all, are responsible for the only two 3-1 comebacks since 2020. The scar tissue is real. The MVP is the MVP. Murray is at his peak this year.

But responsibility starts at the top. And right now, the man at the top is using his postgame microphone to fight with reporters, dismiss the score and call coverage of his team “hilarious” while his team gets run off the floor yet again.

If this series ends Monday or Thursday, there will be many things that linger. One of them will be that the keys to a championship-tier team were handed to a rookie coach who was way over his skis.

The narrative doesn’t matter to him. Fine. The score should. And it says the days are numbered — for Adelman in this job, and the Nuggets’ championship window.

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