Report: Nuggets expected to bring David Adelman back despite first-round flameout

A little over a year after he was the quick band-aid to save the Denver Nuggets’ season, the team is expected to bring David Adelman back for a second season as head coach.

“Despite chatter that Adelman may already be on the hot seat one year into his tenure, the early sense within the organization is that he’ll return for his second season,” The Denver Post’s Bennett Durando reported. “He led the Nuggets to 54 regular-season wins with 28 different starting lineups before wiping out in the playoffs.”

Adelman, 44, led a brutal Nuggets playoff run that ended in a shocking first-round exit against the Minnesota Timberwolves. His first full season at the helm pushed the Nuggets to 54 wins thanks to a season-closing 12-game win streak, all while dealing with a wild amount of injuries throughout the year.

But the first-round loss — Denver’s earliest playoff exit since 2022 — exposed a coach in over his head against a team that had bounced the Nuggets in 2024 with much of the same blueprint. The Wolves smacked Denver around physically, dominated the paint and got an all-time series from Rudy Gobert and Jaden McDaniels. Adelman never found a counter, and his postgame press conferences only made things worse, with the rookie head coach repeatedly deflecting blame to “shot-making” while picking fights with reporters who pressed him on competitive spirit and adjustments.

Despite the rough finish, Adelman maintained the support of the Nuggets’ two best players. Both Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray went out of their way Thursday night to back their coach.

“He’s amazing,” Murray said. “He’s still figuring it out, and still getting to know people, with all the different adjustments and injuries and managing emotions and all that stuff, because I think it’s a hard job. You’ve got a lot of different personalities. You’ve got to think about game-time decisions, and possessing my position. So it was a great season for me, especially all that we went through. I just wish I could do better for my team tonight.”

Jokic, asked directly whether Adelman would be unfairly criticized for the first-round flameout, defended his coach.

“It’s not his fault that we cannot rebound. It’s not his fault that we cannot catch the ball,” Jokic said. “There is nothing to blame. It was all us.”

Adelman was elevated to the head job last spring after Denver fired Michael Malone, the winningest coach in franchise history and the leader of the Nuggets’ 2023 championship, in a stunning move with three games left in the regular season. Adelman, who had been on Malone’s staff as an assistant since 2017, was given the interim tag. He navigated the Nuggets to a win in a dramatic seven-game first-round series with the Los Angeles Clippers last spring before falling to the eventual champion Oklahoma City Thunder, also in seven games. Ultimately, he had the interim label removed before this season.

There’s no question he earned the full-time job last spring. The case for keeping him another year, despite the playoff stumble, can be made if you, like Adelman, argue the season was “incomplete.”

The Nuggets won a lot of games despite playing little more than a dozen games as a fully healthy bunch. Still, the cracks were always there — defensive lapses, a shaky bench, blown fourth quarters and inconsistent effort. The closing kick masked a team that hadn’t fixed any of its long-running issues. The Timberwolves exposed all of them.

Questions about whether Adelman was the right long-term answer never went away, even as many lauded the Nuggets offseason. The coaching staff was filled not with veterans but with fresh thinkers — most of whom, like Adelman, didn’t have much experience in the roles they were being asked to fill.

They inherited Jokic, Murray and Aaron Gordon, and the expectation that comes with it: contend or bust. A first-round exit was always going to put the chair under heat.

A first-round loss has put the chair on fire — but apparently not hot enough to force a change.

It looks like ownership is buying the incomplete argument Adelman sold. Or worse, for a KSE that will apparently “look at everything,” per The Denver Post, the one option ownership won’t consider is paying three head coaches at once.

We’ll see if Adelman actually survives the weekend. If he does, the Nuggets will turn their attention to the rest of the offseason with their championship window narrowing. Jokic, the three-time MVP, will be entering his age-31 season, with only one ring to show for nearly a decade of dominance.

For now, Adelman gets a second crack at it — all the while Jokic stares down the possibility of joining Moses Malone as the only three-time MVPs to win just a single title.

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