Don’t tell Kendrick Perkins, but Nikola Jokic might finally have a mole in Mouse Country.
Between trying to get a handle on the idea of NFL “leverage” and wondering if the 2025 Rockies will pull a reverse 2007 and lose out to cap off a historically pathetic season, a little Nuggets news almost slipped under the Grading The Week’s noses a few days ago.
Michael Malone is back, baby.
Oh, not back with the Nuggets. Not back coaching. Back on TV.
ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro announced Tuesday that the former Nuggets coach and the franchise’s all-time leader in regular-season (471) and playoff wins (44) will be joining the network’s “NBA Countdown” show on a regular basis for the 2025-26 season.
Full disclosure: Team GTW has gotten to rub shoulders with Malone a bit over the last six years, and he’s never done us wrong. After a taste of the TV life during ESPN’s coverage of the NBA Playoffs last spring, we’re genuinely curious if he’ll be able to change some of the anti-Joker vibe coming out of the loudest voices paid by the Worldwide Leader in Sports. Perkins, especially. Or will Post-Nuggets Malone get sucked into the usual Disney narratives — LeBron, Boston, LeBron, Luka, LeBron, Steph, LeBron, LeBron and LeBron?
Malone finds regular (for now) ESPN home — A
It’s not surprising to see Malone take to the television side so quickly. Even on bad days, he rarely ducked the cameras in Denver, and almost always had an answer — even if he didn’t always like the question. He explained basketball minutiae patiently, directly, succinctly and at a level fans and reporters could understand — even if some didn’t always like the rationale.
As a true New Yorker, Malone has never been shy about giving his opinion on, well, anything. He was never shy about punching up and pricking ballooned egos. In flyover Denver, his one-liners, especially his trash talk directed at the Lakers, were greatly appreciated. His admonishment of Los Angeles fans to “take that ‘L’ on the way out” in 2018 will live on in the hearts of Front Range fans for decades.
But Malone also found out the hard way during the 2025 Western Conference finals how big a megaphone the Mouse Network gives you nationally.
During the Oklahoma City-Minnesota series, a clash of two heated Denver rivals, Malone said that Thunder star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander “showed why he’s the MVP.”
It was meant as a compliment to the OKC scoring machine, but that’s not how it played back home in Denver.
Coach Malone respected SGA, but while in Denver, he never would’ve ceded that award publicly to anyone but the Joker.
In ’22-23, the year of the Nuggets’ championship, the Joker was the MVP runner-up to Philly’s Joel Embiid, while SGA finished fifth. In ’23-24, the Joker won the MVP award, with SGA finishing second (much to the consternation of Shaquille O’Neal). Last season, SGA flipped the script and pipped Jokic for MVP honors, as the latter finished second.
Yet ’24-’25 was also the Serbian center’s best statistical season of a Hall of Fame career. The 30-year-old big man became only the third player in NBA history to average a triple-double for the year at 29.6 points, 12.7 rebounds and 10.2 assists per game.
As a coach, Malone made a point to always have his players’ backs in front of the media or when in front of a microphone. Especially Jokic, who somehow ran afoul of ESPN’s cadre of king-makers the last five years, despite winning three NBA MVP awards and finishing as runner-up twice.
The GTW crew is not-so-secretly hoping that, even if Malone doesn’t change many hearts on the Joker at the four-letter network, he figures out a path to change a few minds in Bristol, Conn., along the way.