Michael Malone on Nuggets’ loss to Knicks: “We’re not getting carried away”

The more points the Nuggets give up, the redder Michael Malone tends to get.

So it’s no wonder he had an emotional fever following the highest-scoring regulation game by any Nuggets opponent in his 10-year coaching tenure.

“(Screw) it. We don’t flush,” he said Monday after sitting down to a fiery postgame press conference. “You don’t blush when you’re embarrassed. You don’t flush when you gave up 145 points.”

This was the exact type of loss Malone detests the most. Denver’s aesthetically ugly 102-87 dud against Oklahoma City on opening night? No need to panic, insisted the 53-year-old coach, calm in his diagnosis of the team’s ineffectiveness. How about a 135-122 win over Miami in early November that extended a winning streak to four? “Right now, we’re winning with our offense,” he said that night, and he didn’t mean it as a compliment.

With a 145-118 loss to the Knicks, the Nuggets (9-7) dropped to 5-4 in the Ball Arena this season and 6-7 in their last 13 home games dating back to their second-round playoff series against Minnesota. During their 2022–2023 championship season – playoffs included – they lost a total of eight home games.

“Sixteen games to go and we’re talking effort,” Malone said as the Knicks could be heard celebrating on the other side of the wall behind him in the visitors’ locker room. “We talk about toughness. We talk about physicality. … Regardless of who’s in, who’s out, who do we want to be as a team? So yeah. Leadership would be great. Toughness would be great. The physicality would be great. Playing like you actually care would be great. We didn’t do that tonight.”

Malone specifically called out the starting lineup, asking Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray to be vocal leaders while reiterating that his team was “embarrassed” by the Knicks. He called out the Nuggets’ transition defense and referred to them as a “one-way run team.” He called for collective action.

“We’re just fooling ourselves,” Malone said. “Just kidding ourselves. Yeah, they’re a good team. But if that’s the effort we’re going to give, we’re not going to be even close to being a playoff team.”

“We didn’t show up tonight,” Jokic acknowledged.

After 16 games, Denver is eighth in offense, 17th in defense and 13th in net rating — but 29th in first-half net rating. The loss to New York moved the Nuggets into a tie with Phoenix for seventh place in the hotly contested Western Conference.

Murray felt the Knicks played like a team coming off a loss — they fell 121-106 to Utah on Saturday — while the Nuggets didn’t play hard enough on the heels of a win over the Lakers, also last Saturday, that thrust Malone into only position as the winningest coach in franchise history.