UNC Going All In On An NBA Veteran: Michael Malone Is Carolina's Next Head Coach
Well, this is a curveball nobody saw coming. North Carolina just hired Michael Malone, the former Denver Nuggets head coach, to take over their basketball program. We're talking about a guy who spent over two decades in the NBA as either a head coach or an assistant, not some proven college guy. But UNC decided to swing for the fences here, and frankly, it's a bold move for a school trying to get back to being elite.
The Nuggets Legend Gets His College Shot
Malone spent the last 10 seasons running the Denver Nuggets, and he left his fingerprints all over that franchise. The man is the all-time winningest coach in Denver history with a 471-327 record, and he took them all the way to an NBA championship in 2023. That's not nothing. The Nuggets fired him last April, and he pivoted to ESPN as an analyst one month later. Now he's getting a chance to prove he can build something special at the college level.
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👉 Claim Your Free $10 at KalshiHow UNC Got Here
The Tar Heels fired Hubert Davis on March 24, right after a brutal NCAA tournament loss to 11th-seeded VCU. UNC blew a 19-point lead in that first-round game, which is the kind of collapse that gets you fired. It was the second straight year Davis saw his team exit early in the tournament. Over five seasons, Davis went 125-54 and actually took UNC to a national championship game in his first year, but they lost to Kansas. After that, the Tar Heels couldn't get past the Sweet 16 for four straight years.
UNC tried hard to land big-name college coaches like Michigan's Dusty May, Arizona's Tommy Lloyd, and Iowa State's T.J. Otzelberger, but all three publicly committed to staying put. So the Tar Heels pivoted and landed Malone instead. At 54 years old, he's inheriting a program desperate to climb back to the mountaintop. UNC's last championship came in 2017 under Roy Williams, and they've been searching ever since. This is Malone's chance to prove the Nuggets championship wasn't just about the roster he had.
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