Nuggets Front Office Realigning As Changes Start Coming More Quickly For Denver

When the Denver Nuggets entered the 2019-20 season, the longstanding prime directive shaping the franchise was a strong commitment to maintaining the continuity of both the team’s roster and staff, with the philosophical and practical emphasis on patience having been elevated to something of an organizational mantra in the maxim: “We don’t skip steps.”

But as the ensuing months unfolded, shifts and changes in the organization’s landscape have in actuality made a more striking impact in defining the Nuggets’ current season and future direction than the continuity which has been foundational to the team’s approach.

In the latest example of this, Denver’s front office has seen a realignment which, according to multiple sources, has resulted in the team’s decision to promote assistant general manager of three years Calvin Booth to the general manager position left open by the recent departure of longtime Nuggets executive Arturas Karnisovas for a more eminent job with the Chicago Bulls.

The report was first broken last week by Shams Charania of The Athletic:

Earlier this month, when Karnisovas accepted the Bulls’ offer to head up Chicago’s front office as their new vice president of basketball operations, he left open the general manager position that  he’d held in Denver for nearly three years, and which capped off a seven-year tenure with the team.

The fact that Karnisovas, who had been right hand man to president of basketball operations Tim Connelly since joining the Nuggets in 2013, had emerged as Chicago’s top choice, was hardly surprising.

He had, after all, long been on the radar screen of other NBA organizations as a potential front office target. As far back as four years ago in early 2016, Karnisovas was named as one of four candidates on the Brooklyn Nets’ radar for their open GM position, even after having just received, along with Connelly and the rest of Denver’s front office staff, a new multi-year contract extension with the Nuggets just a week prior (in a move widely interpreted as intending to stave off such poaching attempts).

Perhaps more notably, given the prominence which would come with building a team around star players Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons, Karnisovas was among those sought in 2018 by the Philadelphia 76ers as a candidate for their head GM position, though he ultimately declined to take the interview which they had scheduled with him for the job. That decision came a year after the Nuggets had promoted Karnisovas to GM and Connelly to POBO, another move presumably made in part to keep opposing teams’ headhunters at bay.

 If Connelly has been the face of Denver’s front office since replacing Masai Ujiri and taking the helm in 2013, Karnisovas has operated more as the man behind the curtain, though by nearly all accounts as more of an equal partner to Connelly than a second fiddle.

Connelly had consistently made Karnisovas’ importance to the organization expressly clear during the time the pair worked together. “The [Nuggets’] collective approach, a lot of it is his thinking, his doing,” he told the Denver Post in 2018. “So much of the processes we have in place and how we approach what’s important to us is kind of a brainchild of his.”

The significant vacuum at GM left by Karnisovas’ departure will now be filled by Booth, though he will bring a markedly different background and skill set to bear in the position.

Karnisovas, a Lithuanian, is legendary in his homeland among many reasons for playing on “The Other Dream Team” in the 1992 Olympics, helping earn an unlikely bronze medal for his newly independent nation.  With deep roots and connections in Europe, his fort é is international scouting, and he played an instrumental role in identifying and bringing to Denver the likes of Nikola Jokic, Juancho Hernangomez, Jusuf Nurkic and others.

Booth, a 10-year NBA player who was born and raised in Ohio, was hired for his first front office position in New Orleans as a scout by Tim Connelly. He then went on to work for Minnesota’s front office for four years before rejoining Connelly as assistant GM in Denver in 2017. Booth has taken on a wide variety of responsibilities in his front office work, with both scouting and player development playing central roles.

These front office changes in Denver will take place mostly out of the view of casual Nuggets fans, but they do represent the latest indications that the pace of change within the organization has quickened since the start of the season, despite going into it with continuity front and center.

Many signs had been pointing to the untenability of preserving the same degree of continuity, but the Nuggets failing to reach contract extensions with Malik Beasley and Juancho Hernangomez prior to the deadline last October was a more concrete development, and one which ultimately led to the team’s decision to trade the pair, along with Jarred Vanderbilt, before the February trade deadline. That move marked the most significant release of talent drafted and developed in-house since Denver traded away Jusuf Nurkic in 2017 and Emmanuel Mudiay in 2018.

Another landscape-altering development, albeit a more welcome one, has been the emergence of rookie Michael Porter Jr., who was not necessarily expected to make meaningful contributions this season after missing two years of basketball due to injuries requiring multiple back surgeries. While Porter’s breakout certainly shows promise that he may deliver on the hopes Denver banked on when drafting him, it seems inevitable that it will also create a ripple effect through the roster as minutes for more experience players will have to make way for his unbridled talent to more fully emerge.

And more changes are imminent on the nearby horizon as well. With Paul Millsap, Mason Plumlee and Torrey Craig all becoming unrestricted free agents, and Jerami Grant potentially joining that list if he opts out of his player option for the 2020-21 season, it seems highly unlikely that the Nuggets will be able to retain all four, or perhaps even three of those players, raising a slew of questions about how they will approach the offseason.

Continuity has long been the name of the game for Connelly’s front office and the Nuggets organization, but it was always an approach which cut against the grain of the fluidity of player and personnel movement in the NBA. And as much as they may want to adhere to that approach, forces both internal and external will increasingly be forcing their hand.

The good news for Denver is that their most critical contingent of core players – Jokic, Porter and Jamal Murray – are all under team control for years to come, and promoting Booth from within should help to maintain a high degree of stability within the front office as well. But maintaining continuity as one of the team’s highest priorities is becoming a less viable option. And as I wrote previously for Forbes, that may in some ways actually be a good thing, considering that more ambitious moves may need to be made if the Nuggets are to make the leap to becoming a legitimate title contender.