Michael Malone on Coaching, Program Building: 'Changing the Culture'

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — North Carolina’s 13-day-long coaching search reached a conclusion Monday afternoon, with sources confirming UNC’s decision to hire Michael Malone as its next head coach.

The UNC job will mark the 2023 NBA champion’s first head coaching opportunity at the collegiate level, having previously spent time as an assistant at Oakland, Providence and Manhattan in the 1990s.

Malone appeared on the school’s in-house Carolina Insider production in October to speak about what it takes to build a winning team, foreshadowing the news that would follow a little less than six months later…

Coaching Philosophy 

Michael Malone: “I’ve been in the NBA for close to 25 years. I grew up in a gym. My father was a high school coach, college coach, NBA coach, and he taught me many, many years ago that the best coaches are teachers. And you teach the why.

“And one thing I learned along the way in the NBA is also the fact that players don’t really care how much you know till they know how much you care…

“Yes, our goal in Denver was to win a world championship, but that wasn’t what I talked about when we opened up training camp. My biggest goal as a coach was, can we find a way every single day to get better? 

“If you’re in the weight room lifting, you have to get better. If it’s player development, if it’s practice, if it’s film, whatever it may be, you have to find a way, individually and collectively, find a way to get better. 

“And when you do that throughout the course of the season, then at the end of the year, you’re going to put yourself in a really good position, because it’s so easy for everybody to say, ‘We want to win the ACC.’ But are you doing what you’re supposed to do every single day, or did you cut corners in practice? Did you cut corners in the weight room? Then you’re just talking empty words.”

Building A Culture 

Malone: “Culture is a word that is just obviously used over and over and over again. And you could walk into a high school gym, a college gym, a pro gym, and you’ll see all these quotes on the wall, or all these big, fancy words on the wall. And I laugh because most of the time those words are all hollow. They look great, they sound great, but it’s not lived everyday. They’re hollow words…

“And when I got the job in Denver in 2015, Tim Connelly was the GM at the time, and he’s the one that brought me to Josh Kroenke and he vouched for me to get the job. And I told them, ‘Listen, year one, yeah, we want to win games, but year one is all about changing the culture and creating a new identity.’ And one of the best ways to change culture is by changing people.

“You’ve got to get the right people in place. Our culture was built on three things: work, being selfless and trusting each other. And we wanted to get people, not just players, on my staff and throughout the building, that could embody that every single day and buy into it, and if you didn’t buy into that, well, then you weren’t a Nugget. That’s what we identified. 

“Those are the people that we want to be around every day. Because if you are self motivated and have a work ethic, if you are selfless where, ‘Hey, it’s not about me, it’s about us, we over me,’ and you’re willing to trust not only the coaches, but trust each other, we would have a chance to do something special.”

The Influence of European Basketball in America 

Malone: “This game is truly a global game and is being played at a high level all across the globe. And now it’s not just guys going to the NBA from Europe. You look at the current UNC roster and you have a guy from Montenegro, you have a guy from Croatia, you have Henri (Veesaar) who transferred from Arizona, who’s also from Europe.

“So what the one thing I would say is that you realize that these guys have been working on their craft and being taught at a high level since they’ve been young. Their skill level is what really kind of jumps off the table — big, small doesn’t matter — passing, shooting, footwork, understanding how the game is played…

“There are certain guys that you may have to explain each read, and other guys, you put them in a system and they understand how to take advantage within that system, because it’s innate. They’ve kind of grown that. And a guy like Luka (Bogavac) who’s got so much upside — his dad’s a coach over in Montenegro, and so I think the Europeans do such a great job at an early age of getting guys in the game and not just playing the game.”