{"id":710725,"date":"2026-04-07T09:42:15","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T09:42:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/710725\/"},"modified":"2026-04-07T09:42:15","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T09:42:15","slug":"michael-malone-on-coaching-program-building-changing-the-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/710725\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Malone on Coaching, Program Building: ‘Changing the Culture’"},"content":{"rendered":"

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. \u2014 North Carolina\u2019s 13-day-long coaching search reached a conclusion Monday afternoon, with sources confirming UNC\u2019s decision to hire Michael Malone<\/a><\/strong> as its next head coach.<\/p>\n

The UNC job will mark the 2023 NBA champion\u2019s first head coaching opportunity at the collegiate level, having previously spent time as an assistant at Oakland, Providence and Manhattan in the 1990s.<\/p>\n

Malone appeared on the school\u2019s in-house Carolina Insider production<\/strong><\/a> 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\u2026 <\/p>\n

Coaching Philosophy\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Michael Malone: <\/strong>\u201cI\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd one thing I learned along the way in the NBA is also the fact that players don\u2019t really care how much you know till they know how much you care\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, our\u00a0goal in Denver was to win a world championship, but that wasn\u2019t 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?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re in the weight room lifting, you have to get better. If it\u2019s player development, if it\u2019s practice, if it\u2019s film, whatever it may be, you have to find a way, individually and collectively, find a way to get better.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd when you do that throughout the course of the season, then at the end of the year, you\u2019re going to put yourself in a really good position, because it\u2019s so easy for everybody to say, \u2018We want to win the ACC.\u2019 But are you doing what you\u2019re supposed to do every single day, or did you cut corners in practice? Did you cut corners in the weight room? Then you\u2019re just talking empty words.\u201d<\/p>\n

Building A Culture\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Malone: <\/strong>\u201cCulture 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\u2019ll 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\u2019s not lived everyday. They\u2019re hollow words\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd when I got the job in Denver in 2015, Tim Connelly was the GM at the time, and he\u2019s the one that brought me to Josh Kroenke and he vouched for me to get the job. And I told them, \u2018Listen, year one, yeah, we want to win games, but year one is all about changing the culture and creating a new identity.\u2019 And one of the best ways to change culture is by changing people.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve 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\u2019t buy into that, well, then you weren\u2019t a Nugget. That\u2019s what we identified.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThose 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, \u2018Hey, it\u2019s not about me, it\u2019s about us, we over me,\u2019 and you\u2019re willing to trust not only the coaches, but trust each other, we would have a chance to do something special.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Influence of European Basketball in America\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Malone: <\/strong>\u201cThis game is truly a global game and is being played at a high level all across the globe. And now it\u2019s 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\u2019s also from Europe.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo 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\u2019ve been young. Their skill level is what really kind of jumps off the table \u2014 big, small doesn\u2019t matter \u2014 passing, shooting, footwork, understanding how the game is played\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cThere 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\u2019s innate. They\u2019ve kind of grown that. And a guy like Luka (Bogavac) who\u2019s got so much upside \u2014 his dad\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CHAPEL HILL, N.C. \u2014 North Carolina\u2019s 13-day-long coaching search reached a conclusion Monday afternoon, with sources confirming UNC\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":710726,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[10],"tags":[52488,62,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-710725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-michael-malone","tag-sports","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116362776058518672","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=710725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710725\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/710726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=710725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=710725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=710725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}