Breaking news coming out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina this afternoon as the North Carolina Tar Heels are expected to hire long time NBA coach Michael Malone as their next men’s basketball head coach. ESPN’s Pete Thamel was the first to break the news, and many fans on X seem to feel skeptical about Malone’s hiring. While some fans seem on the fence, this hiring makes a lot of sense given how UNC basketball has performed over the last couple of seasons and the success Michael Malone has had at the professional level.
Malone won a NBA Championship with the Denver Nuggets in the 2022-23 season, the franchise’s first ever championship, while going 471-327 in ten seasons as the Nuggets head coach. Malone won almost 60% of his games as the Nuggets head coach and won a total of 510 NBA games as a head coach.
This will be coach Malone’s first head coaching job since being fired from the Nuggets on April 8th, 2025 when there were just three games left in the regular season. Denver’s front office stated he had lost the locker room earlier in the season and the team’s late season slump prompted the team to terminate Malone as head coach as well as general manager Calvin Booth.
The hiring of coach Malone stems from the lack of excitement and consistency the Tar Heels have produced under now former head coach Hubert Davis, who was fired following the Tar Heels first round exit in the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament to VCU. In Davis’ five seasons at the helm of the team, he managed one National Championship appearance in 2022, where he lost to Bill Self and the Kansas Jayhawks 72-69 but along with his first round exit this year, he also had a first round exit in 2025.
While Davis had not found much success in the tournament recently, he did manage to go 125-54 as the head coach of North Carolina, equating to a .698 win percentage.
UNC athletics seem to be taking a completely new approach towards hiring head coaches for their two major sports programs, football and basketball, after hiring legendary NFL head coach Bill Belichick last season and now hiring former NBA championship coach Michael Malone. So far Belichick has not had much success at the collegiate level, finishing his first season in Chapel Hill with a 4-8 record but UNC has never been known for their football, which makes me think Michael Malone could make more of an instant impact in his first season given his coaching pedigree as well as the history and tradition of North Carolina basketball.
