NBA coaches react with dismay over Michael Malone's firing, 'the unfortunate part of the business'

These are the coaches who won NBA championships in the last six years: Joe Mazzulla with Boston, Michael Malone with Denver, Steve Kerr with Golden State, Mike Budenholzer with Milwaukee, Frank Vogel with the Los Angeles Lakers and Nick Nurse with Toronto.

Mazzulla is still with Boston. Kerr is still with Golden State.

Everybody else got fired. They packed up their ring and left.

Malone became the latest name on that list Tuesday, when the Denver Nuggets — the 2023 NBA champions — fired him with three games left in the season, an unprecedented move for a postseason-bound team. And around the league, in the hours that followed, coaches reacted in basically the same stunned, surprised manners.

The Nuggets enter Wednesday holding the fifth spot in the Western Conference playoff chase.

“Just disappointment,” New York coach Tom Thibodeau said. "It’s the unfortunate part of the business. I’ve known Michael for decades. ... Michael just did a phenomenal job there.”

Championships no longer guarantee job security. Same goes for individual awards. Mike Brown was the unanimous coach of the year in 2023; he got fired by Sacramento earlier this year. Phoenix's Monty Williams and Memphis' Taylor Jenkins were first and second in the coach of the year voting in 2022; they've both been fired now as well.

“I wake up every day saying this could be my last day,” Mazzulla said. “You have to have that type of perspective because it gives you gratitude and it keeps you hungry. You have to have a healthy balance if you want this for as long as you can. At the same time, you’re very much replaceable because that’s just how it works. Every day I remind myself of my own mortality.”

Indiana coach Rick Carlisle knows there's not really any such thing as true job security for coaches. But he didn't see the likes of Brown, Jenkins and Malone being let go this season.

“If anyone would’ve told me that any of these three guys would get let go during the season this year, I would’ve been shocked. ... It's disappointing,” said Carlisle, who doubles as president of the National Basketball Coaches Association. “It’s kind of numbing to be honest. But teams have the ability to do what they want and coaches have contracts. But these were head-scratchers.”

Jenkins was fired late last month with nine games left in Memphis' season. Now Malone is out, with three games left in Denver's season. Before this season, there had been one other instance in NBA history of a team changing coaches with less than 10 games left in a postseason-bound year — Larry Brown leaving New Jersey with six games left in 1982-83.

It's now happened twice in the last two weeks.

“Between Taylor and between a guy like Mike Malone, they’ve done such a great job in their careers of building an identity,” Charlotte coach Charles Lee said. “I have a ton of respect for both guys."

More than half of the current NBA coaches — 17 of the 30 — have been in their jobs for less than three years. And in the WNBA, eight of the current 13 coaches (in fairness, one is an expansion team) have had their job for less than one year; seven of the 13 have a career record of 0-0 going into this season, after simply massive amounts of turnover following last season.

“That’s a sobering reality of this profession,” Miami coach Erik Spoelstra said earlier this season when told he has the second-longest current tenure in the NBA behind only San Antonio's Gregg Popovich.

Malone's firing was the 302nd coaching change in the NBA since Popovich became coach in San Antonio in 1996. That means, on average, the other 29 teams in the league have all had more than 10 coaching changes in the Popovich era.

Milwaukee coach Doc Rivers — who has coached five different clubs — said Tuesday that he's still fighting for what he thinks he's owed on his contract from Philadelphia, which fired him two years ago. And he was livid over what happened to both Jenkins and Malone.

“It’s always, ‘Whose fault?’ and the first guy that gets blamed is the coach,” Rivers said. “It’s tough. We sign on for it. There’s a lot of other guys that will sign up for it as well. That doesn’t make it fair, and that doesn’t make it right. What happened in Memphis in my opinion was wrong. What happened today was wrong."

Malone was the fourth-longest tenured coach in the NBA right now behind Popovich, Spoelstra and Kerr.

And it is puzzling to coaches: four of the last six championship-winning coaches, five of the last seven winners of the Coach of the Year award and seven of the last 11 coaches to take a team to the NBA Finals all have something in common.

They all got fired.

“In situations like this ... you look and as a coach you understand the job that we’ve signed up for," Orlando coach Jamahl Mosley said. "And that’s very apparent. We know what comes with the territory.”

Los Angeles Clippers coach Tyronn Lue — who won a title with Cleveland in 2016 and eventually got fired from there, too — half-seriously said coaches might want to stop winning awards.

“You see the trick now — don’t win coach of the year, don’t win a championship, because you’re going to get fired in two years. … The criteria for getting hired and fired, I don’t know what it is anymore,” Lue said.

And Kerr was even more succinct. Coaches are making more than ever, he noted, but billionaire owners have no problem paying off those contracts if they want to make a change.

“Doesn’t seem right, but this is the business we’re in,” Kerr said. "We’re all going to suffer a similar fate at some point. That’s kind of the way it is.”

This story has been corrected to show Budenholzer's title was with Milwaukee against Phoenix.

AP Basketball Writer Brian Mahoney in New York and AP Sports Writers Steve Megargee in Milwaukee, Greg Beacham in Inglewood, California and David Brandt in Phoenix contributed to this report.

AP NBA: https://apnews.com/hub/nba

Indiana Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle reacts to being called for a technical foul as his team plays the Los Angeles Lakers during the first half of an NBA basketball game in Indianapolis, Wednesday, March 26, 2025. (AP Photo/AJ Mast)

Denver Nuggets head coach Michael Malone, left, argues for a call with referee John Goble (10) in the first half of an NBA basketball game against the Utah Jazz, Friday, March 28, 2025, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

States will share $10 billion for rural health care next year in a program that aims to offset the Trump administration's massive budget cuts to rural hospitals, federal officials announced Monday.

But while every state applied for money from the Rural Health Transformation Program, it won't be distributed equally. And critics worry that the funding might be pulled back if a state's policies don't match up with the administration's.

Officials said the average award for 2026 is $200 million, and the fund puts a total of $50 billion into rural health programs over five years. States propose how to spend their awards, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services assigns project officers to support each state, said agency administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz.

“This fund was crafted as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill, signed only six months ago now into law, in order to push states to be creative," Oz said in a call with reporters Monday.

Under the program, half of the money is equally distributed to each state. The other half is allocated based on a formula developed by CMS that considered rural population size, the financial health of a state’s medical facilities and health outcomes for a state’s population.

The formula also ties $12 billion of the five-year funding to whether states are implementing health policies prioritized by the Trump administration's “Make America Healthy Again” initiative. Examples include requiring nutrition education for health care providers, having schools participate in the Presidential Fitness Test or banning the use of SNAP benefits for so-called junk foods, Oz said.

Several Republican-led states — including Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas — have already adopted rules banning the purchase of foods like candy and soda with SNAP benefits.

The money that the states get will be recalculated annually, Oz said, allowing the administration to “claw back” funds if, for example, state leaders don't pass promised policies. Oz said the clawbacks are not punishments, but leverage governors can use to push policies by pointing to the potential loss of millions.

“I've already heard governors express that sentiment that this is not a threat, that this is actually an empowering element of the One Big Beautiful Bill," he said.

Carrie Cochran-McClain, chief policy officer with the National Rural Health Association, said she’s heard from a number of Democratic-led states that refused to include such restrictions on SNAP benefits even though it could hurt their chance to get more money from the fund.

“It’s not where their state leadership is,” she said.

Oz and other federal officials have touted the program as a 50% increase in Medicaid investments in rural health care. Rep. Don Bacon, a Republican from Nebraska who has been critical of many of the administration’s policies but voted for the budget bill that slashed Medicaid, pointed to the fund when recently questioned about how the cuts would hurt rural hospitals.

“That’s why we added a $50 billion rural hospital fund, to help any hospital that’s struggling,” Bacon said. “This money is meant to keep hospitals afloat.”

But experts say it won't nearly offset the losses that struggling rural hospitals will face from the federal spending law's $1.2 trillion cut from the federal budget over the next decade, primarily from Medicaid. Millions of people are also expected to lose Medicaid benefits.

Estimates suggest rural hospitals could lose around $137 billion over the next decade because of the budget measure. As many as 300 rural hospitals were at risk for closure because of the GOP’s spending package, according to an analysis by The Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“When you put that up against the $50 billion for the Rural Health Transformation Fund, you know — that math does not add up,” Cochran-McClain said.

She also said there's no guarantee that the funding will go to rural hospitals in need. For example, she noted, one state’s application included a proposal for healthier, locally sourced school lunch options in rural areas.

And even though innovation is a goal of the program, Cochran-McClain said it's tough for rural hospitals to innovate when they were struggling to break even before Congress’ Medicaid cuts.

“We talk to rural providers every day that say, ‘I would really love to do x, y, z, but I’m concerned about, you know, meeting payroll at the end of the month,’” she said. “So when you’re in that kind of crisis mode, it is, I would argue, almost impossible to do true innovation.”

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

FILE - Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, speaks during an event about drug prices with President Donald Trump, Thursday, Nov. 6, 2025, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)