North Carolina wanted a “superstar” as its next coach.
And they appear to have found one in former NBA championship coach Michael Malone.
Malone, who led the Denver Nuggets to the 2023 NBA championship, replaces Hubert Davis, who was fired last month after a second straight NCAA Tournament first-round exit.
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Bridget Malone, Michael’s daughter, is a sophomore on the North Carolina volleyball team, and Michael spent time around the men’s basketball program this past season.
“I’m loving this,” former North Carolina and NBA standout Danny Green said on “Inside the NBA. ”I had Michael Malone as a rookie at Cleveland. He was a great X’s & O’s offensive juggernaut to me, so this is a great hire. I love the situation for him and for us [UNC]. This is the start of something new.”
“Mike will bring all the necessary skills that he has developed over the years to put UNC on track to compete for a national championship,” said legendary former Seton Hall Prep coach Bob Farrell, who coached Malone in high school. “People don’t realize that Michael saw [Nikola] Jokic’s potential years before anyone else.”
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The news was first reported by ESPN.
Between North Carolina football coach Bill Belichick (6 Super Bowls) and Malone, those two coaches have seven major championship rings.
Malone will the fifth new ACC head coach in 2026-27 along with Luke Murray (Boston College), Scott Cross (Georgia Tech), Justin Gainey (NC State) and Gerry McNamara (Syracuse).
North Carolina had been linked to several other big names, including current Chicago Bulls and former Florida coach Billy Donovan and a number of high-profile college coaches like Arizona’s Tommy Lloyd, Michigan’s Dusty May, Iowa State’s TJ Otzelberger and Alabama’s Nate Oats. All of them either signed extensions with their current schools or explicitly said they were not leaving their current schools.
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Malone, 54, is a Queens, N.Y. native and the son of late former NBA coach Brendan Malone. He has a career record of 510-394 with the Nuggets and Sacramento Kings.
Malone has never been a college head coach and last coached in college with Manhattan from 1999-2001.
He spent this past season as an ESPN analyst.
Malone’s family, originally from Queens, N.Y., moved to West Orange, N.J., from Rhode Island in 1986 after his father was given a job as a Knicks assistant coach under Hubie Brown. The younger Malone joined a Seton Hall Prep team that was coming off a state championship, and, with unrealistic expectations about his abilities, believed he should have “been playing more or featured more.”
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Eventually, Bob Farrell pulled the angry young point guard aside and told him, “Malone, you’re shaking the foundations of Seton Hall Prep.”
“We laugh at that now, but back then I’m sure it was not nearly as funny for him,” Malone told me for NJ.com in 2024. “But I have so much respect for Coach Farrell, not just the coach he was, but how he treated us players and how he was disciplined. He pushed me to go from being a young immature kind of a punk to growing up and realizing as a leader of a team, I’ve got to be able to set the tone. And it was very impactful.”
Michael always looked up to his father, who died in 2023 — a driving force behind the Detroit Pistons “Bad Boys” defenses in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. Michael recalls being in the car on recruiting trips when Brendan was a college coach recruiting legendary New York City guards like Dwayne “The Pearl” Washington at Boys and Girls High School, Mark Jackson at Bishop Loughlin and Kenny Smith at Archbishop Molloy.
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“I was going to those games with my father, and I knew this was what I wanted to do,” Malone said. “We shared that passion.”
Now he takes over a true Blue Blood of college basketball, a program with six NCAA championships, and a runner-up finish in 2022 under Davis.
It will be critical for him to hire the right staff, especially with the transfer portal opening Tuesday.
This article was originally published on Forbes.com