Tim Connelly often says that he never envisioned becoming a general manager. He scoffs at the idea that someone like him is referred to as the president of anything. Yet six years after the Nuggets plucked the then 36-year-old Connelly from New Orleans to spearhead their front office, the Baltimore, Maryland native had the chance to return home and run his second basketball operations department.
But Connelly turned down the opportunity to head up the Washington Wizards’ front office and opted to remain as the Nuggets president of basketball operations in a decision that became official Monday morning.
There were countless reasons for Connelly to bolt to the Wizards. Washington gave Connelly his start in the NBA and many close to the Nuggets’ lead executive pondered that the chance to run the Wizards was the only post that he would leave Denver for at this point in his career. When Connelly was a junior at Catholic University in Washington D.C. he wrote letters to East Coast NBA teams asking for a job and the Wizards were the lone franchise to get back to him. He joined Washington in 1996 as an intern and worked under the leadership of Wes Unseld, Michael Jordan and Ernie Grunfeld while eventually rising to Wizards director of player personnel.
Connelly still holds immense pride for the region and his Mid-Atlantic spirit pours out whenever he discusses his Baltimore roots. His wife is from the D.C. area too and much of Connelly’s family still resides there. He also has young children.
Washington boasts five-star amenities that at times make Denver look like a Spring Hill Suites. The Wizards have their own G League team which plays in their $65 million practice facility and Washington reportedly gave Connelly a tour of its high-priced compound over the weekend. (Denver for comparison is one of just two NBA franchises without a G League affiliate and has an outdated second-floor practice gym.) The money in Washington was reportedly good as well but you never got the sense that heading back to D.C. was about the benjamins. For Connelly, it would have been about going back where it all started.
But a return to Washington would have also meant an incredible amount of heavy lifting. The Wizards are in salary cap hell with more than $170 million owed to John Wall over the next four season and more than half of their roster is set to enter free agency this summer. Washington is also stuck in the same mid-conference malaise that the Nuggets found themselves in when Connelly took over in 2013. An out of the box thinker who famously recruited former Broncos star Brandon Marshall to Paul Millsap’s free-agency pitch in 2017 so the linebacker could depict to Millsap what winning a championship in Denver was like, Connelly was one of the best men in the league for the job and it was no surprise that the Wizards targeted him. His patient and process-oriented approach is what will be needed to get Washington back on track.
The Nuggets’ enticing future was too difficult to leave behind. Connelly, after all, had just executed the same multi-year, drawn-out rebuild in Denver that he would have had to carry out in Washington. With the Nuggets, Connelly, the architect of the 54-win, Western Conference Semifinal team which was built on the same qualities that he brought to Denver, gets to see his plan through.
Thanks in a large part to their president of basketball operations, the Nuggets already exude the workmanlike and self-motivated culture that from most accounts is absent in Washington. The Nuggets believe that a lot of their success this season was because of their unselfish character and it’s no surprise that at the top, Connelly is always one to credit his staff first and himself second for Denver’s achievements. The Nuggets’ president of basketball operations’ humility, like how he would try to brush off the constant praise he was showered with this season in what turned out to be an Executive of the Year-worthy campaign, is reflective throughout every corner of the Nuggets locker room where after two rough seasons to begin his Denver tenure Connelly effectively hit a reset button and placed a priority on stocking his organization with players who could help foster a self-motivating workplace environment and perhaps exhibited a few of his own characteristics in themselves.
“It’s something we identified when we were going through some rough stretches,” Connelly told BSN Denver earlier this season. “The best way to build was with really good people and the kind of people that were emblematic of the approach we wanted to take.”
The culture shift was a key tenant of Denver’s rebuild under Connelly which has transformed the Nuggets into a model organization when it comes to their team and player chemistry. National reporters from around the country paraded through Denver over the last several months and remarked how the Nuggets are one of, if not the most, connected groups in the league. Denver’s locker room now masquerades as a college lounge where players on the second-youngest roster debate hot topics around the NBA. On weekends during the season, Nuggets player will congregate at each other’s houses for football watch parties.
The tone set within NBA franchises starts at the top, and Connelly’s nature and hard-working mindset trickled down to Denver’s roster, locker room and practice court.
Keeping Connelly is also a big win for Nuggets president and governor Josh Kroenke who has now stopped two franchises — Milwaukee in 2017 who nearly hired Nuggets general manager Arturas Karnisovas and now Washington — from nabbing his two top basketball executives. Loyalty, which in many ways has vanished from most aspects of the NBA, still seems to exist within Pepsi Center and was evident throughout the Wizards’ courtship of Connelly as well. Connelly hopes that Washington’s current interim president of basketball operations Tommy Sheppard, who he worked with in D.C., gets elevated to the Wizards’ full-time role, league sources say.
The Nuggets’ young core of talent in place, which Connelly has his fingerprints all over, would have also been difficult to leave behind. Denver has Nikola Jokic and Gary Harris under contract for the next few seasons but also has difficult decisions to make — because of Connelly’s shrewd drafting — when it comes to how much money to hand point guard and franchise cornerstone Jamal Murray, who’s eligible for a rookie extension this summer. Malik Beasley and Juancho Hernangomez, who like Murray are both under contract for next season and can be extended this offseason, could get paid too. Paul Millsap, who Connelly was instrumental in bringing for Denver in 2017, has a $30 million team option for the 2019-20 season that the Nuggets must decide on by June 29. The common sentiment around the team throughout this last year was that Millsap will be back one way or another.
Keeping Connelly is a monumental day in Nuggets history. In 2013 after a 57-win season, the Toronto Raptors poached Masai Ujiri to run their front office in what on the surface seemed like a move that reeked of the Wizards’ pursuit of Connelly. But the circumstances were different. Connelly’s connection to the Baltimore and D.C. area and his history with Washington meant that his departure would have been different. It wouldn’t have set Denver’s franchise back like Ujiri’s departure did either. But even though the organization could have turned to a more than capable executive in Arturas Karnisovas, who’s been Denver’s No. 2 for the last several years if Connelly had left, his departure still would have stung. Continuity, one of the organizational building blocks that Connelly has preached throughout his tenure which has been evident from the consistency within Denver’s locker room and helped the Nuggets climb the Western Conference hierarchy this season, would have been tested.
“Five years without the playoffs. That’s unfair for this Denver market,” Connelly told BSN Denver at media day last fall, seven months before the Nuggets locked in the second seed in the West after a 54-win season, which is tied for the second-most wins in Denver’s NBA franchise history.
Connelly took the Nuggets from basketball purgatory to the fringes of contention. Fortunately for Denver, the key pillars that he built this version of the Nuggets on, like continuity and selflessness, are here to stay. In Washington, he would have had to build them from the ground up.
Just how far can those franchise tenets take Denver? Connelly is sticking around to find out.
