David Adelman’s staff of assistant coaches will look a lot different in the 2025-26 season for the Denver Nuggets. After Adelman finished out the season as the interim head coach with Michael Malone’s assistant staff, the team has opted to look in a different direction for the upcoming season and will not be renewing the contracts of four different assistants.

Sources: Denver Nuggets are not renewing contracts of assistant coaches Ryan Saunders, Popeye Jones, Charles Klask, and Stephen Graham. They played integral role in securing 2023 NBA championship. Contracts expire at end of month. pic.twitter.com/cXIJtyFDDQ

— Chris Haynes (@ChrisBHaynes) May 30, 2025

Ryan Saunders, Popeye Jones, Charles Klask and Stephen Graham will not be back on the Nuggets bench next season. None of them are essentially getting ‘fired’ as their contracts are all expiring this offseason. All four were members of the 2023 coaching staff that won the championship, and played key roles on that squad.

Saunders was formerly the head coach of the Minnesota Timberwolves from 2019 to 2021 after being an assistant in the organization for five years, but was fired midway through the 2021 season as he had led the team to just a 7-24 record at the time. He was out of the coaching cycle for a year until Michael Malone and the Nuggets gave him a call in 2022 to come be on the championship-winning staff.

Jones has had ties to the Nuggets organization throughout the entire century, as he was a player with the team in the 1999-2000 season. The forward only played in 40 games and averaged just over eight minutes per game in his one season there. After 11 seasons in coaching for various franchises, he made his way to Denver in 2021.

Klask has been on the Nuggets’ staff all the way since the 2018 season, and served as the team’s head coach in the 2021 NBA Summer League. The Nuggets finished 2-3 that summer down in Las Vegas, good for 18th place in the league. He started as a scout for the Detroit Pistons way back in 2001, and spent all but one season with the Pistons up until his move to Denver in 2018.

Graham is the longest tenured of the four coaches being let go. The player development coach first got to Denver ahead of the 2016-17 season, Jamal Murray’s rookie season. He has played a vital role in building up some of the home grown talent that Denver has drafted over the years with names such as Christian Braun.

Nuggets President Josh Kroenke recently said that the team doesn’t need a full organizational reset, but rather a small step back to assess things before gearing up for another run at the title in the 2025-26 season. These moves allow new head coach David Adelman to hire his own staff, as these guy were all technically Malone’s assistants.

There were some question marks surrounding the decision by Kroenke to hire a head coach before a general manager, as that role is still vacant for the Nuggets, but Kroenke’s move gives Adelman enough of a window to have a true coaching search for his own assistant staff.

“One of the reasons why we wanted to make the decision now and move forward with [Adelman] as our coach is to give him the ability to build the staff he really wanted,” Kroenke said in a press conference last week.

With the old assistants out of the building, Adelman now has his window to curate the staff that he believes will bring a championship back to the Mile High City.