More than a month after their season ended and more than two months after firing general manager Calvin Booth, the Nuggets have finally restocked their front office.
Ben Tenzer has been appointed as Denver’s executive vice president of basketball operations, multiple league sources told The Denver Post on Monday. The Nuggets are also hiring Iowa Wolves general manager Jon Wallace to take over as executive vice president of player personnel.
The duo will collaborate to oversee Denver’s basketball ops on a day-to-day basis, reporting to team president and KSE vice chairman Josh Kroenke. Tenzer finished the 2024-25 season as the team’s interim general manager after the Nuggets fired Booth with three games remaining in the regular season this April, along with head coach Michael Malone.
Now two longtime members of the organization have earned promotions. New head coach David Adelman was an assistant under Malone since 2017. Tenzer first worked for the Nuggets as a student intern during the 2005-06 season, while he was a junior at the University of Colorado. He left the team in 2009 to attend Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, then returned full-time as director of team operations in 2013, under then-GM Tim Connelly.
When Connelly left Denver for Minnesota in 2022, he took Wallace with him. The former Georgetown star guard and burgeoning NBA executive had spent three years in the Nuggets’ front office, most recently as a scouting coordinator. Now he’s returning to Denver to collaborate with a fellow disciple of Connelly’s tenure.
A former Basketball Without Borders instructor and Summer League operations coordinator, Tenzer was most recently the general manager of the Grand Rapids Gold, Denver’s own G League affiliate team. He has long been a salary cap and CBA expert for the front office, spanning multiple regimes. This is his first NBA general manager job.
He joins a short list of active NBA general managers and presidents of basketball operations with backgrounds as a G League GM: Sean Marks (Brooklyn), Mike Gansey (Cleveland), Elton Brand (Philadelphia), Trajan Langdon (Detroit) and Anthony Parker (Orlando).
“Ben and I have been spending a lot of time together, talking about each individual player, how we think we can improve them as individuals and within the context of the team,” Josh Kroenke said in late May, early in the search for Booth’s replacement. “Ben has a lot of great ideas of how we can improve the front office, both internally and externally. And I’m also soliciting a lot of opinions outside.”
Tenzer and Wallace are tasked with maneuvering the Nuggets out of a corner. Their payroll is bogged down by high-dollar contracts that render it difficult to improve roster depth, especially under the constraints of a new NBA collective bargaining agreement that took effect on July 1, 2023 — three weeks after Denver won its first championship.
Since then, the Nuggets have been eliminated in the second round of the playoffs two consecutive years, both times in a Game 7. Their most significant roster casualties have been the losses of Bruce Brown and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope in free agency. Still, they fielded the seventh-most expensive roster in the league last season, and they’re projected to have the fifth-most expensive in 2025-26 after a max contract extension takes effect for Jamal Murray.
Tenzer will have the taxpayer mid-level exception at his disposal this offseason, allowing him to sign a free agent at a salary of up to $5.7 million. Other than that, he’s limited to veteran minimum contracts. Denver is the only team in the NBA without a pick in the upcoming draft, which begins on June 25.
Three roster spots are vacant as his tenure begins — those filled last season by DeAndre Jordan, Vlatko Cancar and Russell Westbrook, who is declining a player option. Among Tenzer’s first decisions will be whether to re-sign any of those players or bring in newcomers.
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