NEW YORK — The Denver Nuggets stunned the NBA on Tuesday when they fired head coach Michael Malone and general manager Calvin Booth with mere days remaining in the regular season.

Malone was the league’s fourth-longest-tenured head coach and was less than two years removed from an NBA championship, which the Nuggets won in 2023. Denver sat in fourth place in the Western Conference at the time of his firing and boasts one of the NBA’s best players in three-time MVP Nikola Jokic, though the team had lost four straight and seven of its last 10.

Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla was asked about Malone’s firing before Boston faced the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden.

“There you go,” he replied. “Coaching.”

Mazzulla said Malone’s ouster was another example of the volatility of their profession.

“He was there, what, 10 years there?” Mazzulla said. “Yeah. I mean, that’s a lot. You hope for stuff like that. You hope for situation, stability to be somewhere for as long as you have. When it’s your time, it’s your time. I think you focus more on the fact that he was able to be there for 10 years. Not many coaches get to do that. I think there’s only two left, three left now? Pop (Gregg Popovich), Spo (Erik Spoelstra) and (Steve) Kerr are the only ones that have gone as long as that. You hope for that. But you know that not everybody gets that opportunity.”

Malone — who, like Mazzulla, attended Bishop Hendricken High School in Warwick, R.I. — was the second head coach of a playoff-bound Western Conference team to get the boot in the last two weeks. The Memphis Grizzlies fired their longtime bench boss, Taylor Jenkins, on March 28.

Mazzulla was asked if he ever worries about his message no longer resonating in the Celtics’ locker room.

“Yeah, I mean, to me, I wake up every day and I say I find the balance of (that),” he said. “It’s part of what motivates me, but I wake up every day saying this is going to be my last day. You have to have that type of perspective because it gives you gratitude because it also keeps you hungry. So you just have to have a healthy balance of, you want this for as long as you can. At the same time, you’re replaceable, because that’s just how it works. So every day, I remind myself of my own mortality and I think that’s what kind of keeps me in a better perspective and a gratitude of the opportunity that you have.”

Of the 11 coaches who participated in the last seven NBA Finals, only Mazzulla, Kerr, Spoelstra and Jason Kidd still are with the same teams.