Can we just admit Davion is an example of taking the best player available theory to its absurd extreme?
Remember at the time we drafted Davion we had both Fox and Haliburton. If you go best player available that player has to have some chance of being better. Being better than two potential all NBA players was unlikely. Davion never got the chance to develop.
taking Davion in that spot was simply a horrible horrible draft pick.
I'm still going to disagree with this on the principle that we can't analyze picks and judge them as good or bad based on what we know
now. That's a whole other thing (retrospect) which belongs in a separate category -- and even then it's too early to state anything definitively. The only fair way to go about analyzing decision-making is to look at what was known information at the time that the decision was made and what the plausible expected outcomes would be.
At the time we were a team
badly in need of plus defenders at every position and Monte drafted two players who were elite defenders in college: Davion Mitchell in the first round and Neemias Queta in the second round. Monte did draft a third PG at 9th overall on a team that already had Fox and Haliburton -- that part is worth questioning -- but less than a year later he had traded Haliburton for a big man to balance the roster and Mitchell was not only entrenched as Fox's backup, some media personnel in Sacramento were calling for Mitchell to replace Fox as the starter prior to the Mike Brown hire.
Everything that has happened
since then seems to be pointing to a Sacramento exit for Mitchell. Mike Brown immediately embraced Fox as his franchise player and Fox upped his performance on both ends of the floor to meet that challenge. Monk was brought in on a low-risk 2 year deal as a bench scorer and he proved that he deserves more minutes and more time with the ball in his hands. Huerter's effectiveness as a shooter vanished over the summer and as a result Coach Brown has pushed him to the bench cutting into Mitchell's playing time even more.
The part of this narrative that I disagree with though begins in that Golden State series last year when the Kings got off to a 2-0 series lead largely due to their surprising defensive intensity of which Davion Mitchell played a huge part. Then "The Stomp" happened, Domas was targeted for cheap shots under the basket for the rest of the series, Fox tried to play hurt, Mike Brown went away from what had been working, fell in love with 3pt shooting, and stopped calling on Mitchell entirely and (yada, yada, yada) here we are.
I wish we could just go back in time to Game 3 of that GS series and try the last 5 games of that series over again but without caving into GS' gameplan of trying to win in a shootout against two of the best shooters in NBA history. Something about the way that series ended seems to have broken something special with the Beam Team which hasn't really been fully repaired. The personality of this year's team is what's off -- we're way too boom or bust. We're way too committed to shooting ourselves in and out of leads. I think the benching of Davion has played a bigger role in that change than most realize. Mitchell's defense isn't about gambling for steals -- he plays a game of attrition, wearing guys down with relentless ball pressure. It's not nearly as effective when only deployed for 5-10 minutes per game. If he's going to be deployed effectively, he needs to be on the floor long enough for opposing guards to get worn down by his ball pressure. He needs to play alongside Monk and Fox in stretches and he needs to be on the floor in close games.
