Personally, I think he got fired because he was unable to motivate the team to keep playing hard despite the bad officiating. For whatever reason his motivational techniques which had worked in the previous two seasons were now being tuned out. It also appears to me that the more immediate cause came after the Detroit game when, in the midst of a losing streak, rather than saying "this is on me" Coach Brown tried to call Fox out publicly in order to motivate him to take more ownership of the team and Fox did the exact opposite. This put the front office in a position where they felt they had to choose one or the other.
But if you want to trace this all back to bad officiating, I wouldn't argue with you. Winning breeds good chemistry and losing has the opposite effect. Expectations are high for this team because of the job Mike Brown did in that 2022-2023 season. As a coach in any major sports league you're expected to show improvement year to year so in a way he's also guilty of accelerating his own demise. I do think the team overall was showing signs of improvement this season with the notable exception of the end of game execution but whether the blame for that lies more on the players, the coach, or the officials is an eye of the beholder thing and clearly we all have our own biases about each.
But if you want to trace this all back to bad officiating, I wouldn't argue with you. Winning breeds good chemistry and losing has the opposite effect. Expectations are high for this team because of the job Mike Brown did in that 2022-2023 season. As a coach in any major sports league you're expected to show improvement year to year so in a way he's also guilty of accelerating his own demise. I do think the team overall was showing signs of improvement this season with the notable exception of the end of game execution but whether the blame for that lies more on the players, the coach, or the officials is an eye of the beholder thing and clearly we all have our own biases about each.
I don't think this is Brown's fault in any way, but something should have been done to meet with the NBA and get officials to ref us fairly, especially in home games where you have to assume a baked in home court edge of sorts. Who knows what anyone did behind the scenes but we all saw Brown's laptop presser. That didn't do us any favors. If you go out of your way to humiliate game officials they aren't going to respond in kind.
Beyond that, really seems like the practice schedule didn't help. Seems like he may have run hard practices and added practices as punishment after a loss (really I question why they were running an AM practice before a flight when he got fired). And the favoring of slumping/ineffective players while benching young players, not playing Sasha, etc. We sort of look stupid for letting Neemi go though I'd argue he didn't have much role on what the team was trying to do, basically letting him walk for McGee and then having him contribute in the NBA Finals and win a ring with the Celtics certainly makes our FO look bad.
Detroit game was final straw and that really was on the players. Fox obviously on the penultimate play (and lazy heave on the final play) but the whole team quit and the fact nobody has done more than shrug since the firing while praising Doug has certainly been telling.