It's hard for me to put any of this current struggle on Monte. What's he supposed to do when all our shooters are massively slumping? You build the team that, I don't know, are going to hit shots pretty close to their career levels. And it's not like we can just forget the start of the year and then 3 of our best players all get hurt for a stretch and now we're all out of wack trying to reintegrate them into the offense.
The two things I put on Brown are 1. Not enough Keon and 2. The 3pt defense remains in the gutter. Those are two things we have direct control over and it took 20 games to even address one of them.
There's also the mental hurdle of overcoming the Sacramento Kings whistle. Which, I will admit, is exaggerated to a certain extent by our bias as a fanbase (2002 Western Conference Finals PTSD for those of us who remember it and the same type of confirmation bias that all fans of a particular team are susceptible to). But there is a fair amount of smoke to the fire that Sacramento is just treated different by officials relative to other teams. Kevin Huerter commented on it during his first month on the Kings. I don't know if DeMar has spoken to it, but his reactions during certain games suggest that he is aware of it. The Kings have lost a handful of winnable games already due to suspect officiating and that's the difference between riding high at 12-6 in the 4 seed right now and 8-10 with a constant stream of
"I told you so's" filtering in from the usual naysayers.
Like most Kings seasons this one started out with high expectations, a lot of energy from the entire roster, and early buzz about All-Star spots for our top players. But after 4 weeks the doubts have started to creep in, the shoulders have started to slouch, and there's a palpable frustration starting to spread across the faces of our main rotation players. It's the frustration of
"when we do everything right, are these officials even going to let us win?"