Yes but the premise of my post is that Monte tried to work within the bounds of fair play as the NBA wants to define them and did not tank and now we find ourselves as the worst team in the league while the team which won 17 games and 14 games in the two seasons when the Kings were actually good is now sitting on top of the standings. The point is tanking is a problem because it works and the latest CBA has made it almost impossible to build a team without tanking. The 'almost' is accounting for teams like LA and New York which will always attract top free agents when they have cap space. For Sacramento it may actually be impossible.
I also see you posting this take a lot and I find it painfully reductive. We don't know what would have happened if Kuminga or Wagner had been available for our pick. The lazy response is to assume that since Franz Wagner averaged 24 points per game last season on the Magic that he would have been the same player in the context of our team but to believe that you have to ignore that (1) He took 19 shots per game which he would not have gotten as a #3 in our offense. (2) He shot 29.5% from three last season, so do you really want him shooting that much anyway? (3) His career 3pt % is 32.5 which is worse than De'Aaron Fox so do you really want him shooting that much anyway? (4) There were 10 players who played at least 1000 minutes for the Magic that year and of those 10 players, only KCP and Tristan De Silva had worse individual defensive ratings than Wagner. Maybe he's not the potential savior he is made out to be?
And Kuminga.... well there are already 47 pages of back and forth about him on this message board, sitting there in the Personnel Moves sub-forum like a bad hangover. I like Kuminga, I've been in favor of trading for him and still am. And if we still want him, I'm sure he's available since Atlanta took him on mostly to get something for their Porzingis investment. I don't know that he was the guy which would have made Monte stay the course on Haliburton. That trade seemed to be more about giving Fox the best chance to succeed and most of us presumed Haliburton was the one traded because Fox had no trade value.
What I do know is that Monte inherited a team which had the worst defense in the league that season and he drafted two guys in Davion Mitchell and Neemias Queta who were likely the best defenders available at those spots and signed another the following year (Keon Ellis) as an undrafted free agent who has been damned good in that department too. He saw the problem and was working the solution but this CBA is slanted so far in favor of the players that he couldn't even keep what he built together for more than a year and a half. He had to trade away the 2023 first round pick (as the sweetener for Richaun Holmes' contract) just to create enough room under the cap to sign Sasha Vezenkov and JaVale McGee. And the following year he had to trade away Davion Mitchell to create the cap space to sign DeRozan. We all get to armchair GM without any chance of being proven wrong but I don't know that anyone could have done better given the circumstances.
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