It's been nearly two weeks since the Sacramento Kings fired Mike Brown (the head coach they extended six months before). Yet, no one really knows why it happened.
Some pointed to Brown potentially having a shaky relationship with the team's star point guard, De'Aaron Fox. However, those rumors were quickly shot down. Others said it was the Kings' underwhelming start to the season that led to Brown's demise. But the team never even made a trade to see if the problem was the coach or the roster he inherited.
So, what was it that caused the Kings to fire their most successful coach in the last decade and a half? We likely will never know the definitive answer to this question, but this postgame soundbite does give us a hint of what it could have been.
Malik Monk throws a jab at Brown
While he isn't the team's best player, it is hard to argue that there is someone in the locker room who is more respected/loved by the team and its fans than Malik Monk. So, when Monk voices his opinion on something pertaining to the entire team, it likely means that he represents the beliefs of his teammates.
That's what makes this quote from the team's Sunday win over the Golden State Warriors about interim head coach Doug Christie's coaching style particularly interesting.
“We bought into what DC is doing,” Monk said to reporters after the 129-99 win over the Warriors. “We all just bought into it, and we all feel good and confident in what he’s saying.He played before so I think he knows how to say it to us a little better than people that didn’t play the game before.”
That last portion of the quote, " I think he knows how to say it to us a little better than people that didn’t play the game before," is noteworthy because Brown never played in the NBA. He played four years of college basketball (two at the University of San Diego) before going undrafted in the 1992 NBA Draft. From there, he did not get picked up by a team and began his post-playing career as a video coordinator for the Denver Nuggets.
Now, Brown still played Division I hoops. So, maybe Monk wasn't directly referring to him with his comment. But still, one can't help but wonder if the team was actually growing tired of Brown and his coaching style.
If that actually was the case, it would make everything make a lot more sense. It would show that the Kings' front office understood that their roster was flawed (if we can see it, so can they), and that they weren't necessarily firing Brown for losing games. Rather, they were letting him go for losing the locker room.