Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. I’ll admit I was pretty surprised to see the Mavericks live to fight another day.
In today’s SI:AM:
🎣 Travis Hunter’s first SI cover
🫡 Navy’s NFL prospect
⛈️ Thunder’s key piece
Same old Kings
The Sacramento Kings are starting from scratch.
The Kings lost to the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA play-in tournament on Wednesday night, meaning they will miss the playoffs for the 18th time in the last 19 seasons. The game was never really close. Dallas took a 71–48 lead into halftime and the Kings were unable to make it competitive in the second half. The Mavs will face the Memphis Grizzlies on Friday for the right to face the Oklahoma City Thunder in the first round of the playoffs.
Less than an hour after the loss, news broke that the Kings had fired their general manager, Monte McNair, who had held the role since September 2020. It’s a steep fall from grace for a man who was named the NBA’s Executive of the Year in 2023. That was the year after McNair pulled off a trade deadline deal with the Indiana Pacers to acquire Domantas Sabonis in exchange for Tyrese Haliburton.
It was a move that was widely panned at the time. Haliburton was in the middle of his second NBA season, having finished third in Rookie of the Year voting the year before. It was clear that the former lottery pick was developing into an All-Star caliber player, so it was a headscratcher to see Sacramento deal him for a big man who’s four years older. But in Sabonis’s first full season in Sacramento, popular opinion of the trade shifted. Sabonis stepped his game up, especially on defense, and anchored a Kings team that went 48–34 under new coach Mike Brown to finish third in the Western Conference and snap a 16-year playoff drought. Although the Kings lost in the first round of the playoffs against the rival Golden State Warriors in seven games, this new-look version of the team that McNair had assembled seemed poised to be a factor in the West moving forward.
That year has looked like a fluke in retrospect, though. The Kings went 46–36 last season, just two fewer wins than they had the year before, but in a less compacted Western Conference, that was only good enough for ninth place. They lost in the play-in tournament and missed the postseason again. This season was even more of a disappointment. It started with the Kings going 13–18 in the first two months of the season, after which they fired Brown and promoted assistant Doug Christie to interim coach. They did better under Christie (27–24) but still finished under .500 at 40–42.
The biggest development this season, though, was the trade that sent All-Star point guard De’Aaron Fox to the San Antonio Spurs. Fox is under contract through the end of next season and negotiations on an extension with the Kings had stalled. In October, he turned down a three-year, $165 million max extension and was honest about why, telling The Athletic that he didn’t want to sign a long-term deal with a team that wasn’t going to be consistently competitive. Any hope of signing Fox to an extension apparently went out the window when Brown was fired—not just because Fox and Brown had a good relationship, but because of how the franchise handled the decision to give the coach the boot. Brown was shown the door just six months after signing a contract extension that would have kept him in Sacramento until the end of the 2026–27 season. The abrupt decision to axe him didn’t inspire confidence in the Kings’ direction. And while Sacramento went 11–4 in Christie’s first 15 games in charge, Sam Amick and Anthony Slater of The Athletic reported that the “temporary bump up the standings hadn’t masked Fox’s unflattering view of the organization’s culture under owner Vivek Ranadivé.” A little more than a month after Brown was fired, Fox was traded, with the Chicago Bulls’ Zach LaVine as the main return. McNair said shortly after the Fox trade that there was “no pathway to a long-term agreement” with the All-Star, and so the team had little choice but to trade him.
It isn’t hard to trace the Kings’ current predicament back to the decisions of Ranadivé. It was his call to fire Brown, which contributed to Fox’s desire to leave. Amick and Slater reported Wednesday night that McNair was at odds with Ranadivé on a number of key issues, including the Brown firing, the trade for LaVine and the signing of 35-year-old DeMar DeRozan. As a result, Ranadivé fired the guy who built the best Kings roster in decades. Sacramento has won at least 40 games in three straight seasons. Before that, the last time the team won 40 games was in 2005–06.
Now the Kings are starting from square one. They don’t have a head coach, a GM, or a roster with enough talent to contend in the West. More troublingly, they have the one problem that’s harder to solve than any other in sports: a meddlesome, inept owner.
The best of Sports Illustrated
• Two-way NFL draft prospect Travis Hunter is on the cover of the latest issue of Sports Illustrated, with a cover story by Pat Forde. After seeing how good a fisherman Hunter is, maybe it’s time we start calling him a triple-threat.
• Rayuan Lane III isn’t your typical NFL draft prospect. Greg Bishop got an inside look at what it’s like to prepare for a career in pro football while also living the grueling life of a cadet at the U.S. Naval Academy.
• While the Eagles have excelled by eschewing the modern Moneyball trends of team building, Conor Orr cautions that Philadelphia’s approach isn’t right for every team.
• Chris Mannix has a good profile of Jalen Williams, the Thunder forward who will be key to Oklahoma City’s title hopes after being overlooked in the 2022 draft.
• Quarterback Nico Iamaleava is reportedly transferring to UCLA after his controversial exit from Tennessee.
• Kevin Durant is already drawing interest from some contenders if the Suns decide to trade him this summer.
• Justin Rose spoke for the first time about his playoff loss to Rory McIlroy at the Masters.
The top five…
… things I saw last night:
5. Hayden White’s last-minute game-winner for Indy Eleven in the U.S. Open Cup.
4. Shohei Ohtani’s towering 448-foot home run.
3. These Yankees fans’ reaction to an Aaron Judge homer.
2. This wacky play from the Pirates-Nationals game where the batter got thrown out at first by the left fielder.
1. Cody Bellinger’s diving catch for the final out of the Yankees’ win over the Royals.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as SI:AM | Directionless Kings Fire GM After Play-In Ouster.
