On March 2nd, roughly a week before the NBA went into a COVID-induced hibernation, Malik Monk was suspended “indefinitely” for an undisclosed substance abuse violation. There weren’t a whole lot of details about Monk’s suspension available at the time, and then everybody forgot their need for details when a different kind of suspension, the league-wide kind of suspension, happened, so we never got the whole story. And now he’s been reinstated by the league so it’s like nothing ever happened.
But DownToBuck is a warrior who fights beneath the gloriously waving flag of truth. If there is truth out there to be found, DownToBuck finds it. And if the truth can’t be found, then DownToBuck finds what he estimates to be the closest approximation of the truth, and he disseminates that as the actual truth, and his viewers are none the wiser.
That is why I have undertaken hours, literally more than one hour, of good old-fashioned investigative journalism in order to get to the bottom of this. What I have learned in my travels through the encrypted cybertubes that comprise the Dark Web will shock you, certainly, but it will also enlighten you. And I have made that enlightenment even easier to achieve by distilling my findings into the easy-to-understand POWER RANKINGS format. Now nobody will be left behind by a long narrative that is above their reading level.
OFFICIAL REASONS WHY MALIK MONK PROBABLY GOT SUSPENDED POWER RANKINGS
1. His coach hates him. It is a well-known fact that Hornets coach James Borrego hates Monk’s guts and wants him to fail. What better way to ensure that failure than to suspend him? Monk was playing well up until he got suspended, scoring 17 PPG per game in the month of February; clearly, Borrego saw Monk’s rapid ascension first-hand and knew that he had to put a stop to it by any means possible.
“Why does James Borrego hate Monk so much?” you ask. That part I never quite figured out. I’m sure if I spent more time on the Dark Web I could find out, but the inherent slowness of the TOR network combined with my obsessive need to use exactly twelve different proxies at all times means that each page takes like a minute to load, more if there are images, and just forget about watching video. Even if I found a twenty-second video clip that purported to depict James Borrego stating the exact reasons why he holds so much contempt for Monk, I wouldn’t have the patience to let it load.
2. Terry Rozier planted drugs in his locker. Rozier was already feeling anxious because his point guard minutes got co-opted by Devonte’ Graham very early in the season. To watch Monk come in and try to steal his shooting guard minutes was the final straw. So he bought a thousand tabs of LCD and left them all over Monk’s locker. There was so much LCD there that the police had to bring their special drug truck in order to cart all the drugs away.
3. Dunks too powerful. Simply put, Adam Silver personally invested in high-end rim technology for all NBA arenas and wanted to make sure that nobody would damage that investment. The rim-crushing quality of Monk’s ferocious whamjams made Silver very nervous. Nervous enough to unilaterally issue a suspension without consulting with anybody on the Hornets before handing it down.
If you knew what kind of high-tech circuity was in these rims, you would totally see where Silver is coming from. They’ve got magnets. They’ve got transistors. They’ve got server-class CPU’s. They’ve got brain-altering radio waves. They’ve got small amounts of nuclear material that is of the same grade that nukes are made out of. They even have cryptocurrency-mining capabilities. Nobody should even be touching these highly-radioactive rims much less dunking on them.
4. Tanking. Monk was playing well enough that he could theoretically have been leading his team to actual victories for the first time in his career. But victories aren’t gonna make your draft picks any better. Most teams will just bench their players in times like these, but the Hornets took one extra step towards believability by full-on suspending him.
5. Michael Jordan’s brain replaced with a grapefruit. Having your owner’s brain get replaced with a citrus fruit (a very tart citrus fruit at that) can lead to some crazy stuff going down (including suspending your own players for literally no reason). This explanation also covers the continuous string of baffling decisions that the Hornets as an organization have been making since they missed out on Anthony Davis and got Michael Kidd-Gilchrist instead.
[POWER GAP]
9001. Actual drug use by Monk himself. I searched all over the Dark Web and couldn’t find ANY pictures of Monk ingesting a quarter-pound rock of pure cocaine. Meanwhile, similar pictures existed for nearly every other NBA player of note. Does anybody actually believe the official NBA-provided narrative on this?