That’s great. Nikola Jokic sits out for the first half of the fourth quarter, the game gets out of hand, he comes in too late to stop the game from getting even more out of hand, and he sits back down after playing for 90 seconds. I understand that Mason Plumlee can do some things against Clint Capela that maybe Jokic can’t, but I understand even better that you just have to let your MVP candidate go out there and try to win you the game.
Now I know why Mike Malone got fired in Sacramento.
You have to give him the chance even if he had 8 turnovers, which wasn’t even that bad because 7 of them came in the first half. That’s what MVP candidate do sometimes, anyway. They turn over the ball because that’s what happens when you have the ball all the time and want to do fancy stuff with it.
And too illuminate my Malone comment from above, I’m not implying that the Kings fired him because he was misusing their star players. I’m implying that they fired him because they knew how bad he’d misuse a Serbian player in the future and they already knew that they were going to form the SSS (Serbian Superteam in Sacramento).