Much has been made of the Sacramento Kings choosing Marvin Bagley over Luka Doncic. Indeed, based on the raw stats of those two players (abridged version of said stats: Doncic good, Bagley bad), it appears that the Kings drafted the wrong guy.
But players don’t exist in a vacuum, accumulating stats in a void with no teammates. They exist on a team with other real human beings, and those other real human beings need to be taken into account when draft selections are being considered. Otherwise, you’d end up with a team that had both Clyde Drexler AND Michael Jordan on it, an obviously untenable situation.
Such is the case in Sacramento. Yeah, Doncic is a great player, but the Kings already had two dynamic Euro point-forwards on their roster in Nemanja Bjelica and Bogdan Bogdanovic, and they didn’t need another one. Especially one that wasn’t even Serbian.
In this game, Bjelica utterly outplayed and, frankly, humiliated Doncic, showing the world that the Kings made the right choice. Doncic is likely crying right now, rushing out of the locker room before media members are able to interview him, thick tears of pure sorrow running down his fat face, his boyish cheeks flushed with embarrassment. Bjelica didn’t even need to keep scoring at the end; he dominated so hard that he could take a break on the bench and leave his teammates to mop-up duty (a task which they failed, somehow).
I would’ve liked to see him try and set a new career-high outright (I can’t believe he scored 30 in Minnesota with how bad they were marginalizing him), but there’s something to be said for respecting your disgraced and emasculated opponents by not running up the score on them. He ended up tying his career-high with a demoralizing and filthy dunk at the end, after Puke Faulton realized they needed one more bucket from him to really seal the deal, and 30 is still a serious amount of pointage for him. It’s hard to be disappointed with this performance, but sometimes I don’t think he realizes how much of a scoring threat he can be.