Darius Acuff Jr. made nine threes on Saturday night, tied a rookie record doing it, and became the first teenager to pull it off. He played 37 minutes and change, scored a career-high 38, and made nine of Sacramento's eleven made threes as a team. His teammates combined to go 2-for-24 from deep. At some point in that fourth quarter, with the game decided and the kid two baskets from 40, Doug Christie had him on the bench instead of the floor.
No one has a quote of Christie saying he pulled Acuff to keep him from a milestone. Nobody needs one. Sacramento's most electric, most nationally relevant performance of the season got cut short in a game that had nothing left to decide, by a coach who stood in front of reporters afterward and called this same player "special" and said the team has to find ways to help him. He said it right after the game. Saturday's substitution pattern argued otherwise.
Sacramento took the floor without Keegan Murray, Maxime Raynaud, Ben Simmons, and Dylan Cardwell. That's four rotation pieces gone, and a team that thin is going to get run off the floor by a Memphis squad that's unbeaten through its first six games this season, even with its own starting point guard and backup point guard both out. Injuries explain the 0-6 start, but they don't explain why the guy putting up a career night by himself gets pulled before the buzzer while Domantas Sabonis, who logged 38 real minutes and finished a few assists off a triple-double in a 31-point loss, keeps grinding out a stat line nobody in Sacramento needed by the fourth quarter.
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RatingThis is the actual rotation story: with the season already lost for the night, Christie kept logging minutes for a locked-in veteran stat line instead of feeding the one player on his roster doing something nobody else his age has done. If he genuinely believes Acuff is special, Saturday was the moment to prove it cost him nothing to let the kid play out the string. He didn't. He protected a game that was already over instead of building the one thing worth building on a winless roster.
He's reportedly not on the hot seat yet, and ownership wants him evaluated once the roster is healthy. The organization is buying him time to develop young talent, and Saturday he had the clearest chance of the season to do exactly that, and he flinched. If an 0-7 start really is the number that starts the conversation about his job, he didn't do himself any favors leaving his best argument for keeping it sitting on the bench.
