Sacramento Kings forward DeMar DeRozan didn’t hold back while offering his feelings on the 2024-25 season.
“Last year was a s–tshow,” he told reporters Monday (around the 1:25 mark in the video).
He did add that he’s in a better place heading into his second season with the Kings and is excited for the 2025-26 campaign:
“This summer, I didn’t realize how much I wasn’t myself from like, a mental standpoint. So the best version of me really wasn’t there,” DeRozan told reporters. “The approach I took this summer was kind of just re-finding myself coming into the season. Understanding the opportunity that’s in front of us all. Don’t take it for granted, go out there and be my fun, competitive self and go out there and compete.”
While DeRozan noted that he changed his own approach heading into this season, he also told reporters that the team dealt with “a lot of s–t going on internally that we tried to fight through.”
While DeRozan didn’t go into the specifics about what was happening internally, it isn’t hard to connect the dots. The team fired Mike Brown in December last year after a slow start and traded De’Aaron Fox to the San Antonio Spurs in February as part of a three-team deal that netted them DeRozan’s former teammate in Chicago, Zach LaVine.
In May, the team officially hired Doug Christie to serve as the full-time head coach and had a relatively quiet summer outside of pulling off a sign-and-trade deal to acquire Dennis Schröder alongside trading away veteran big man Jonas Valančiūnas for Dario Šarić.
In general, however, the Kings will have continuity, or at least more than last year’s erratic campaign. That seemed to come as a relief for DeRozan.