The Sacramento Kings were never supposed to be this painful or depressing. They were supposed to be wacky and fun. They weren’t supposed to be this dark.
What started off as laughable incompetence in California’s capital has devolved into a genuinely sad, regrettable state of affairs.
The team’s star player is a malcontent, the coach – who may or may not be the coach by the time you read this – has checked out, the general manager has no idea how to do his job, and the owner is, in the context of basketball anyway, a crazy person.
There are worlds in which this Kings team could have been a feel-good story.
A rejuvenated Rajon Rondo leads an explosive, aesthetically pleasing and high paced George Karl offence while DeMarcus Cousins emerges as the MVP candidate his talent suggests he should be.
With Rudy Gay as the prototypical stretch four, the Kings spread the floor with the shooting of Omri Casspi, Marco Belinelli and Ben McLemore, and dynamic rookie defender Willy Caulie-Stein anchors the bench unit.
That’s how the narrative could have gone. Instead, the Kings enter the All-Star break at 22-31, 4.5 games out of the playoffs having recently given up a combined 238 points to Brooklyn and Philadelphia (two of the NBA’s three worst offences, hey Kobe!), which is almost impossible.
They have serious designs on firing their head coach, par for the course in Sacramento, a team that has had eight different head coaches since Rick Adelman left in 2006. Remarkably, of those eight, only Paul Westphal lasted more than two seasons, and even then he only made it to two seasons and seven games.
George Karl is the biggest name coach that the Kings have recruited in the past decade. But he’s about to turn 65, he’s had battles with his health, and he’s seemingly lost the locker room. He’s clashed with Cousins and Rondo, the two most influential personalities on the team, and he doesn’t seem entirely engaged with the team.
As Zach Lowe pointed out, on a podcast last week, Karl discussed how Rudy Gay shut down Kevin Durant in a Kings win over the Thunder, a win where Kevin Durant did not play.
But right now Karl is the least of Sacramento’s worries. The Kings organisation is infected at almost every level. Vlade Divac and Vivek Ranadive are running a Keystone Cops operation at the top. The decision last season to fire Mike Malone, the only coach that Cousins has ever gotten along with, was only episode one in a series of choices so poorly conceived that they didn’t seem real.
Divac traded a first round draft pick and the rights to swap two picks with the 76ers to dump the salaries of Jason Thompson, Carl Landry and Nik Stauskas. Now, why didn’t the Kings just use the stretch provision on Landry to clear cap space instead of giving up the draft picks? Because Divac didn’t know that the stretch provision existed. You can’t make this stuff up.
The Kings used that cap space to sign Rondo, Belinelli and Kosta Koufos. A first rounder and two pick swaps for a shooter who can no longer shoot, a third string center and Rajon Rondo.
Going by the numbers, Rondo, with his 11.9 points per game, 11.9 assists, 6.2 rebounds and 1.9 steals, is having a renaissance. But the renaissance is purely numerical.
Rondo has been an abomination on defence, devoting himself only to laziness and indifference. He kills spacing on offence and the Kings have been better this season with Rondo on the bench. The on-off court numbers suggest that Sacramento would be better off starting Darren Collison. The NBA has passed Rondo by.
Preceding a disastrous trade and a disastrous free agency was a disastrous draft. Caulie-Stein has actually been better than advertised, and in a nutshell there’s nothing calamitous about taking him at pick six. But there is if you’re the Sacramento Kings.
Caulie-Stein is an offensive zero who can’t shoot – he’s a pure centre. You cannot use the sixth pick in the draft on an offensively one-dimensional centre when you have DeMarcus Cousins on your team, also a centre.
You cannot do it, but the Kings do a lot of things you cannot do, and of course they did this. Emmanuel Mudiay, Stanley Johnson, Frank Kaminsky, Justise Winslow, Myles Turner, Trey Lyles, Devin Booker and Cameron Payne were the next eight picks after Caulie-Stein – all would have been smarter selections for the Kings.
The farcical state of the Kings and their poisonous culture has become such that free agents actively don’t want to go there (unless you’re Rondo and no one else offers you a deal). Last off-season the Kings offered Monta Ellis, Wesley Matthews and Tobias Harris more money than they eventually signed for with other teams. Players are literally leaving millions of dollars on the table to avoid Sacramento.
The Kings’ season isn’t over yet. They’re less than five games back and they’re only an injury to James Harden, Dirk Nowitzki or yet another Utah star away from being back in the race.
The Sacramento roster is constructed more in the vision of a fantasy basketball roster than a coherent NBA team but there is a rhythm to certain pairings of the weird, funky parts. The Kings are best when Casspi and Gay play the three and the four, and in the 400-plus minutes those two have shared the floor with Cousins the Kings have absolutely blitzed teams, playing with a net rating behind only the Warriors and Spurs.
But the end game for this iteration of the Kings seems to be at best an inglorious first round exit. Such is life when you’re defined by incompetence at every level.
Divac and Ranedive haven’t proven that they can approach competence in their respective jobs, and Cousins, the face of the franchise, continues to be a toxic presence on the team. His petulance remains almost impressive in its determination and his commitment to defence is intermittent at best.
Even James Harden would be ashamed of this…
For all his faults, Cousins is still a top ten talent in the league even if he’s a bottom ten teammate. He’s averaging a 27-11-3 with over a block and a steal a game – that doesn’t grow on trees.
If Cousins had the right infrastructure around him maybe his talent would be accentuated, his shortcomings subdued, and he would prosper. The problem is that he has the worst infrastructure in the league around him.
Kings fans deserve better. By all accounts they provided the league’s most raucous, passionate crowds in the early 2000s. They were Oracle before Baron Davis and then Stephen Curry.
Back then the Kings were defined by heartbreaking losses – three Game 7 defeats in three years from 2002 to 2004, the first of which capped off perhaps the most bitter playoff series loss in NBA history, the infamous 2002 Western Conference Finals against the Lakers.
Since those Chris Webber days, the Kings have just been defined by losses. It’s been ten years since they won 40 games in a season and eight years since they won 30. In a league with a salary cap and a draft system that rewards losing that kind of sustained ineptitude is as remarkable as it is depressing.
Given the court jesters running the show in Sacramento today, there seems to be no end in sight to the losing for these Kings of tragicomedy.
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