They say that sports teams are either selling wins or they’re selling hope.
What happens to a fan base when you stop selling either?
The Kings opened their coaching search with seven candidates. Four of those candidates would have made me very excited about the future of the team. Two would have been ok, but not exciting. One candidate I disliked entirely. So of course the Kings advanced the bottom three candidates on my list.
For those couple of days between the initial report and the report of the second round candidates, I had hope. Hope that maybe this team was going to do something to reinvigorate the passion of this fan base. A fan base we know still has that passion, and is simply waiting for it to be awakened.
Now, I’m left with an all-too-familiar feeling when it comes to following the Kings: hoping I’m wrong.
We watch move after move that leaves us scratching our heads, and we always come back to a familiar refrain: “I hope I’m wrong.”
I hoped I was wrong about picking Marvin Bagley over Luka Doncic. I hoped I was wrong about all those times the Kings refused to tank. I hoped I was wrong when the Kings waited, and waited, and waited to fire Luke Walton. I hoped I was wrong when the Kings roster on opening day looked horribly unbalanced.
I’m still waiting and hoping I’m wrong.
Because at the end of the day I’m a fan. I want this team to be good, and I fully admit that Mike Brown or Steve Clifford or Mark Jackson could potentially turn this team around. But I’m tired of the Kings zigging while the rest of the league zags and then watching it fail. The Kings have spent the entirety of the Vivek era acting like they’re the smartest guys in the room despite all evidence to the contrary.
It’s exhausting.
I’m tired of hoping I’m wrong. It would be nice if for once I could see what the Kings were doing and immediately get excited about it. I want this team to be good. And I’m tired of once again being put in a position to try to rationalize and talk myself into what appears to be yet another ill-fated and uninspiring path.
Judging by how empty the arena was for most of last season, I would say most fans are done hoping too.
The franchise is currently on worst case path and has been for years. I have no idea where it leads if the team continues to poison the fanbase with their stupidity and nonsensical decisions. At what point does the league step in? We’re in a unprecedented level of dysfunction and failure for a nba franchise.
The few games I watched were not nearly empty enough to make a statement. And this last season was by far the least amount of games I’ve watched.
I was always comfortable with the notion that none of us knew better than an NBA front office, and that while we all had our opinions, none of us lay people could replicated the wide-ranging and thorough processes of an NBA front office.
Robinson over Lillard? I get it. McLemore over McCollum? Fine. None of these were overwhelmingly consensus picks at the time.
But Doncic for Bagley? 90% of the fan base wanted Doncic. In that regard, 90% of the fan base would have this organization in a better position today than where the organization has placed itself.
The successes can be counted on one hand. There are not enough fingers and toes to count the failures.
It is under that cloud of doubt – that growing, never-ending 16 year cloud – that this organization and fan base finds itself. The days of Geoff Petrie pivoting away from the fan base (hello Peja, goodbye John Wallace) are almost a couple of decades gone now. There is simply no benefit of the doubt left in the tank. This organization, through some of the most astonishing mismanagement in the history of professional sports, has not only completely exhausted its goodwill, but has also exhausted any acknowledgement that they may know more about their business than the average fan.
What will change this? Results, and nothing else. No more talk, no more justification, no more excuses. Results.
The current path of this organization is 100% on this organization, from the owner to and through the front office. The old regime impact is long gone. Ownership and the front office completely own the results of the upcoming season. Should the team succeed, they deserve all of the credit. Should they fail, I really believe that ownership should cop to their inability to compete in the NBA and they should sell. Won’t happen, but it should.
Stop telling us. Show us.
It’s funny, of all the bad decisions, the Ben one is still one of the most mystifying for how poorly it turned out. I wasn’t the biggest Ben fan and he had his flaws, so no surprise to any of us who watched even his NBA games that he wasn’t a star. But it’s a bit wild that he didn’t have a better career.
I realize there wasn’t nearly the same access to draft data and video back then, but at Kansas as a true freshman, BMac put up:
Per 40 stats: 20-6-3 per 40 with 1.2 steals and 0.8 blocks.
Shooting: He hit 55% of his twos, 42% of his threes, and 87% of his FTs for a 63% TS%.
And these weren’t empty stats either, as he had a 10.5 BPM (7.2 OBPM, 3.4 DBPM), as Kansas went 31-6 and made it to the Sweet 16 before losing to a good Michigan team with 6 future NBA players by 2 points (and in the loss Ben had 20 points shooting 8-15 with 4 threes).
And isn’t not even as if retrospectively, the team was carried by a better NBA prospect. The only two other future NBA players on Kansas’ roster were Jeff Withey and Andrew White.
Ben did all this while measuring at 6’5″ with a ~6’8″ wingspan. And he had good athleticism and quickness, so he wasn’t a Nik, Jimmer, or Landgon case. And while he may never have been called a gym rat, it’s not as if he had bad character or didn’t work on his game.
Yeah, of course his handles weren’t great. And he wasn’t overly tough or physical. Plenty of reasons he didn’t become a star player. But he came into the league right in the era when shooting was becoming a priority. I can 100% understand why GMs liked him and why he was drafted by Pete. And it’s pretty amazing he didn’t at least become a good starter who justified the use of the #7 pick.
Of all our FOs really bad misses over the years. This is certainly one of the more understandable ones.
Ben’s is a case that I can only chalk up to poor ball IQ. Even on his 2nd stint in Sacramento it was laughably bad, and that’s gonna eat at your confidence.
I do wonder how that might’ve gone for him if he’d been drafted to a better organization instead of one with zero player development infrastructure, but he also dropped to us at 7 for a reason — teams must’ve known he wasn’t capable of seeing the game at the NBA level.
100%. His awareness was bad and his skills just never really developed. But man, I can 100% see why Pete drafted him. There’s a much better case for Ben than Nik, Jimmer, or even TRob (knowing what we know now, understood and was happy with the pick at the time).
I think the Cuz factor hurt his development as well as given big minutes without earning them . Of course Petrie advising Vivek to consider Giannis with that pick still stings
Petrie suggested drafting Giannis? Wow.. never knew that
Word is Vivek was extremely impressed with Mark Jackson’s first interview and he’s “the man to beat”, though I don’t know how you’d call being hired to coach for this owner “winning”. The reality is barring a few rare instances, when the owner is in the room calling the shots its usually a very bad thing. Jed York of the 49ers is an example of someone early on pulling the same BS that Vivek does, but as it failed he pulled away and let football people make the football decisions. And when an egotistical silver spoon dbag like Jed is outclassing you as a franchise owner you done did messed up A-a-ron.
Heh, associating hope with this team has pretty much become a meme at this point.
I think ever since Joerger got fired, I’ve pretty much just been on a downward trend of apathy. There have just been too many things that the organization has done that has given me little to no confidence that they will right the ship any time soon. I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong, but I’ve been so apathetic for so long I don’t even know how old I will be when the team is good again.
Truly, if not for TKH and the staff/community, I really wouldn’t be following anything Kings related right now. The jokes, memes, and analysis makes each season easier to get by.
At this point it really does seem like a conscious effort to alienate the fan base.
I’ve seen up close what a team that’s purposely trying to drive away fans looks like (I lived in St. Louis for three years before the Rams relocated back to LA) and this is starting to look a bit like that. I’m not saying that the organization has any plans to to attempt to move, but keep in mind that a team that’s worth 2 billion here is going to be worth 3-4 billion (or more) in Seattle or Las Vegas. I have no doubt that Kings ownership knows this too.
I always hope that Greg is wrong.
My thought is that things will only change when enough money isn’t flowing into the bank account. Minimal merch sales, commercial deals drying up, and massive amounts of open seats at games are probably the only ways we have to make fan voices heard. And even then I’m worried that that will backfire and lead to another relocation effort. Even on that, I’m kinda “meh” at this point.
Was it this guy? I think he’s alright, you do you.
I’m cautiously optimistic. I’ll say this about the coaching search. I get that a lot of people want a fresh face like Ham or Hardy, and I know I was leaning that way myself.
But here’s a real scenario: What if you pick those guys, and they don’t work? What then? Are you going to applaud the FO for following a positive trend? Or are you going to criticize them for it not working yet again?
In my experience, the FO will be judged on one criteria and one criteria alone: Whether or not it works. Whomever ends up the next head coach, it matters whether or not it works. Everything else just sucks hind tit.
The smartest man in the room left almost the minute Vivek walked into it; Geoff Petrie.
Vivek should definitely have moved heaven and earth to retain the GM who had just used a #7 pick to trade for Jimmer and followed that up by taking Thomas Robinson at #5 with Damian Lillard still on the board!
Also the guy that recommended the new ownership select Giannis in the 2013 NBA draft
nevermind the (valid) reasons he made those selections in the first place
Even though he claims to have made that recommendation, we have no way of knowing whether he would have made Giannis the Kings pick if he had been retained as GM. He could just as easily have “caught the falling knife” that was Ben McLemore as he did with Robinson.
All true, as his being the GM during all of Kings actual winning . You surely do not think these last three GM’s are better .
Petrie was a terrific GM for most of his stint with the Kings, but he gets too much of a pass for his last seven or eight years here.
Respectfully, I don’t see this situation as the Kings “zigging while the rest of the league zags.” (Unless they hire Jackson.) Brown or Clifford would be very non-flashy, conventional hires. They are former head coaches with good reputations around the league. Brown, in particular, is the definition of “NBA establishment”: Popovich coaching tree, multi-time head coach, several years with a super-successful Golden State org.
Now, if Monte hires Mark Jackson, that would definitely be “zig,” and not a good one.
If Jackson’s name wasn’t in the mix, I’d be less anxious about hearing that Clifford & Brown were finalists.
All this being said, I don’t believe anyone actually went on the record with this, well, information, for lack of a better word. One of the things about McNair that I truly appreciate is that he doesn’t feel the need to speak every thought that pops into his head, and he keeps his information close until the time comes when it makes sense to reveal it.
As was previously speculated about Jackson, and the possibility that this was his agent’s work getting him on the list, that could be a factor. Presumably, Brown and Clifford also have agents.
People whose lives aren’t at risk who refuse to go on the record are absolute cowards. It’s terrible how many sports reporters and others in the news biz are comfortable using unnamed sources, and the result has been the absolute failure of news outlets to hold anyone accountable for anything. If you’re a reporter and you can’t files stories without them, get out of the game, you’re wasting my time.
People whose lives aren’t at risk who refuse to go on the record are absolute cowards. It’s terrible how many sports reporters and others in the news biz are comfortable using unnamed sources, and the result has been the absolute failure of news outlets to hold anyone accountable for anything.
Rec’d for this Andy. Personally, I hold the view of very few places that call themselves news organizations are such because of such practices.
I’m not really seeing how named sources matter if reporting is otherwise accurate. People have a lot more to lose than just their lives. Folks have families to support and mortgages to pay, and being fired for speaking out can quickly turn someone’s life and their family’s lives upside down. All credit to people who stick their neck out for the truth. Sometimes people’s larger responsibilities prevent them from doing the same.
“If” is doing a ton of work in your first sentence.
And attribution is of absolute importance. “Sources say” covers so much ground as to be meaningless. “Team sources say” is hardly any better.
McNair seems to share my philosophy of “if you don’t need to know, you don’t get to know.” This has the dual benefit of allowing deliberation to take place outside of a media/social media context, and also makes a leaker much easier to identify in such a small group.
And all of this still presupposes that no-name is even involved or privy to anything happening at that level.
If Jackson gets the job, it means that the decision was never McNair’s to make. I would guess that the General Manager feels a lot less strongly about the infallibility of Warriors employees than does the owner. If Mike Brown is the compromise, I’ll take it.
I don’t really understand what makes Mike Brown a Warriors guy anyway. He’s worked for Denver, Washington, San Antonio, Indiana and Golden State as an assistant. Plus he’s been a head man in Cleveland and LA.
Mike Brown is a NBA lifer. Who just happens to have been employed with the Dubs for the last 6 years.
Whatever gets him hired instead of Jackson, I say, run with that.
I expect laughter and chaos and not wins. It’s going great, no complaints.
I reserve my hope for the other teams I follow who aren’t historically inept.
Without superstars it’s all just noise at this point.
Somebody please post the Shawshank Redemption “hope is a good thing”. GIF. Please and thank you.
Thank you
What people don’t know is that Mark Jackson had already written a letter of resignation to send to Joe Lacob, about a week before he was fired, but never sent it.
He cited as reasons for stepping down, being a bit burnt out, and wanting to spend more time with his stripper.
After all the fanbase is gone and the organization is totally in the red losing money hand over fist what happens next? Will the league force Vivek to sell to new owners, keeping the Kings in Sac or will the league allow Vivek to relocate to one of the so-called expansion cities?
Where did you find information about the franchise losing money?
I used the word “After” to mean when all the revenue streams diminish, what will happen next?
I’d imagine the minority owners would put themselves in a position to facilitate change in the leadership of the group.
ahhh, your posts are classic. group therapy for miserable Kings fans. let’s all give a round of applause for one of our senior members. (member sits down). new guy sitting next to him: “it took a lot of guts to say that”. moderator: “does anyone else share those sentiments?” (a bunch of hands raise slowly)
If Mark Jackson gets the job, that will be the final straw for me. I have Dish Network so I can’t even get the Kings games at the moment. I was going to switch to another provider before the season started, but if he gets the job, I won’t be switching and won’t be a fan of the Kings anymore. That’ll be it. No joke.
Badge Legend