Last week, the Kings created a short list of six individuals who they planned on interviewing to become their next head of basketball operations, and they hired Mike Forde of Sportsology to lead the search.

Trajan Langdon of the Pelicans and Adam Simon of the Heat both declined to take an interview, but the other four candidates all met with the Sacramento hiring team, which reportedly Vivek Ranadive and his son Aneel, as well as interim GM Joe Dumars.

Now that the Kings have conducted their first round of interviews, Carmichael Dave of KHTK Sports reports that the team has a dream set-up with two of the candidates running the Sacramento front office. Sachin Gupta would be the head of basketball operations, and Monte McNair would be the general manager.

Hearing strong movement towards a front office setup with Sachin Gupta as Head of Ops and Monte McNair as GM/2nd in command for the Sacramento Kings.

Interviews continue today.

Fluid situation of course……

— Gupta Commander (@CarmichaelDave) September 15, 2020

It’s worth noting that those positions would be promotions for both individuals, as Gupta currently reports to head decision-maker Gersson Rosas in Minnesota, and McNair is an assistant GM in Houston.

This would be an ideal outcome for Sacramento. Obviously, both Gupta and McNair have to agree to leave their current jobs to move to the Kings, and they would have to be amenable to this proposed set-up, particularly McNair, who would not be the head of basketball operations.

Nevertheless, this process has shown remarkable growth for Ranadive thus far, who has traditionally failed to interview more than one candidate for important roles, and simply installed Vlade Divac into this position without any real qualifications. The Kings have canvassed respected individuals around the league, they used a search firm to prevent Dumars from exerting undue influence in the process, and they’re attempting to build a front office that has multiple smart minds instead of one person with excess power.

We’ll see where the search goes from here, but it is possible that Sacramento will have a new front office in place before the 2020 NBA Draft. That will help the new regime make their mark on this franchise immediately.