The Stockton Kings did not participate in the 2020-21 G League season, which took place entirely in a bubble in Orlando, but they’ll be back in 2021-22 though with some different faces.

Per reporting from Sean Cunningham, the Stockton Kings will be moving on from head coach Tyrone Ellis. Ellis served as head coach for two seasons starting in 2018 and won 60 percent of games while providing multiple developmental success stories, but he was essentially in limbo when Stockton elected to opt out of the bubble.

With anticipation of the 2021-22 G League season, the Stockton Kings will be interviewing for a new head coach with three current internal candidates on the Sacramento Kings coaching staff beginning this week:

Bobby Jackson, Lindsey Harding & Jonah Herscu, sources say.

— Sean Cunningham (@SeanCunningham) May 24, 2021

Now the Kings are looking to move forward with a new head coach, but potentially one who the franchise is already familiar with. According to Cunningham, three of the candidates are already part of the Sacramento staff: Bobby Jackson, Lindsey Harding, and Jonah Herscu.

Jackson has been with the Kings staff in various capacities since 2010. He was a regional scout, an advance scout, an assistant player development coach, and is now a full-fledged assistant coach focusing on player development. Harding joined the Kings in 2019 and has been part of the player development team since. Like Jackson, she doesn’t yet have head coaching experience, but that will change this summer with the South Sudan women’s national team. Harding was also a finalist for the Duke women’s basketball job in 2020, which ultimately went to then-Celtics assistant Kara Lawson, so head coaching is clearly on her radar.

Herscu is a less obvious choice for the job. He has been an advance scout for the Kings, though he was a player development assistant with the Lakers for one season before coming to Sacramento with Luke Walton. Herscu was an assistant coach in the WNBA with the Chicago Sky and has previously worked in the G League with the Fort Wayne Mad Ants.

Whoever gets the job — and it could be an external candidate — will have a lot of talent to work with. Luke Walton and Monte McNair both said that one of their goals is developing depth internally, and that could come from the team’s stable of young players. Currently, Kyle Guy and Louis King are on two-way contracts, and both project as potential backups in their NBA careers should they continue on their developmental path. It’s unclear what Sacramento has in Jahmi’us Ramsey and Robert Woodard as both of them essentially only played in the bubble, but Stockton would be a good place to find out. That makes this head coaching job of critical importance to the future of the franchise.

Who would you like to see in charge of the Stockton Kings?