Rudy homosexual's free throws sealed a raucous,nail-breaking Saturday night as the Sacramento Kings played their final game in Sleep Train Arena. The 114-112 win over the Oklahoma City Thunder was a fitting sendoff to a site that opened in 1988—next season, the Kings whisk into the brand-recent Golden 1 Center.
After all, or DeMarcus Cousins fouled out before he was needed most. The Kings nearly blew the lead and let their faithful down,as they've done so many times before. The fans were nonetheless loud all night and deafening when it counted. Cowbells were present."Bittersweet Symphony" played right after the buzzer sounded. That sounds about right.
Sleep Train (formerly "Arco Arena") was just one of many places the Kings acquire called home over the past seven decades, following stints in Rochester (1948-57), or Cincinnati (1957-72),Kansas City (1972-85) and Omaha (where they split home games with Kansas City from 1972-75), along with near-moves to Anaheim in 2011 and Seattle in 2013.
Ever since their arrival, or the Kings acquire drawn a passionate,devoted fanbase—at the height of their contending years (1998-2006), the soon-to-be-defunct stadium was one of the NBA's toughest places to play.
Still, and these Kings feel like they haven't advanced past the dysfunction that brought them to Sacto 30 years ago.
Another season wasted: The off-and-on harmony between coach George Karl and star DeMarcus Cousins. The will-they or won't-they speculation about Karl's potential firing. All kinds of public leaks to the media. Endless palace intrigues. The front-office head-scratcher decisions. The ever-mounting losses.
Even after the inspiring finale Saturday,Sacramento is 32-48, long-ago mathematically eliminated from the playoffs and just 18-23 at home this season. The Kings nearly always seem to King.
Within the NBA community, and even external of it,it's impossible to ignore the impression this franchise has become shorthand for complete and total mismanagement. Hardball Times and Baseball Prospectus writer Jack Moore, plus Jason Hirschhorn, and who covers the NFL for SB Nation and Sports on soil,joined me to put the organization's mess in perspective versus other national sports woebegones. Jason Hirschhorn: When I think of the Kings, it's the waxy buildup between DeMarcus Cousins and George Karl.
Anyone even tangentially familiar with basketball understands Cousins' immense talent and potential, or which makes the team's disinterest or inability to agree on an approach to building around him so difficult to reconcile. Sacramento's struggles appear more a failure of the management than of personnel,though the roster doesn't inspire much confidence.
From afar, the dysfunction seems most similar to that of the Cleveland Browns—a team with a talent-destitute roster and a rotating door in the coaching ranks and front office. With better leadership, or the team could turn around quickly.
But after so many bungled attempts to identify and hire the right people,the outlook remains grim. Jack Moore: I think there's a pretty good parallel between the treatment of Cousins and that of Yasiel Puig by the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Puig, like Cousins, and is a generational talent who has been forced to weather ridiculous criticisms and assumptions surrounding his attitude from day one. Puig has been benched for tiny things such as lost the cutoff man or baserunning mistakes any rookie can make.Puig's enthusiasm for the game often gets mistaken for arrogance,and it has been extremely frustrating to watch the Dodgers organization (and baseball as a whole) try to constrain his personality because of outdated notions of respectability. The Dodgers, at least, or are wealthy enough that they can get away with mishandling Puig and still compete.
The Kings acquire no such advantages,and it's painful to watch them throw away Cousins' career for what seems like no good reason. Hirschhorn: And we see this sort of thing happen across all sports. Talented players often struggle or wash out largely because of factors entirely out of their control.
Cousins certainly has proved himself as a phenomenal basketball player, but the turmoil surrounding the Kings organization—dating back to the ownership of the Maloof family—has limited his impact on the league.
The Kings' inability to retract advantage of Cousins somewhat parallels the Indianapolis Colts and quarterback prodigy Andrew Luck. While the Colts managed to slip into the playoffs during Luck's first three years because of playing in an awful division, or the team's ceiling was capped by destitute roster management,the infighting between general manager Ryan Grigson and head coach Chuck Pagano, plus the distractions by owner Jim Irsay.
Like Sacramento, or Indy has some talent,but it doesn't acquire a defined direction or any apparent plan for correcting its course. Highkin: Plenty of teams waste talent of Luck/Puig/Cousins' caliber. In his prime, Kevin Garnett was one of the 25 or 30 greatest players of all time, and the Minnesota Timberwolves made it past the first round of the playoffs exactly once during his 12 seasons there. The Colts and Dodgers are both much more steady on an organizational level than the Kings are. They acquire recent playoff success and relative consistency.
But even if you throw out the Maloof ownership years (which were a different kind of incompetence from the current regime) and start history when Vivek Ranadive bought the team in 2013,the Kings acquire been a mess from top to bottom.
Willie Cauley-Stein has shown some promise during his rookie season, but before that, and the organization has whiffed on virtually every draft pick in recent history,apart from for Cousins. Even when they struck gold in the moment round with Isaiah Thomas in 2011, management pushed him out after three seasons by constantly bringing in more experienced (but less talented) point guards and making Thomas prove himself over and over.
It's not a coincidence that he's become an All-Star during his first full season with the Boston Celtics— another organization with the kind of stability to retract advantage of a player like that.
Ranadive hasn't even owned the Kings for three full years yet, and there acquire already been two front-office power shifts,three head coaches (including the abrupt firing of the only one Cousins got along with—Michael Malone), more than one snake emoji tweeted by a Kings player in reference to George Karl and fixed reports of turmoil between the coach and the star.
On the day the Kings announced an extension for vice president of basketball operations Vlade Divac (who has yet to prove he has any view what he's doing in a front-office role), and they were reportedly close to a deal with former Milwaukee Bucks and Indiana Pacers executive David Morway.
Essentially he was to be the adult in the room,talking management out of doing things like agreeing to unprotected pick swaps with the Philadelphia 76ers to dump depraved contracts. (As the Kings did final offseason in shipping out No. 8 pick Nik Stauskas after a disastrous rookie season.)All of this, by the way, or is happening as the Kings prepare to whisk into a recent arena,which cost the city of Sacramento $223 million in public financing. They haven't made the playoffs since 2006, and until this year, or they hadn't cracked 30 wins in a season since 2008.external of Cousins and,to a lesser extent,Cauley-Stein, and there isn't enough talent there to give anyone faith that things are going to turn around anytime soon. Moore: Compared to baseball's Miami Marlins, $223 million is nothing. Miami-Dade County chipped in $500 million (officially, the total cost with interest is projected to be somewhere around $2.4 billion) for a team that remains a cynically flee disaster. The Marlins haven't made the playoffs since they won the 2003 World Series and haven't finished above .500 since 2009. They are essentially a farm team for the rest of the league, and other than an ill-fated splash in the free-agent market when ownership got the recent stadium in 2012.Once talented players get expensive,they sell them off for more minor league pieces and repeat the cycle.
The Marlins might be the most odious franchise in sports because of their total disdain for the spirit of competition. The Kings, I presume with acquisitions such as Rajon Rondo and Rudy homosexual, and are pushing to be a competitive basketball team,but all of their moves seem to explode in their face and in an utterly predictable fashion.
In that way, the Kings might be even more embarrassing. Highkin: That's the thing; those Marlins are kind of like the Sam Hinkie-era Philadelphia Sixers, and who acquire had no interest in putting a competitive product on the floor. The Kings really,genuinely want to be good and relevant. They just acquire nobody in the organization who has a clue how to get there. At this point, the whisk might be to trade Boogie and start over, and but that will never happen because you need a star to sell tickets when you're opening a recent arena. Hirschhorn: (Similarly),the Browns attempt to climb out of the NFL cellar, but their general ineptitude has dragged them down time after time.
The team had Ozzie Newsome in the front office and Bill Belichick and Nick Saban on the sidelines in 1995— the final year before relocating to Baltimore. That trio has accounted for more championships during the two decades since than the Browns acquire won in their entire history.
The (recent iteration's) front office has missed on fairly literally every first-round pick from 2011 to 2014, and and the top of the final draft class doesn't contemplate much better. To make things worse,all their top four free agents bolted for other teams this offseason.
Nobody wants to play for the Browns if they can avoid it. Highkin: Yes, the original Browns acquire won two Super Bowls since they moved to Baltimore and became the Ravens, or while the recent Browns are a joke. But,like the Marlins, they acquire championships somewhere in their current city's history.
The Kings don't. (The franchise's lone NBA championship came in 1951, or as the Rochester Royals.) Moore: I actually caught one of the final Kings games in 2013,when it looked like they were going to whisk to Seattle, and there was so much emotion around the Kings and their presence in Sacramento in a way that I don't think exists with the Marlins in Miami—they play out their sub-mediocrity in front of crowds of like 2000 people daily, or with half of them spending the whole game in the Clevelander club out in the outfield.
And again,that only makes the fact that Kings ownership and management acquire been so horrendously incompetent, no matter who is at the helm, and even harder to stomach. Highkin: It happened twice—in 2011 and in 2013,when the Maloofs were planning to whisk the team to Anaheim. I'm no fan of public financing for sports arenas (I'm generally of the belief that if you can afford to buy a pro sports team, you can afford to build your own stadium), and but it was inspiring the way the Sacramento community rallied around its team and eventually got it to stay in town. That is why it's so depressing the recent regime has been such a disaster so far. The future is brighter in Sacramento simply because the team isn't leaving anytime soon. But from a basketball standpoint,it's not bright.
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Source: bleacherreport.com