Report: Kings will run GM and coaching search at season's end
Is it really a monarchy if you change kings three times in a single presidential term?
It seems as if the indecisive Kings are, once again, indecisive. Sacramento has made general manager change after general manager change, coaching change after coaching change since Vivek Ranadive's ownership group took over in 2013. Now, with Vlade Divac running the show in the front office, it appears there could be another regime stepping in not too long from now.
Via Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports:
Sacramento Kings owner Vivek Ranadive and vice president of basketball operations Vlade Divac were using All-Star weekend in Toronto to canvass league officials on possible candidates to hire as general manager, league sources told The Vertical.
The Kings are starting to acknowledge that Divac has been overwhelmed with the complexities of the collective bargaining agreement and the sophisticated ways with which most NBA organizations are run now. Privately, the Kings have been telling people they plan to run a GM and a coaching search once the regular season ends. Sacramento has committed to keeping coach George Karl for the rest of the regular season, but has shown no inclination to bring him back next season, sources said
At 22-31, the Kings find themselves 4.5 games back of a playoff spot in the down-from-last-year Western Conference. Sacramento looked like it had a shot at one point, but has fallen off of late, mostly because of its wreched defense.
Ranadive brought Divac in last season and named him vice president of basketball operations. At the time, Pete D'Alessandro was the GM and was running the organization. Divac had never even held a front office job. But Divac's hiring set the wheels in motion for him to take over the organization. D'Alessandro left that summer. It hasn't worked out well.
Judging by some of the moves the Kings have made under Divac, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the team worries if its VP understands the complexities of the collective bargaining agreement. Front officers around the league have been studying the cap and cap-related moves for years in order to get where they currently stand. Divac just walked in the door.
This past summer, the Kings gave up a gluttony of draft picks, Carl Landry, Jason Thompson and Nik Stauskas, one year removed from being selected in the lottery of the draft, just to clear cap space. But they didn't have to give away their future in order to clean up enough space to sign Rajon Rondo—to a one-year deal—and Kosta Koufos, who the team might already trade.
The Kings have cycled through three coaches since Ranadive's first season as owner, 2013-14. The reports that Karl's ousting is written on the walls have been coming out for months now. Sacramento is supplying exactly zero stability. None for DeMarcus Cousins. None for their hopes of re-signing Rondo, who has been better this year than he was a season ago in Boston and Dallas. None for the dreams of developing their younger players.
Coaching turnover isn't the best thing for a young Willie Cauley-Stein. Regime changes turn roster consistency into a impossibility. But this is what's going on in Sacramento. Maybe the next GM or the next coach will actually stick.