Fansided

How the Sacramento Kings became the worst-run franchise in the NBA

By Will Osgood

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You could make a case for the Sixers. Same with the Knicks, though reasonable excuses follow. The Lakers too. And Minnesota, ah, it’s a long shot, but maybe.

But the reality is simple: The Sacramento Kings are the worst-run franchise in the NBA. And truthfully, it’s not even that close.

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There’s nothing inherently wrong with crowdsourcing. Heck, there’s nothing wrong with taking a group of four very intelligent young men who understand analytics, and how to apply them to drafting players for an NBA team.

That the Kings were mocked for doing just that prior to last year’s NBA Draft is ridiculous. The Kings did not have a true analytics department in-house so they brought one in. What’s so silly about that? If anything, it was a shrewd move.

At the beginning of the Grantland documentary (below), general manger Pete D’Allesandro eluded to the need to get the eighth pick right, to be “precise”, saying there is almost no margin for error.

The idea in D’Allesandro’s mind was similar to that of Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane—these are correspondingly small-market teams trying to compete with the big boys from Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, etc., etc.

D’Allesandro has been known throughout NBA circles for some time as a strong cap and analytics man. That reputation landed him in a job in Denver under Masai Ujiri as an advisor and eventually as the Vice President of Basketball Operations.

Upon taking over ownership of the Sacramento Kings, Vivek Ranadive decided he needed a new man to run the show in the front office. D’Allesandro had his pick, essentially, to take the Nuggets’ open GM job as soon as Ujiri left for the Raptors, or try to make things work over in Sac-Town.

Thus far, it seems he chose…poorly.

D’Allesandro officially took the Kings’ general manager job on June 17, 2013—giving himself hardly enough time to put together a draft board, let alone a staff for the 2013 draft.

Whatever the Kings did in the 2013 draft was sure to not land on D’Allesandro’s plate, and could not be used against him on his resume. He was making an important set of decisions for a franchise he’d been employed with for less than a month.

In said draft, the Kings took Kansas guard Ben McLemore who was generally considered a top-five prospect in a draft with a ton of questions. Not even two weeks later D’Allesandro and the Kings sent Tyreke Evans to New Orleans in a three-team trade which netted them only one player of importance, Greivis Vasquez.

Vasquez was shipped to Toronto on December 8 in a trade which brought back Rudy Gay from the Raptors. D’Allesandro used a trick commonly employed by the original wheeler and dealer, Beane, in using trade pieces acquired in one trade to net a greater reward.

D’Allesandro, by all accounts, has made his best effort to re-work the Kings’ roster to, as he says, “find the market inefficiencies”. Yet, it is impossible to not notice, something doesn’t quite add up.

Long before becoming the laughingstock of the NBA during the 2014-15 season—where it would fire its second-year head coach after a decent start, only to struggle whilst its best player, DeMarcus Cousins, missed a few games, and go on to make headlines for preparations to employ a “cherry-picking” strategy, the Kings franchise grew impossibly weak and befuddled.

Vivek Ranadive bought the Sacramento Kings on May 31, 2013 from the Maloof brothers for a then-NBA record $534 million. Circumstances, of course help to explain. The Kings, not thwarted by the NBA, were in talks to move the franchise to Seattle.

It was actually the commitment to keeping the team in Sacramento which eventually won Ranadive and his ownership group the bid. The NBA recognized, though would never publically admit as much, that as great as its partnership with Oklahoma City has been (due in no little part to the success of the team with Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook), it made a mistake in the way it allowed Clay Bennett to purchase and immediately haul that franchise off from Seattle.

In one of former commissioner David Stern’s final major acts as leader of the league, the NBA felt it had to make right what it had messed up in not allowing Seattle to keep their beloved Supersonics six years earlier.

As noble as the act to keep the Kings in Sacramento may have been, in this case it may have actually been the wrong call, and not just because in the process it eschewed giving Seattle another try at the NBA thing.

The Kings had been rumored to be headed to Anaheim in 2012, but had been denied that opportunity as apparently none of the other NBA owners would have voted for the move, according to Stern. Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson—best known in NBA circles for his time as a point guard with the Phoenix Suns—worked to negotiate a new arena deal in Sacramento.

Yet even then, a sale to a bidder with plans to move the team seemed imminent. A move was in some senses necessary. In the lockout NBA season of 2012, the Kings ranked 27th in home attendance, according to ESPN.com. They dropped to 30th in 2013, though they were only 29th in percentage of seats filled.

Attendance figures increased in 2014, as the team improved its ranking to 22nd, and filled 94.1 percent of the seats in the renamed Sleep Train Arena. An improved roster on the court surely played into that. Yet that improved roster yielded a 28-54 record and a fourth place finish in the impossibly tough Pacific Division.

Undoubtedly, this is not all the fault of new ownership. The Kings were in trouble when Ranadive bought the team.

The Kings last had a winning season in 2005. Whether it was poor decisions in naming coaches, employing poor personnel on the court or off-court troubles, the Kings were a mess well before Ranadive bought the team.

The biggest embarrassment came from the ownership team. The Maloof brothers, well known for spending ample time in Vegas—where they were natives—had sputtered away a good deal of their inheritance on other investments and had themselves been considering relocation well before putting the team up for sale.

ESPN’s 2012 Ultimate Team Rankings had the Kings 121st out of 122 major sports franchises in terms of value, popularity and fan engagement. The arena deal, or lackthereof, played no little role in those rankings.

The lack of winning and playoff appearances surely played a role too. And of course, the economy, especially in California during the 2000s was far from friendly to making money in the NBA.

But the game itself was gaining popularity as players like LeBron James, Kobe Bryant and Kevin Durant made the league more akin to the one which featured Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan.

But Kings fans saw a team which offered little to enjoy. Once proud in the late 90s and early 2000s with teams featuring Chris Webber, Jason Williams and Peja Stojakovic, the Kings had become a pregnant woman with no child in her uterus.

It still played games in the NBA, but it hardly looked like an NBA team. Until drafting, and hitting on, DeMarcus Cousins the team had no star, no visible sign of future hope.

It cycled through coaches like they were low budget films on Netflix. It spent money it did not have, and promised to make things better, but never really did.

Insert the 57-year old Ranadive. Ranadive, one of two foreign owners in the NBA, made his riches by founding TIBCO Software, Inc. and selling it for $4.3 billion in 2014. In that venture, Ranadive’s company offered real-time sports analysis through CBS Sportsline.

Ranadive, born in what is now Mumbai, India, coached his daughter’s middle school national runner-up basketball team, and has published three best-selling books on business leadership, according to the Forbes, Wall Street Journal and New York Times lists.

In the case of the poor Sacramento Kings, they are an inefficiency in and of themselves.

They still seem to have no plan, 10 years removed from a playoff berth and with an owner committed to winning. It is clear that running an NBA team is not the same as coaching a 13-year old girls’ basketball team.

Yet, the man calling the shots is treating it as such.

Ranadive, who once owned a partial share in the Golden State Warriors, figured to bring sound business principles and a commitment to winning basketball games.

Yet here we are on February 6, 2015 with the Kings no better off for the wear. The Kings are 17-31 and again in fourth place in the competitive Pacific Division. A playoff bid continues to evade them.

It was reported in January that Nik Stauskas—the sharp-shooting guard the Kings’ brass had pegged with the help of their hired aide—was put on the trading block.

This was just one more odd announcement surging to the forefront in what has already been an odd and incomprehensible season. Mike Malone was hired last offseason, hand-picked to lead the Kings back to relevance on the basketball court.

Yet he was allowed just over a year to win, and then was briskly ciphered through, like all the other Kings coaches in the Maloof era after Rick Adelman, the apparent reason being a disagreement in coaching philosophy.

Apparently Ranadive is the one to blame. He apparently proposed to his basketball operations that the Kings employ a 4-on-5 defensive strategy, looking to gain an edge, prior to this season. Is that the difference in philosophy?

Let’s hope not. But we may never know.

Here’s what we do know: these Sacramento Kings are still the Kings of old. Despite possessing the best center in the NBA, based on just about every meaningful category, the Kings cannot get out of their own way.

Their owner appears to be meddling in business that should not be his to meddle in. Few professional teams are run in such a way that the owner makes personnel decisions. In the cases where such an arrangement is used, the results are generally disastrous (see: Al Davis, Jerry Jones and to a lesser extent George Steinbrenner until he hired Brian Cashman).

Despite a whirl of moves, which in hindsight may be more the result of their controlling owner than the work of a proven front office maestro (D’Allesandro), the Kings’ roster remains flawed.

It would make sense that it is primarily the work of Ranadive, not D’Allesandro, given that the Kings remain without an identity. They are a bunch of parts which make little sense together. Billy Beane’s A’s teams at least still look like a baseball team, even if their origin documented in Michael Lewis’ Moneyball makes them look a bit unorthodox.

That, and while often head-scratching, Beane’s moves have mostly worked. His market inefficiencies approach has actually taken advantage of real market inefficiencies.

In the case of the poor Sacramento Kings, they are an inefficiency in and of themselves.

They still seem to have no plan, 10 years removed from a playoff berth and with an owner committed to winning. It is clear that running an NBA team is not the same as coaching a 13-year old girls’ basketball team.

Yet, the man calling the shots is treating it as such.

At least the Kings have a new arena coming soon. Maybe that will be the catalyst for increased revenue, excitement and winning.

But there is nothing present on the surface suggesting it will do either.

The Kings remain the laughingstock of the NBA, for no other reason than that they cannot get out of their own way. Move after move is made trying to exploit market inefficiencies.

All the while they forget basketball is a game played with five men. They need to build around their superstar center, not make headlines for a series of random moves.

Next: Is a Warriors vs. Hawks NBA Finals inevitable?

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