Obviously I don't know if they would be the worst frontcourt in the league but if we ran those guys, I'd put big big money on them being bottom 5. I think you're over valuing our players because they're young and some of these guys have room left to grow but the odds of them growing enough to turn this squad into a playoff team has got to be extremely low. We've all learned that you can't judge a player too quickly but if there's anything we've grown accustomed to, it's watching bad basketball. As a fan base, we know it when we see it. It's not like this franchise has a track record of giving up on players too early, only to have them go flourish somewhere else. It's happened but not to the tune where they'd be a surefire playoff team if they had just held on.
I actually really like Jones but he's a back of the bench big along with Metu and Bagley. Queta needs a lot of time for seasoning but the odds of bigs like him becoming a force are usually pretty low. I'm happy with the pick but I wouldn't rely on him for anything for at least another full season. He's got a long way to go but he has shown impressive flashes in the G League.
Gunning for the playoffs right now is basically the same strategy they've always deployed. They see a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel and talk themselves into this being the year. They'll miss out by a position in the standings and land themselves right in that familiar late lottery zone again. Even if they make the play in as the 10th seed, you know they'll just get bounced immediately. They're so close to being firmly in the top 5 in the draft, I see no reason to blow that to follow that carrot again. Acquire the talent in the draft and there won't be any decision making on whether they should tank or not because they'll win regardless.
What makes me even more confident that it's not the right decision is that the conference is very weak compared to previous years and the Kings are still in the exact same spot they've always been in. That means they've regressed. What are they going to do when the other teams improve? I'd put my money on other teams improving before the Kings because this is the worst franchise in all of sports.
The one time in the last 15 years when we truly did bottom out and finish with the worst record in the league we picked
4th. And the best player of this generation was in that draft and went 7th so we can't even blame bad luck for missing out on that opportunity. And now with the way the lottery has been restructured the team with the worst record has a 48% chance of only picking 5th overall. I understand people are unhappy with how the team is playing but tanking is not any kind of a solution because all that's going to do is give us the same type of picks we've had in abundance for the last decade and gone nowhere with. You want 5 lottery picks? I give you Marvin Bagley (#2), De'Aaron Fox (#5), Buddy Hield (#6), Harrison Barnes (#7), Davion Mitchell (#9) and I'll throw in Tyrese Haliburton (#12) as a bonus. All that talent
was acquired in the draft.
Mostly I see a bunch of adults throwing temper tantrums every time the team loses, calling these players losers and then demanding that the team lose even more so we can eventually somehow field a team of
not losers I guess? I can't tell anyone else how to enjoy their sports but I feel like rooting for your own team to fail is a pretty miserable way to go about it. I should know. I've spent most of the last 10 years doing it. And I understand completely why you would argue on behalf of building a team with the lottery but you know what? We've tried that over and over and over and over again. And you're going to tell me with a straight face
as a Sacramento Kings fan that what we really need here are
more lottery picks to fix the problem? I don't believe it. We've had a dozen plus chances to do it by now and sabotaged every single one of them. And we will go on sabotaging every single one of them because we still haven't learned that great players don't develop in a vacuum.
It's not luck which has kept San Antonio in the playoff hunt for 20 years or transformed Golden State from a laughing stock to a model organization or allowed Indiana to draft serviceable starters with late first round picks almost every year. The environment needs to change first and that includes the fans as far as I'm concerned. There is no shortcut to a championship just like there's no shortcut to winning a basketball game. We lost this last game to Dallas the same way we've lost most of our games this season ... the players dribble around the perimeter and then fire up a three point jumper. That's about as lazy as it gets offensively. Sometimes they go in and that bails them out just enough to pretend it's working but if they want to win more than occasionally they need to start putting in the work every day, fighting for every rebound, freeing up their teammates with screens, moving without the ball. Hoping on lottery picks is the same thing as firing up those contested threes. It's lazy and it doesn't work and as long as us fans continue to act like losing is a strategy that will magically lead to winning this is
exactly the team we deserve.
Here's all I'm offering as an alternative... let's see what we already have. Let's address the problems one at a time. Rebounding is a problem. Interior defense is a problem. Maybe try a bigger lineup? Maybe find some minutes for the best shot blocker on the roster even if he's raw? We're messing up too many defensive rotations or getting destroyed on mismatches. Maybe sign or trade for another wing who can guard 3s and 4s? Maybe pull players immediately when they make the same mistake twice in a row and tell them what they're doing wrong and then put them back in the game? I feel like half this roster has looked around and seen that their teammates aren't working hard and started to feel like they don't need to either. That's absolute death for any kind of a team. Working hard should be the bare minimum requirement just to earn minutes. Maybe there's no time to rebuild the entire offense mid-season but we could simplify it down to high low actions and pick and rolls and at least execute
something correctly even if it's rudimentary and predictable. That's all Dallas beat us with. Can we try to develop the players we have right now instead of junking everything and pretending like things will be different next time if we just find players who will work harder?
