gunks
Hall of Famer
I guess this is the real "who is in control" indicator, isn't it?
Fire Christie
- Thread starter SufferingKingsFan
- Start date
I guess this is the real "who is in control" indicator, isn't it?
coolhandluke
Starter
One can only dream. No matter how close he's with Perry, Thibs is not going to get tied up with this Kings roster that doesn't have any star level talent. He's well established and can wait for the right opportunity. It's more likely that a retread or long time assistant would get the nod.
ShastaKingsFan
Hall of Famer
Is Thibs considered a retread yet?
Srzly
Bench
I really hope this isn’t true. He has shown nothing as a head coach.
I get the roster sucks, but he also gets outcoached basically every game.
No adjustments most of the time, or when he does they are often too late. I’m convinced that he could stay in the locker room most games and you wouldn’t even notice a difference in the product on the court.
Padrino
All-Star
It's just GM speak, I expect. Doug Christie is a Vivek guy, not a Perry guy. So despite the fact that he doesn't like labeling it a rebuild, Perry's going to get to work rebuilding the roster while the Kings lose enough games to keep their lottery chances high this season and next. I'd guess they don't pick up Christie's option after next season, though, once Perry has had enough time to lay the groundwork with Vivek to hire a new head coach, trotting out more GM speak about appreciating Christie's service as a Sacramento Kings legend, but so-and-so is now the coach we need to move into the future, etc.
Kingster
Hall of Famer
What struck me in the box score of this last game was that there was only one assist between Nique and Max, the two most gifted passers on this team. It's not because these two rookies are unwilling to pass; it's because Christie refuses to put them in positions with the ball in their hands where they can use their passing skills in an offense that makes sense. Christie continues to placate the vets at the expense of development of the youth and of "playing the right way."
I've been one of the more vocal Queta supporters, so assuming I'm one of the people you are referencing here -- my take on this is/was that Queta would likely grow into being a serviceable part-time big (he has) while JaVale McGee is the ringleader of the "Shaqtin' a Fool All-Stars" and should be kept as far away as possible from any team that intends to compete. I would have preferred we continued with the Nerlens Noel reclamation project if I had my druthers but I didn't see any downside to keeping Queta on the roster too as the 15th man considering we had size issues otherwise and some kind of hedge was needed to account for Noel's spotty injury history. Moving both and forcing Mike Brown to lean on McGee for the backup C minutes was the worst of all possible worlds.
I don't know if that counts as hyper-fixated but I at least wanted to clarify where I was coming from. It was more about my extreme distaste for JaVale McGee then an irrational fervor over Queta.
But also, since so many people just look at counting stats and dismiss players like Queta as replaceable, I do want to make a slightly broader point. Sure he's not even averaging a double-double and he's only playing about 24 minutes per game but then you look and his team is outperforming expectations so far given who is left on their roster and he leads that team in defensive rating. As well he should since the stat is skewed in favor of big guys who play a lot of minutes. It is worth pointing out, I think, that the reason you keep a 7 footer around is not for counting stats it's for "presence" and what's reflected here when you look at team record, per36 stats, and the defensive ratings of every player on that team is that Queta has been effective at providing them with an inside presence. Not dominant, not a guy that's going to get talked about in fantasy leagues or among casual fans outside of Boston, but he's been the starting center for 33 of Boston's 35 games so far this season (he missed two with a sprained ankle) and Boston has been the 7th best team in the league by record so far. That's good value for the just over $2 million they're paying him this year. Certainly better than 3/4ths of our current roster in price vs. production.
I did not support bringing in McGee or giving up on Queta, but since the Celtics are as close as a B team as I have, I'd also note that him getting a 2-way with Boston that eventually got converted while they were in repeater tax territory - and did not look good - means that until this year we wouldn't have had the time to invest in him with our roster and aspirations. I wasn't going at you, but the people that insist it was an institutional failure to move on.
Clearly that was Brown's decision though, to bury him and then go get his guy as backup.
Jdbraver137
Starter
Queta is not good
Padrino
All-Star
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "good." If you mean "All-Star caliber talent," then sure, Queta is not "good." But if you scale appropriately to mean "above-average NBA center," then yes, Queta is "good," especially since he doesn't cost anything and has helped Boston keep their head above water without Jayson Tatum to the tune of the second-best record in the Eastern Conference. Those who don't think Queta is good weren't paying attention last season and aren't paying attention this season.
QWERTYLICIOUS
Starter
Lower your expectations of the guy (significantly), and you might just have a different opinion when it comes to Queta...
Our team is 8-29. If this were NBA 2K where players are rated on the same vague combination of popularity and past performance that most fans use to assign value (ie the "Queta is not good" model of player analysis) than our roster of aging stars would probably be neck and neck with a Boston roster that does not have Tatum and a Miami roster that has only had Tyler Herro for 7 games. Yet in actuality we (the team which is currently 8-29, mind you) could not find room to develop Neemias Queta who is fifth in minutes played on that Boston squad which has a record of 23-12 and ranks second in the league in team offense or Davion Mitchell who is 2nd in minutes played on that Miami Squad which is 20-17 and ranks third in the league in team defense.
Our front office shared your opinion and look where it has led us. Not only are we currently the third worst team in the league by record, we also rank 30 of 30 in team offense and 27 of 30 in team defense. Don't you think that perhaps the player evaluation methodology which was used to make those decisions, to punt on Queta and Mitchell and replace them with older veterans who were known quantities at the time but already into the age-related decline phases of their careers, might have been flawed? If you want to stand up and say "not me, I know better" then you've got to come to the table with something more illuminating than "Queta is not good". If he's not good, why is the team he's played 812 minutes for in just over 2 months 23-12? He must be doing something right.
There is a pattern of behavior here where consistently for decades this franchise has done a really poor job of determining player value. And the new front office and coaching staff don't get a pass either since in less than a year on the job they're already well on their way to fumbling Keon Ellis away so that we can double-down on vets yet again. Who we let go is only part of the story. When you look at who we've chosen to prioritize acquiring, re-signing, or developing instead, it sure looks like institutional failure to me. Nearly all of it.
You're the biggest Brown defender here and you want to have it both ways because he is the one that fumbled the bag with Queta, Davion, and others, possibly including Keon.
Can we at least wait to see what happens with Keon, and really everyone at the deadline before we drag Perry over the coals?
ShastaKingsFan
Hall of Famer
The pattern of behavior under Ranadive is already clear
To the extent that there IS a pattern, it is that he gives a huge amount of leeway to his GM for the first 2-3 years.
I've never seen him give a basketball interview, I've never seen him talk about players that excite him or passion for the game outside of coaching his daughter's team which gave us the stupid cherry picker quote.
I'm really not defending him when I say that I think he isn't responsible for all the ticky tack horrible moves the team makes. He hired the people that are. I'm yet to be convinced Perry knows what he's doing and isn't just a smooth talker. When he gets a GM who knows what he's doing I think we'll be fine. Monte built a fine team in 2022 and gave us our funnest season since maybe 2003. His follow up was abysmal but between Monte and Brown there was no reason for Vivek to intervene and there was nothing before DDR that screams owner interference.
I don't know who was responsible for DeMar but I can't really blame Vivek for nudging Monte to do something to improve the roster after the 23-24 season was so disappointing and Fox was refusing to entertain our extension offers. But its also clear to me that Fox refusing to extend put pressure on everyone as well to make that move to retain him, and I think with full 20/20 hindsight it's likely that he was out the door the minute he signed with KLUTCH and I'd put odds at 50-50 Recee urged him to do it.
ShastaKingsFan
Hall of Famer
Really? I have to wonder what he would have to do, to convince you that he's a meddling owner. Come out and say so about himself in an interview?
That article sounded like it was more than a 'nudge". It sounded like a command to get DDR done before the Summer League game so he could walk out with DDR at half time for the "not like us" moment. That's... bad.
I've defended Brown because I felt he earned it. The coach's job isn't to keep everyone happy, it's to get the team in position to win games and he was doing that. Even the games we lost we were at least competitive. That doesn't mean I agree with every decision he made. If the standard we're holding our coaches to here is perfection than nobody is going to measure up.
Queta and Mitchell getting cut or salary dumped to make way for someone else is only a problem if the someone else's they were replaced with don't match their production. All I'm trying to say here is that it's not an accident that this franchise has been a bottom 10 ranked defense in all but one season of the post-Adelman era (2006 to now). That one season was the 2023-2024 season, year 2 with Brown, when the Kings won 46 games and lost in the play-in to New Orleans. They finished 14th in defense that year which was the first and only sign of life for our playoff chances and I remember hearing a lot of whining about how the offense had regressed and we were worse. That's the type of mindset which leads people to outlandish takes like "we'll fix this by adding Zach LaVine" and then after the house of cards *shockingly* crumbled down in the wake of yet another attempt to win with more offense the kicker "Zach LaVine is not the problem, he's our leading scorer".
Mitchell and Queta are flawed players, all role players are. If they were good at everything they'd be stars. We tried them out and then tried someone else, fine. That's professional sports. There's a lot of oops involved in finding what works. I'm not up in arms about losing role players. But if we can't even after the fact correctly identify which moves were the oops moves and which players we should have kept, which players are good buy low candidates now and which will nuke our future, than our odds of pushing this back into the positive are slim and none. Monte and Mike signing 3 defensive bigs that previous summer and winding up with none was a massive bummer for everyone but Monte did eventually get it right with Jonas Valanciunas so it's clear that he knew what type of player he was looking for. I can't say that I trust Perry to do the same because so far he hasn't shown me any indication that he gets it. Trust is earned and he hasn't earned mine yet.
What I am not convinced of is that he is beyond average in the meddling department. He let the basketball people basically do nothing for 2 years before he stepped in.
Almost everything Perry has done has been aimed with a reset in mind. I'm not convinced he can do the job once the reset part is over. But I'm willing to let him flip that switch.
Something had to be done. The two years of Monte basically doing nothing were already digging us in a hole, especially when every move he did make after the 22-23 season began was a downgrade.
In a perfect world Mike Brown didn't push his chips in early, gets to complete last year and Monte actually did something to move this team forward. Unfortunately Monte's failures combined with the horrible start being magnified by Brown's contract demand meant Mike was the first head to roll, and it did what it was supposed to do. The problem was Fox, who I think with hindsight we can now say just didn't want to be here and was plotting his exit after the GSW series and signing with KLUTCH.
ShastaKingsFan
Hall of Famer
Have you considered that maybe the better savvy pro's with other options, including coaches, players, and front office, don't want to come to the Kings at this point in large part because of the owner?
I think they don't want to come because Sacramento regardless of who the owner is. And this applies to a number of other cities around the league as well including the one I call home today. We weren't swimming with people begging to join the team when the Maloofs were golden boys and the team played the most exciting basketball in the league either.
You've decided on a version of events which you prefer to believe in but very little of this is verified. Fox himself said he made up his mind on leaving Sacramento only after Mike Brown was fired. And Scott Perry trying to take credit for an intentional self-sabotaging is like banking in a logo three and saying you meant to do it that way. Of course he's going to try and spin his disastrous first personnel decisions as step one of a master plan. He was also quite careful to promise nothing and tell everyone that it will take multiple years to fix this mess. Our most recent lotto pick can't sniff the floor and even the guy Perry drafted this past June in the first round has been buried by the additional guards he himself signed. He inherited a 40 win team and has it on pace for 18 wins and now he's saying he won't put a timeline on a rebuild, so extensive is the work to be done? At least Sam Hinkie called bank before unleasing the hail mary hatchet job on his own team.
I am critical of Fox because he loafed around just as often as he played to his potential. He's given more effort the past 3 months with his new team than he ever gave to us for more than 4-5 games at a time. And it was his sloppy play and refusal to sign an extension that lead to the front office paralysis and Brown's firing.
I wish we could have just traded him without a one team trade demand and given Monte and Brown a chance to see if they could make lemonade out of it together but it really does feel to me that a conscious decision was made to elevate Fox over Domas and it put us in a holding pattern that stalled out and lead to a crash and burn.
Unfortunately when you go on a massive losing streak in a season you view yourself as a top 6 team in the conference something had to give and it was easiest to can the coach first. Especially when it was evident more than half the team had tuned him out. I don't know why but the only other explanation I have been given is that Domas is a bad apple and at fault for everything. And I just can't fathom that based on what we've seen him give on the court, healthy or otherwise.
ShastaKingsFan
Hall of Famer
Head coaches and front office executives?
Agree – it’s frustrating that the owner pushed for these moves that suck. But Monte was in charge for five years, including the year in which we acquired DDR and Zach. He could have been the smartest guy in the room but if he couldn’t maintain influence within the club he deserves some blame.
The process for selecting Monte and his team was very competitive with a number of guys that people on this board liked and we chose Monte.
I think the only time we ever got passed over by a coach we really coveted was SVG which was a blessing in disguise. Can't really help us when we identify splashy names that stink or just want a paycheck.
Yeah and I'm not letting Vivek off the hook but at the same time I think he's been hands off when he should have intervened more often than he is a Jerry Jones type. My biggest gripe thus far is I still don't think he knows how to hire front office personnel that are worth giving complete confidence to. His first FO ran off his hand picked coach that won a championship in his next gig, his next group rated Bagley so high they didn't even consider the rest of the draft class at the 2 spot, and Monte was too passive and imho never got maximum value on his trades, even if it was just throwing in a second rounder to a deal that was otherwise fair, he always seemed to give the edge to our trade partner.