If this same team was able to win games early in the season to the point where we actually had people talking about the playoffs, then something has happened to change that. (And no, I never bought into the playoff talk. It was, to me, nothing more than hopeful fan exuberance.)
Is it all on the coach? OF COURSE NOT! But pointing the finger at last night's game and saying, "See, he played the kdis and they still played horribly" is like handing someone an elephant's tail and asking them to describe the animal it came from.
There are a myriad of problems on the Kings. Yes, playing time for the kids is a major one BUT so is the "matador defense," as Grant aptly called it last night.
The team tuned out. And who did they tun out on? It certainly wasn't the fans. It was the coach, IMHO.
Our team sucks. Period. When a team plays that badly for nights on end, you have to ask if there's anything you can do about it.
What a lot of us are saying is that Reggie Theus was an experiment to begin with. He was a former player who coached two years in a small college with a certain amount of success. He came to the NBA with niothing else on his coaching resume.
I've seen enough to come to the conclusion that he simply isn't what our Kings - old and new - need to build the foundation for the future. Yes, he played the kids but he also called time outs at bizarre times, panicked and threw some really bizarre combinations on the court in an attempt to find something/anything that would work and, in general, just didn't look like he had a clue what he was doing.
Coaches lose games. Players win games. It's been that way from the beginning and that's the way it always will be. In this case, that goes further. Coaches can so totally confuse and demoralize their players that the players no longer care about giving their most. They commit stupid errors and become selfish and self-absorbed.
When they showed Bobby Jackson at the end of the game, it was a look into the hearts of many of us. He was pissed - and it wasn't because the Kings lost the game. I truly believe he was most upset because of the laxk of leadership from the bench, and the decline into chaos and failure on the court.
No, Reggie didn't do what he was supposed to do. he did what would on the surface meet the requirement to "play the kids"... There's a lot more to being a successful head coaxh, however, and I don't think he's doing any of it.
The oddest thing is I still firmly believe Reggie Theus COULD be a totally adequate coach. He could work with the kids, he could challenge them to improve by putting them into situations where they didn't fear being yanked for making mistakes, he could do a lot of things. Unfortunately, I think Reggie has put himself into an adversarial relationship with the owners that can only end one way. I don't want to see us with another new coach...but I certainly don't want to see over four months more of what I saw last night.
If removing Theus stops the bleeding, so to speak, long enough to regroup our team and get them back to playing with heart and hustle then Theus has to go. It won't be the first time a coach was removed and, if you look around the NBA, it certainly won't be the last.