It's not living in the past, it's analyzing the bone head decisions that turned this team into the joke that it is today. He might still be able to draft well, but Petrie lost his edge in the trade market years ago. Everyone has caught on...
Bill Walsh used to say that its better to trade a player one year too early than one year too late. It takes a lot of guts to do it though. Your going to take heat. When he traded Montana, 49er faithful went balistic. Then he traded Lott, and then Rice, etc. They all went on to play a few years more and they were fairly secessful.
Owners are like the all-star player thats past him prime, but still thinks he has one good year left. They think that all it takes is a little adjustment here and there, and Wa La, were as good as knew. It seldom works, and the result can be even more destructive. Not only didn't it acheive sucess, but now you have a roster full of players that just a year or two ago were very tradable. There's a very fine line between having one more shot at it and not.
I believe that the Kings first mistake was the Peja trade. Not that he shouldn't have been traded, but who he was traded for. And no, not because it was Ron Artest, but because the trade was made with the idea that whatever was broken, could be fixed by the trade. The handwriting was on the wall and no one read it. Or if they did, they didn't have the power to make a course correction.
Vlade was gone, and he was the glue that held that team together. Webb was gone as was Christie. Only Peja and Bibby remained, and neither of them seemed to be able to function together. It was time to start over. But instead, the powers that be, still had dreams of a championship banner flying in the rafters of Arco. Unfortunately, that dream turned into the present nightmare.
