After the moves the front office has made I expected to see improvement. I can see Rudy Gay and Williams have talent and I expected to see improvement with the team.
But after a few games I can see the moves (so far) don't make a lot of sense. We have three penetrating scorers, one rookie and one rebounder as starters. Not to mention we are very thin at guard.
We have a defensive minded coach who has been given a lot of offensive pieces but no defensive pieces. We hired a GM who appears to have a different philosophy from the HC. Coincidentally the GM did not hire the HC.
So what is going on? The only thing that makes sense is the GM has acquired pieces he intends to trade for draft picks or other players.
Maybe I'm stating the obvious but I think we need to be more patient. I think it is too soon to be very critical of the HC as he has not been given an ideal situation to work with.
I'm looking forward to more moves.
close. i'd offer simply that the new regime was handed a crap team, and now they're trying to replace the various spare parts of that crap team with more talented parts. in their inaugural offseason, they let tyreke evans, one of their very few quality assets, walk in free agency. they didn't want to match what new orleans was offering, and that's fine. but ever since that decision was made they've been scrambling to acquire just about any player that represents a "talent upgrade" over the
many turds that were left on the roster. honestly, i'm not convinced that ranadive/d'allesandro are giving any consideration to whether or not the pieces actually "fit." at this point, i don't think they care; they just want to have greater future flexibility than they had at the outset. such a strategy, indeed, requires patience on the part of kings fans. many of us
knew that the playoffs were well out of reach long before the season began. this team is simply a mess, and management has considerable work to do to give it shape...
coach is certainly frustrated with the imbalanced, non-defensive roster he's working with, but he, too, must be patient. the kings are very likely to end up with the kind of draft position that will allow them to acquire a potential impact player. then you move forward with a core of cousins/'14 draft pick/mclemore and possibly rudy gay. but if you draft jabari parker or andrew wiggins, you can move rudy gay's enormous ending contract for complementary pieces (if he's not traded before then). if you draft marcus smart or dante exum, then isaiah thomas could likely be re-signed at a reasonable 6th man's salary (if he's not traded before then). if you draft joel embiid or julius randle, then other moves will need to be made, but there is
flexibility going forward in any instance, as long as the kings land a top-6 pick, which is hardly out of the realm of possibility. i'd damn near call it a likelihood, if the team's defense continues to perform so poorly...
all of that said, the picture of "what's next?" becomes
much clearer after the upcoming draft (or, i suppose, after any additional midseason trades occur before the upcoming deadline). but, as of this moment, the kings simply do not have the right combination of talent for the picture to look like anything other than the reflection offered by a funhouse mirror. it seems pretty obvious to me that management has no problem trading any king not named demarcus cousins or ben mclemore, so patience is required until either a trade or the draft reveal a player that can be considered a longterm member of the core of this team going forward...
