Kings' Luke Walton wants competition, Buddy Hield not guaranteed to start

[SacTownKid]

“We’re going to play fast,” Walton said. “We have one of the fastest point guards in the League on our team, we have versatile players who can get out and run the wings, and we have shooting.”

-April 16, 2019

Exactly. The most frustrating thing about Walton is he always said the right things. Heck, he would even do them, for a game or two. "We're going to go small!". Then the first sign of issues he's right back to the standard horns garbage with two bigs stuffing the paint on his way to absolute futility. I don't know if that brief run with the Warriors where he was flying the plane on auto pilot got to his head or if he was sick of all the baby's in his locker room but something strange was going down.

 

[pdxKingsFan]

To be fair to Luke - there was extreme pressure for him to win with this team last year - and right out of the gate their high draft pick went down with injury, derailing all the offseason moves in support of that player, and creating another tidal wave of second guessing EVERYTHING from the moment that pick was made.

Now I think Luke is dead man walking, but he will be given a chance to show he can succeed - with a slightly depleted but better balanced roster. And if he fails, I think everyone is going to accept that, but he won't be given another chance. About the only thing he can do completely wrong is to put us right in that 30-40 win zone.

 

[captain bill]

If he’s really considering putting Halliburton in competition with Buddy he’s gotta be smoking something. Regular season starts in just over 2 weeks and he reported a few days ago. Everyone loves seeing the new shiny truck right away but this is a year that we shouldn’t expect to see rookies on the floor getting any sort of minutes early on if at all. The time from the 2020 draft to the all-star break is about the same as the time from the draft to the first day of training camp in a regular year. It would be completely nuts to be doing anything with the rookies right now other than just acclimating them to the environment.