These are not incogruous statements. Firstly, is Greene only allowed to get minutes if he is a so-called "savior?" Secondly, unless you think that Petrie and/or Westphal think that Greene is going to develop into a center, what does our needing a backup center have to do with whether or not we play Greene?
Even if this is true (which I, personally, am not willing to stipulate), that's still not an excuse for not playing him, especially not when the games don't count. At twenty-one, with only one season of sporadic playing time under his belt, Greene is still an unknown commodity and, in my opinion, it certainly should be important to someone in Kings management to find out what his value is, whether he's a good player that we need to utilize, a bad player that can con some other team into thinking still has an upside, or an ugly player that we need to cut our losses on. But, here's what we absolutely should not be doing: we should not be burying Greene on the bench behind veteran journeymen.
This is much worse than the Wallace situation, because at least then you had the excuse of a team that was trying to compete for a championship, and didn't have time to develop a kid at a position where they already had two good players. But this team... well... ain't. And Mason, Nocioni and Garcia, to put it mildly, simply aren't good enough to justify Greene not playing at all. There is no good reason to sit a twenty-one year-old untested kid behind five and ten-year journeymen veterans, on a team that's not going anywhere whether the vets play or not.
Play him, trade him, or cut him; just don't bury him behind some other scrub.
