Kings training camp 2025 open thread
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- Start date
QWERTYLICIOUS
Starter
CHAMPIONSHIP!!!
Who's hosting the official "KingsFans.com Championship Party" in June???
ShastaKingsFan
All-Star
Christie keeps talking about "picking up 94 feet", before he has a roster that proves that it can commit to a straight up man to man defense in a half court set. No sagging off to help, just stick with your man and don't give up open 3's. You will give up some easy 2's, but don't allow easy 3's. Call it high iQ analytical defense.
Optimism here escapes me
Optimism here escapes me
You want 94 feet then you need to start Carter, Keon, Nique, and Keegan.
I'll start this with the caveat that we have not played a real minute yet under the Perry/Christie regime, but I have a sneaking suspicion we've just been getting all talk this off-season. They can say all the right things in a presser about being a defensive-focused organization, build an identity, we're going to fight every game etc.... and we come out the 1st game with the exact same problems as last year, allow 54% from 3 and -10 3PM on the night.
I'm no NBA coach and I won't pretend to even come close to understanding the intricacies of how to run a professional organization, but my god how was this not the first thing addressed this off-season and training camp? How do you watch a year of being the worst 3pt defense in basketball and literally the first game has those same exact problems? And people can keep pretending it's all personal; there's significantly worse teams with far worse talent that don't get shot out of the building night in and night out.
Like you said, I'll gladly accept open lay-ups every so often if that means we're not leaving uncontested 3's the entire game. Step 1 to fixing the defense SHOULD have been "Hey guys, we are not going to be 30th in 3pt defense this year."
ShastaKingsFan
All-Star
I'm afraid that Doug tends to be quite "pie in the sky". I'd rather him get a feel for what his roster is truly capable of, before throwing unrealistic goals out into the media. I think most of it is based on what his individual mindset was for himself, instead of what is really the strength of this group of players. I hope it's not his downfall as a head coach
Telemachus
Starter
The idea that someone can't improve unless they are young is ridiculous. Not to mention, he is 23, not 25. BTW, almost every player improves after 25.
Insomniacal Fan
Starter
There are no teams in the NBA with a starting center that is significantly worse at rim protection. https://stathead.com/tiny/kbXL8.
It's analytically the right call to give up 3s instead of open layups. I'm no coach, but I think most modern NBA offenses are going to be able to figure out a way to exploit a weak point.
sactowndog
Hall of Famer
Yep this team is hampered by the personnel and by an owner who adamantly hires people who tell him what he wants to hear. Most people do that but our owner is a demonstrated idiot about sports so it’s problematic.
Doug excels at telling people what they want to hear but actually accomplishing it with this roster will be tough. The Monte era was way worse than people want to admit in terms of shaping the roster. It’s going to take time to fix this thing.
Allowing a GM that you're about to fire to handcuff the team to $96 million in guaranteed money over the next two years was like finding a lit match and then pouring gasoline on it and shutting the door. It's also ironic that it was two years of inaction which cost Monte his job and then suddenly he had his busiest trade deadline loading up the roster with contracts that his successor would need to waste assets to get rid of.
ShastaKingsFan
All-Star
Was it Monte's fault,....or is it the ever present Ranadive problem?
sactowndog
Hall of Famer
In some fairness to Monte, Vivek wanted Zach. But the fact Monte had limited influence over our owner was part of the problem. It’s why I said the Monte era and not Monte specifically.
sactowndog
Hall of Famer
Both. See my answer the post before this one.
ShastaKingsFan
All-Star
There's some moves that I don't believe that Monte would have made, had he not been working for Ranadive. Taking on Lavine for one
sactowndog
Hall of Famer
You left out the second round picks Monte wasted on things like a short term rental to make the play-in and lose your pick.
Yep.
I might be inclined to point fingers at Monte, even as one of his most staunch supporters, if the timeline made sense. I suspect DDR was a "Ranadive" play as well, bringing in a big name and he got to say "They not like us" at the presser. DDR certainly isn't a player archetype that Monte would normally look for.
There's no logical line of reasoning to say that Monte was in full control of the Fox deal, completely transformed the nature of this team... and then was let go 2 months later. Not even Vivek would be that trigger happy to expect results that quickly.
My guess is Vivek's been running the show for a better part of the year. And that's where the factions started to form with the Wilcox camp/Brown camp/Fox camp/ Monte camp, etc. I think if we gave truth serum to Monte, he wouldn't have let Brown go either. But I'm also guessing, especially considering Perry was hired 12 hours after Monte was let go, that this Perry/Christie pairing has been in the works for awhile. And that Vivek needed to clean house and have the "reasoning" to do so before.
For now, I think the one improvement is I think we can assume Perry/Christie are on the same page, which always does help cohesion within the organization. But I am extremely curious if Christie will actually back up his talk and if he truly does have full control to run this team. Same with Perry
Yeah, I don't know this to be true but past history (the Malone firing and Vivek fawning over Buddy Hield) points to Vivek as the likely moving force on the decision to remove Mike Brown and then to acquire Zach LaVine shortly thereafter. If there's one thing I feel I can say with absolute certainty when it comes to our owner it's that the man loves watching fast-paced offense and exhibits limited patience for anything else.
sactowndog
Hall of Famer
I don’t disagree. But as head of basketball ops they fall under Monte’s record regardless. There was a reason other GM candidates pulled their name from consideration.
Goes back to my point, Vivek hires people that will readily agree to his stupid opinions when he needs people that will tell him to F-off and go back to the business side. There is a reason Doug was a Vivek favorite. Whether Scott Perry can finesse our idiot owner remains to be seen.
Quite frankly what this team needs is a unified basketball operations group saying this roster can’t be successful and we need to tear it down. Not sure that exists either.
I agree with most of this but would caution that Pete D'Alessandro and George Karl were clearly on the same page too. As were Vlade Divac and Luke Walton. What is different about Perry and Christie so far is that they are at least talking a lot more about defense though I have yet to see roster moves which reflect that shift in philosophy and given who our owner is, I remain skeptical that this duo will be allowed to shift the culture in the way that they want.
Padrino
All-Star
I don't have much enthusiasm for the coming season, primarily because I don't know what it portends for this team's future. They're going to be competitive, because they're not without talent, but they're highly unlikely to be good enough to rise above the play-in bracket. So what are we doing here?
It's a "gap year", sure. The front office is going to take time to evaluate things. But what conclusion are they going to reach other than "We need to sell just about everything off because none of it is good enough and none of it fits"? And once they reach that inevitable conclusion, are they going to be empowered by ownership to sell off veteran assets to kickstart a rebuild? Or are they only going to be empowered to trade not-good-enough vets for other not-good-enough vets, thus keeping the mediocrity churn rolling in perpetuity?
I just find it hard to care about what's coming in 25-26, because so little of it possesses the whiff of long-term stability. Keegan/Keon/Carter/Nique are all great under-30 pieces, but none of them are "build around" pieces, and they're all on the older side for young guys, so if a rebuild order doesn't come down the pike soon, the franchise isn't really going to position themselves well to take advantage of the youth they already have before they're forced to commit long-term money to players who are strong talents but are not necessarily needle-movers.
Elsewhere, I have to admit to not believing in this coaching staff at all. I'm among those who have been quite bearish on Doug Christie as a head coach, and when I look up and down the staff list, it just doesn't scream modern NBA to me. Where does the innovation come from? Where do the schemes compensate for this roster's glaring weaknesses? All the talk of defending 94 feet is nice, I guess, but we all know it's not going to mean anything, because the Kings have very few defenders capable of making a difference on that end, and the ones they do have are unlikely to log the minutes necessary for their defensive skill to have a sustainable impact.
Honestly, Christie is already setting himself and his staff up for failure by making grand proclamations about how defensive commitment will be what earns minutes, and that a defensive performance like the team's first preseason game will not happen again. My eyes just roll straight to the back of my head. Schroder/LaVine/DeRozan/Murray/Sabonis is going to be a bad defensive starting unit. It just is. And when the Kings' team defense once again finds itself in the bottom-third of the NBA as the regular season progresses, what accountability measures are going to be taken by the coaching staff? Will we ever see DeMar DeRozan or Zach LaVine come off the bench for this squad? Does Christie have cojones enough to commit to getting his actual defensive talent extended time on the court together at the expense of his big money guys?
And god... don't get me started on "culture". The Kings have been attempting to establish a "culture" of some kind for over fifteen years, spanning many GMs, coaches, and players, and none of it has stuck. I don't want to hear it. I've had to tune out so much of the Kings' off-season chatter this year because it's a bunch of unearned kumbaya from a franchise that cannot seem to get out of its own way.
Now, I'll allow that maybe this team will surprise me. Maybe the vibes will be immaculate and they'll rediscover their offensive mojo and bust their butts enough to turn out a league-average defense on their way to the 48-50 wins necessary to snag the 6th seed in the brutally tough Western Conference. I'd certainly enjoy being proven wrong like that... but I'm really not betting on it.
It's a "gap year", sure. The front office is going to take time to evaluate things. But what conclusion are they going to reach other than "We need to sell just about everything off because none of it is good enough and none of it fits"? And once they reach that inevitable conclusion, are they going to be empowered by ownership to sell off veteran assets to kickstart a rebuild? Or are they only going to be empowered to trade not-good-enough vets for other not-good-enough vets, thus keeping the mediocrity churn rolling in perpetuity?
I just find it hard to care about what's coming in 25-26, because so little of it possesses the whiff of long-term stability. Keegan/Keon/Carter/Nique are all great under-30 pieces, but none of them are "build around" pieces, and they're all on the older side for young guys, so if a rebuild order doesn't come down the pike soon, the franchise isn't really going to position themselves well to take advantage of the youth they already have before they're forced to commit long-term money to players who are strong talents but are not necessarily needle-movers.
Elsewhere, I have to admit to not believing in this coaching staff at all. I'm among those who have been quite bearish on Doug Christie as a head coach, and when I look up and down the staff list, it just doesn't scream modern NBA to me. Where does the innovation come from? Where do the schemes compensate for this roster's glaring weaknesses? All the talk of defending 94 feet is nice, I guess, but we all know it's not going to mean anything, because the Kings have very few defenders capable of making a difference on that end, and the ones they do have are unlikely to log the minutes necessary for their defensive skill to have a sustainable impact.
Honestly, Christie is already setting himself and his staff up for failure by making grand proclamations about how defensive commitment will be what earns minutes, and that a defensive performance like the team's first preseason game will not happen again. My eyes just roll straight to the back of my head. Schroder/LaVine/DeRozan/Murray/Sabonis is going to be a bad defensive starting unit. It just is. And when the Kings' team defense once again finds itself in the bottom-third of the NBA as the regular season progresses, what accountability measures are going to be taken by the coaching staff? Will we ever see DeMar DeRozan or Zach LaVine come off the bench for this squad? Does Christie have cojones enough to commit to getting his actual defensive talent extended time on the court together at the expense of his big money guys?
And god... don't get me started on "culture". The Kings have been attempting to establish a "culture" of some kind for over fifteen years, spanning many GMs, coaches, and players, and none of it has stuck. I don't want to hear it. I've had to tune out so much of the Kings' off-season chatter this year because it's a bunch of unearned kumbaya from a franchise that cannot seem to get out of its own way.
Now, I'll allow that maybe this team will surprise me. Maybe the vibes will be immaculate and they'll rediscover their offensive mojo and bust their butts enough to turn out a league-average defense on their way to the 48-50 wins necessary to snag the 6th seed in the brutally tough Western Conference. I'd certainly enjoy being proven wrong like that... but I'm really not betting on it.
I think the by far biggest action and discrepancy between the Perry/Christie talk and what's actually going to happen on the court is burying Carter to the 11th man and signing a journeyman PG who is not good at all defensively. Instead of saying "You know what, Carter has some ways to go at being a PG, but this kid is a defensive game-changer and we're going to lean into that talent", the initial plan to start this season is to keep that guy out of the rotation. Pretty much the embodiment of what they've preaching all off-season.
And the way you survive the poor defense of a DDR/LaVine/Monk core is you get as many Carter/Keon/Keegan/Nique minutes on the floor with them as possible.
Gonna be a long year
Padrino
All-Star
I truly, sincerely would love to be proven wrong in my estimation of Doug Christie. But he's long been a company man, and I just don't see him possessing the courage as a first-time NBA head coach to p*ss off his big money vets (and potentially the front office) by benching them in favor of his younger, heartier, more defensively-capable talents. Carter is rarely going to see the court without injury elevation. The same is probably true of Nique, though he might be lucky enough to get a bit of regular run because the Kings just don't have much length.
Part of me is honestly hoping that the whole thing goes south so hard and so fast that the front office starts working to dump some combination of vets for future draft compensation ASAP. At least then we'd get to see a bit more of what the Kings have in the Keegan/Keon/Carter/Nique bunch. It frustrates me to no end that, if the roster were to remain unchanged, we're still not going to know exactly what Keegan could be to this team offensively, because he's consistently sacrificed in the offense for the sake of elevating vets who are nowhere near the Kings long-term plans (if indeed, a long-term plan ever actually materializes).
Jdbraver137
Bench
Role players, but stars are stars from the get go.
That's definitely not true. Couple exceptions to the rule, but almost all stars start out as highly productive role players that get boosted into a bigger role year 2/3 and pop then
I wouldn't go so far as to say that "almost all stars" start out as highly productive role players (unless we're talking about their pre-NBA careers) but there certainly are plenty of examples which disprove the "all stars are stars from the get go" idea. Kawhi Leonard is the most oft-cited recent example but there's also Jimmy Butler, Nikola Jokic, Domantas Sabonis, Paul George. The team situation a player is drafted into plays a role too. Top 5 picks usually end up on teams which are happy to hand them the ball early and often but players taken in the mid first round and later are more likely to be blocked from those high usage roles for a few years. It does seem though, from my cursory first glance, that players who are destined to be multi-time All Stars will typically reach that "All Star" milestone by their 5th NBA season or not at all -- but even that rule has its exceptions (Steve Nash, Chauncey Billups).
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Caccia
Starter
Then you should coming back in a year's time and see what has transpired. No point wasting mental or emotional effort here.
