http://www.sacbee.com/content/sports/basketball/kings/story/12697843p-13550367c.html
Mark Kreidler: Thumbs up for Adelman in 'down' season
By Mark Kreidler -- Bee Columnist
Published 2:15 am PDT Saturday, April 9, 2005
Rick Adelman, in his seventh season as Kings coach, has dealt well with difficult situations.
Sacramento Bee/Randy Pench
At this point, time itself is Rick Adelman's great adversary. He has been in Sacramento exactly long enough for every thinking fan to have achieved an almost complete paralysis through analysis of his every strategy, substitution pattern and grimace.
He has become what most sports figures who linger in one town eventually do: a polarizing figure about whose style and approach the vast majority of Kingdom long ago made up its mind, thumbs up or thumbs down. Each game only reinforces the good or the bad, depending upon your politics.
In other words, he's Chris Webber in a suit, minus the drama.
And so expect no consensus from the peanut gallery when I tell you this: This season represents Adelman's finest work as the Kings' head coach.
Finest? Absolutely. Best job under the circumstances. Weirdest confluence of events. Most unrecognizable bunch of faces since the Kings reorganized as a franchise way back in, oh, 1998.
Sacramento has a fair chance to fall short of 50 victories for the first time in five years, and it's Adelman's best work. The Kings are going to wind up fifth or sixth in the Western Conference, and it's his best work.
If Mike Bibby and the Fun Bunch go out in the first round of the playoffs, it won't constitute the greatest shock in the world. Peja Stojakovic may well wind up with his least satisfying overall season since the turn of the millennium. The Maloofs are jacking up prices on the good seats once again despite the club's lowest finish since 1999-2000.
Best ... work ... yet.
Let me paint a scenario. Take a team that came within one game of playing in the Western Conference finals last year. Immediately subtract your best passer in the modern era, Vlade Divac, and the NBA's best three-point shooter by percentage, Anthony Peeler.
It's all still good, right? Now establish your power forward, Webber, as a guy who simply isn't going to return to what he was before his severe knee injury. He is, let's say, 75 percent of his former athletic self.
Add Stojakovic as an unhappy camper who requests a trade during the summer and then reports in something less than his usual stellar shape. Give newcomer Greg Ostertag a training camp injury. Pack the entire group off to China for an NBA goodwill tour that essentially costs one week of camp time. (Post-China, the Kings lose four of five exhibition games and go 0-3 to begin the season; their travel partners, the Houston Rockets, go 1-3 in subsequent exhibitions, 0-2 to begin the season and 6-11 through 17.)
Right the ship and then lose Bobby Jackson for the season. Right it again and watch Doug Christie, then Webber, be traded in the first two explosive in-season deals of the Geoff Petrie era. Lose Brad Miller. Coach for your playoff life down the stretch with an available roster that includes exactly three of the players from that conference semifinalist of one year ago.
Adelman has coached Kings teams that were fantastically more successful, but, look, he has never done more with less. Make that more: More tumult. More upheaval. More change.
"I can't think of any coach who has been asked to do what coach Adelman has had to do this season," Kings owner Joe Maloof said recently. "It's pretty incredible, the things that have happened with our team."
It's interesting, the things Maloof says versus the things people sometimes believe he is thinking. There was a line of thought, entering this campaign, that Joe and his brother, Gavin, would wait to see how Adelman did this season before deciding whether to exercise the option on the coach's contract for 2005-06, so unsure were they whether they had the right man for the job.
It was a fantasy; Adelman's contract had always called for the Maloofs to decide on the extension during this season, not after it. Now Adelman has his deal for next season, and you're seeing why.
One of the great criticisms of Adelman, and the most often repeated, is that he's a single-style coach who can't adapt his ways to suit the realities of the moment. Let's run that theory through the current dramedy.
Adelman favors the high-post offense; the Kings right now are almost exclusively guard-driven. Adelman likes his teams to crash the boards and sprint the breaks; the Kings right now are a mediocre-to-fair rebounding team and deliberate on offense.
Adelman likes to ride his established stars to victories. In the post-Webber sequence, the Kings are 13-10 on the backs of Bibby and Stojakovic, certainly, but also on those of Brian Skinner and Mo Evans and Cuttino Mobley and Corliss Williamson and Kenny Thomas.
The man wearing the suit will not be nominated for anything because of that. His team might just go out in the first round of the playoffs. He certainly will be granted no more slack next fall than he was last fall - he has worked in one city far too long for that to happen. That may or may not be fair, but it's definitely life in the food chain of American sports. In the meantime: Rick Adelman can coach. Don't look now, but he may even be getting better at it.
Mark Kreidler: Thumbs up for Adelman in 'down' season
By Mark Kreidler -- Bee Columnist
Published 2:15 am PDT Saturday, April 9, 2005
Rick Adelman, in his seventh season as Kings coach, has dealt well with difficult situations.
Sacramento Bee/Randy Pench
At this point, time itself is Rick Adelman's great adversary. He has been in Sacramento exactly long enough for every thinking fan to have achieved an almost complete paralysis through analysis of his every strategy, substitution pattern and grimace.
He has become what most sports figures who linger in one town eventually do: a polarizing figure about whose style and approach the vast majority of Kingdom long ago made up its mind, thumbs up or thumbs down. Each game only reinforces the good or the bad, depending upon your politics.
In other words, he's Chris Webber in a suit, minus the drama.
And so expect no consensus from the peanut gallery when I tell you this: This season represents Adelman's finest work as the Kings' head coach.
Finest? Absolutely. Best job under the circumstances. Weirdest confluence of events. Most unrecognizable bunch of faces since the Kings reorganized as a franchise way back in, oh, 1998.
Sacramento has a fair chance to fall short of 50 victories for the first time in five years, and it's Adelman's best work. The Kings are going to wind up fifth or sixth in the Western Conference, and it's his best work.
If Mike Bibby and the Fun Bunch go out in the first round of the playoffs, it won't constitute the greatest shock in the world. Peja Stojakovic may well wind up with his least satisfying overall season since the turn of the millennium. The Maloofs are jacking up prices on the good seats once again despite the club's lowest finish since 1999-2000.
Best ... work ... yet.
Let me paint a scenario. Take a team that came within one game of playing in the Western Conference finals last year. Immediately subtract your best passer in the modern era, Vlade Divac, and the NBA's best three-point shooter by percentage, Anthony Peeler.
It's all still good, right? Now establish your power forward, Webber, as a guy who simply isn't going to return to what he was before his severe knee injury. He is, let's say, 75 percent of his former athletic self.
Add Stojakovic as an unhappy camper who requests a trade during the summer and then reports in something less than his usual stellar shape. Give newcomer Greg Ostertag a training camp injury. Pack the entire group off to China for an NBA goodwill tour that essentially costs one week of camp time. (Post-China, the Kings lose four of five exhibition games and go 0-3 to begin the season; their travel partners, the Houston Rockets, go 1-3 in subsequent exhibitions, 0-2 to begin the season and 6-11 through 17.)
Right the ship and then lose Bobby Jackson for the season. Right it again and watch Doug Christie, then Webber, be traded in the first two explosive in-season deals of the Geoff Petrie era. Lose Brad Miller. Coach for your playoff life down the stretch with an available roster that includes exactly three of the players from that conference semifinalist of one year ago.
Adelman has coached Kings teams that were fantastically more successful, but, look, he has never done more with less. Make that more: More tumult. More upheaval. More change.
"I can't think of any coach who has been asked to do what coach Adelman has had to do this season," Kings owner Joe Maloof said recently. "It's pretty incredible, the things that have happened with our team."
It's interesting, the things Maloof says versus the things people sometimes believe he is thinking. There was a line of thought, entering this campaign, that Joe and his brother, Gavin, would wait to see how Adelman did this season before deciding whether to exercise the option on the coach's contract for 2005-06, so unsure were they whether they had the right man for the job.
It was a fantasy; Adelman's contract had always called for the Maloofs to decide on the extension during this season, not after it. Now Adelman has his deal for next season, and you're seeing why.
One of the great criticisms of Adelman, and the most often repeated, is that he's a single-style coach who can't adapt his ways to suit the realities of the moment. Let's run that theory through the current dramedy.
Adelman favors the high-post offense; the Kings right now are almost exclusively guard-driven. Adelman likes his teams to crash the boards and sprint the breaks; the Kings right now are a mediocre-to-fair rebounding team and deliberate on offense.
Adelman likes to ride his established stars to victories. In the post-Webber sequence, the Kings are 13-10 on the backs of Bibby and Stojakovic, certainly, but also on those of Brian Skinner and Mo Evans and Cuttino Mobley and Corliss Williamson and Kenny Thomas.
The man wearing the suit will not be nominated for anything because of that. His team might just go out in the first round of the playoffs. He certainly will be granted no more slack next fall than he was last fall - he has worked in one city far too long for that to happen. That may or may not be fair, but it's definitely life in the food chain of American sports. In the meantime: Rick Adelman can coach. Don't look now, but he may even be getting better at it.
