Race to the Bottom thread
- Thread starter iowamcnabb
- Start date
We're as bad as we've ever been. Where this organization maybe lacks "vision" if you want to put it that way is in their unwillingness to trade for injured players as Indiana and Washington have in order to put their thumb on the scale a bit and ensure that any future wins this season are unlikely. Indiana traded a player that I think may eventually be an All-Star in Ben Mathurin to ensure their tank -- a practice which it seems like the NBA league office is going to do something to curtail in the near future.
I guess when cheating the system isn't technically against the rules then not cheating might be called playing to lose. The whole situation just sucks in general. And it might not matter anyway. It's all just a lotto in the end. For all we know some team with long odds like Dallas is going to win the #1 again. That's neither boldness nor vision, it's just dumb luck.
eleventy
G-League
Momentous Glory? other than just after the turn of the century, i can't remember this organization EVER getting THAT much glory.... oh, oh, oh, i get it, "momentary" (glory)
sactowndog
Hall of Famer
If the Kings don’t somehow get a top 3 pick this franchise is in trouble. Not even being able to lose correctly has been the final straw for many.
The difference is minimal. Currently they have about a 36% chance at a top 3 pick. The Pacers as the worst team have about a 40% chance. If the odds weren’t flattened and picks went in order of record there would be much more incentive to intentionally throw games.
I fully understand tanking and the implications of it and how "smart it is" to throw games and lose. And letting Russ and DDR take over games at this point in the year is fully stupid and moronic.
But man, it sucks to feel "bad" about Max racking up double-doubles and looking awesome. Or when Dev had that huge explosion game vs Indy and score 16 points in the 4th.
sactowndog
Hall of Famer
The dfference of where they will pick if not in the top 4 is not necessarily minimal. And as we saw in the Mitchell draft even a single spot can matter.
They could just simply do what the rest of the bad teams have done. Play your bad players more minutes than your good players. The tanking teams would not let their good players go off for 40 against basement dwelling teams like the Kings did with DDR. Only a couple of the Kings wins against tanking teams were due to the young players going off. Normally they were on the backs of DDR, a Westbrook triple double type game or Achuiwa going off on undersized players.
Those same vets helped to lose a lot of games for us in the first three months of the season though, when playing better defenders with fresher legs may have actually kept the team out of omghowarewesohorribad territory. So it probably evens out.
Those same vets helped to lose a lot of games for us in the first three months of the season though, when playing better defenders with fresher legs may have actually kept the team out of omghowarewesohorribad territory. So it probably evens out.
I personally don't subscribe to the theory that Nique, Max, Carter and the other young guys would have won the same or more games than DDR, Schroder and Westbrook if the roles were reversed. The metrics pretty much show that the vets suck but they're still better than the young guys that also suck. I've been harping since the first week on the fact that it makes no sense to play the vets heavy minutes if your team is terrible. There's almost nothing to gain from it but there's a lot to lose. Like a chance at Dybansta.
The most obvious path from the start would have been to develop the young guys and plant yourself around the bottom of the standings while doing so. The Kings never looked like they knew what they were doing for one second. They'd go hard on the vets, then all the sudden the young guys were playing, then they pulled most of them back and played the vets again. Keon and Carter got pulled every which way for no reason. Then so many guys got hurt that they now just have to play whoever is available. Even right now, if the Kings are playing a bad team and the game is close and DDR is on one, just pull him for McBuckets or Plowden and stop working against your own best interests. There's plenty that can be done. Every other tanking team seems to be doing it just fine.
It's been a mess to say the least but to act like there's nothing that they could have done or that the young guys who have terrible metrics would have won us the same amount or more games just doesn't add up to me.
Zach LaVine played a lot of minutes in November and December when Doug could have made good on his promises and played Keon Ellis and Devin Carter instead. It took a little while for the team to realize what they had in Dylan Cardwell so I can understand why we were playing vets like Achiuwa and Eubanks at C instead but there are probably a dozen free agent big men that we could have signed to grab rebounds, take charges, and at least alter shots in the paint.
Sure we would have scored less with more attention paid to playing defensive role-players but we wouldn't have been the absolute black hole of soul-sucking defensive incompetence that we were. And teams like Miami and Boston have already proven over and over that you don't need a ton of name-recognition talent to win NBA regular season games, you need discipline and a team-wide commitment to signing and playing the types of players who will do all the dirty work. See also Phoenix this season.
My point is, playing the vets got us the worst record in the league by mid-season, so complaining now that we're winning because we're playing the vets too much feels inaccurate. The last two months of the season have always been swallowed up by bizarre fluke performances and questionable injury reports. You either play the game or you don't and it seems like we're mostly playing along -- Indiana and Washington are just playing it better/worse than we are. And it likely won't even matter.
It's not inaccurate at all to complain that we're playing the vets too much.
The vets weren't playing a Jazz team led by Cody Williams in December where it took DDR putting up a 40 piece in almost 40min to beat them by a few points. In December they were up against Markkanen and Keyonte George.
The vets playing early on in the season vs. the vets playing now is not a 1 to 1 comparison. Of course these guys are going to beat G League lineups. They're old but they're still HOFers that have some gas in the tank. These G League lineups weren't being fielded early in the season. If they were, the Kings would have started out with more wins.
There's not much that I can say to anyone that thinks that the Kings had no choice but to ride DDR to 40pts against a lowly tanking Jazz team. If that's what someone thinks, then they already dug their heels in the sand. Nique played 12 minutes less than DDR that game. Plowden and McBuckets also had more minutes they could have played. This isn't 4D chess here. This is just common sense decision making on the fly. Every other tanking team other than the Kings is doing it right before our very eyes. There's zero excuses to be riding DDR, Monk or Westbrook to wins but the Kings are clearly doing it.
Sure you can complain about the vets playing too much now, but the vets playing too much then is why we're even having this conversation so to me it feels misplaced. Absolutely I think we should have traded the vets and committed to playing the kids, back in October even. And that includes not signing Schröder, Westbrook or Achiuwa in the first place. This is ancient history now, but I was adamant that we needed to bench Zach LaVine and just let him rot there till his contract runs out so we could play actual basketball this season. That was not a popular opinion at the time.
Also... the NBA does not want NBA teams playing G-League lineups from January-April so they can maximize their lotto odds. Adam Silver has fined teams for perceived gamesmanship already this season and threatened harsher sanctions in the future. We've got more than half of our roster out on injury reserve for some reason or another -- including players like Sabonis and Murray who are our equivalents to Markkanen and Keyonte George. I'm surprised you just flew right past this detail. We can't make up excuses to sit everyone.
Indiana, Washington, and Brooklyn all made trades designed to make themselves worse in the short-term. Our front office seems reluctant to do that. That's really the only place where I would nit-pick their decision making. Letting DDR cook for a random game .... eh. He's a future Hall of Famer and fellow Trojan so it doesn't bother me. Even though he and Monk ended my season-long streak of predicting monthly win totals accurately with their outbursts.
Because Christie's job is on the line and the players have some pride.
Look, ideally, yes, DDR plays 20 minutes a game, our G-leaguers and rooks play more minutes, and we maybe lose an extra game or two.
But Doug can't play that game. I know his record sucks this year but if he ever wants another job again actively tanking games isn't going to get him one.
You think Max and others will be happy with the team intentionally losing games? This is their careers you're talking about. They want every damn win they can get.
And with the flattened odds, chances to get the #1 pick are much more spread out than before. After the lottery we could be cursing the fact that if we had won only 2 more games (or whatever) we would have gotten the #1 pick. It's all a crapshoot.
LoungeLizard
Starter
Jazz coming hard for that #4 spot of ours. Down 13 to the Wizards at home after 1. SMH.
Insomniacal Fan
Starter
Christie was hired because he'd do what the organization wants him to do. A serious head coaching career aspiration would take him through doing an assistant coach job for another organization. (like Bobby Jackson did)
Christie is Jerry Reynolds.
Disgusting, down 72 to 45 at half, at home to the lowly Wiz. Big screw you to Silver and his silly fines.
Hope those fans are at least getting free pizza and beer.
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sactowndog
Hall of Famer
Yep we are going to be the 5th seed which will screw our 2nd round pic too. Ugh
Joshyjosh31
Starter
We’re gonna go from top 3 pick to possibly 7th cause we wanted to sign westbrick and play the vets 30min vs tanking teams actually hilarious when you think about it
sactowndog
Hall of Famer
Hilarious is one word for it.
While I agree with the premise of this, im fairly confident we would have won more games with Dev taking his minutes the whole year. He had a few explosion games for sure, but he was downright bad this season and was getting #1 option minutes and USG.
DeMar, sure. He was still a starter caliber player and an extremely effective scorer.
We could have fielded a team of eight-year olds and midgets with scoliosis and never had better than a 40% chance of a top-three pick under the current lottery odds. To the extent that this is all the front office's fault, it would be more accurate to say we've gone from a 40% chance of a top-three pick to a 36.5% chance at a top-three pick, but that's not a great slogan for catastrophizing.
I don’t get how this fact doesn’t get thru? Complaining feels better I guess.
Joshyjosh31
Starter
Well I’d rather field that team plus Carter and find out what we have in Carter instead of burying him behind westbrick and still ending ip where we are
Pretty sure that if we ran him out on the court with a bunch of eight-year olds and midgets with scoliosis we would have zero chance of actually finding out what we have in Carter. This isn't baseball, it's a team sport.
sactowndog
Hall of Famer
Or you could say we have gone from the 5th pick as our worst case to the 8th or 9th pick as our worst case. That could well be significant. Not to mention the 31st pick to the 34th or 35th.