SacBee: Fanfare: K-Mart support is in full force

Revrag

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We were considering buying Kings season tickets because the team finally seemed to be on the right track.

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I like Reggie Theus overall, but he has made blunders. The biggest ones have been about his talking with the press.

The person who wrote in to the Bee put into words my biggest concern.....that is that fans will fall away at a quicker rate than before. The team cannot afford for him to alienate fans more than they already are.

My concern about the accelerating loss of fans buying tickets is that the prices will have to rise to pay the salaries we already have. That, or we will not be offering much money to anyone and our team will only get worse. Worse team = worse fan support (as far as ticket buying goes). Now we enter a viscious cycle that makes it harder and harder for the Kings to improve their situation.
 
Brain and ears need to keep up with mouth

Yeah, I would have said this was predictable.

If Reggie listened as much as he talked, this never would have happened. We were hearing, after the April 1 meeting between the Maloofs, Geoff, and STHs,
Petrie then asked for the audience to vote if they wanted Artest back. The response seemed to be about 50/50. He said something to the affect that Ron was a problem wrapped up in a question.
http://www.kingsfans.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26592

And that didn't show that half of the fans wanted Artest around long, or that they wanted him as the focal point of the team, just that they were okay with his accepting his optional year. There was no way of knowing how many of those STHs were mainly wanting him to sign the option so that we could trade him. (The hardcore Artest fans didn't really show their numbers until the "Who should take the shot?" poll, where they turned out to be 13%. I wouldn't expect Reggie to guess that number in advance, but he should have known it would be lower than 50%.)

If he had paid any attention to that, he would have realized that, two weeks later, many fans would not be thrilled by his heaping praises on Ron at the expense of Kevin and the rest of the team. It was not very long ago that we gave Kevin a hefty contract extension, and annointed him the face of the franchise, which got an almost universally positive reaction from fans. Trying to swap Ron into that position, when half of the fans want him gone now, and the feelings of the other half are unclear, is a really dumb move.
 
Well said, fnordius.

Reggie has certainly made a lot of mistakes this past season, both on and off the court. Even still, I like him as our coach, see that he got our team to play harder this season, and believe that overall he did a nice job. Hopefully, like any other "rookie", he will review what he did well and embellish that and review what he did wrong and make adjustments.

Assuming Ron opts in, I would love to see Reggie mix it up more on offense (including at the end of a close game)...going through Brad at the high post, Ron in the low post, and placing Kevin in isolation on the wing to let him work unobstructed...using all three with some regularity. All three approaches have born fruit over the past year, but they all cannot be effective if they are done every time over long stretches of a game. Mixing it up better would keep teams more off-balance and IMHO produce better overall results.

Off the court, Reggie has already learned about handling individuals and, hopefully, learned (the hard way) on how much or how little he should say to the press.
 
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