Share Your Opinion: Most Disappointing Kings Draft Ever?

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Share your opinion: Which year's draft was the most disappointing to you as a Kings fan?

I was looking at a 1991 Fleer Duane Causwell basketball card a coworker gave me (as a joke!) and I read something I had long forgotten as a Kings fan, something I buried deep in my soul to forget it, to forget the disappointment... the anguish... it was the 1990 NBA Draft. Granted, this draft was not loaded with talent, but the Kings had FOUR first round picks (#7, #14, #18, and #23) and they picked (sequentially) Lionell Simmons, Travis Mays, Duane Causwell, and Anthony Bonner... I liked L-train, but the injuries! This draft created YEARS of disappointment for me...so much promise, a young squad of first rounders ended up being... well... hobbled and disappointing.

What Kings draft was the most disappointing for you? Pervous "Out of Service" Ellison? Quincy Douby? Billy Owens?
 
You mean which was most disappointing after the fact, not which was most disappointing at the time, right?

I'd say Ellison was most disappointing after the fact. Not because the Kings made a horrible choice, but because you can usually get a great player at number one, and there were simply no great players there the one time the lottery smiled on the Kings. :(
 
I don't know that the 4 pick draft was worse than can be expected: even drafting at #7, you are not guaranteed an elite star quality player. Fortune did not shine on us, and no one went on to be an NBA Star, but I don't know how unexpected that was:

#7- Simmons- when he was healthy he was a star quality player. He probably would have been a solid #2 option on a good team, who played decent D and rebounded well (if I recall correctly). Probably pretty average compared to the normal #7 pick (certainly not the best, but also not even close to the worst)

#14- Travis Mays- no one will ever know, as injuries derailed him before he truly got started. Seems to me he was pretty decent that first season. And quite frankly, "pretty decent" is usually what you get at #14. Comparing him to guys who went 9-15 this year, I bet a healthy Mays would be somewhat better than a couple and somewhat worse than a couple of Augustin, Bayless, Thompson, Randolph, etc... In short, you might get a good player here, you might not- Mays was decent- decent is what you get at 14.

#18- Duane Causwell- a mid first round big man project. 1 or 2 of the group of Robin Lopez, Spreights, Koufous, etc... will end up no better than Causwell. Likely, none of them are more than role players on good teams. Yeah, Causwell was a bust, but that often comes with being a #18 or so pick. We took a risk, it didn't work.

#23- Bonner- hard to say he didn't live up to expectations. A late first round big man who goes on to be a 7-8 year rotation role player. Not great, but not bad for #23 overall.

The point, is that no one pick is disapointing. All of them had careers that are about par for the course for where they were drafted (except maybe Causewell- but there are more big man flameouts than most positions). I think what is disapointing is not what they did individually, but that collectively, we had four shots to find a steal or a bargain- and we came up with average each time...
 
Rain man said:
I don't know that the 4 pick draft was worse than can be expected: even drafting at #7, you are not guaranteed an elite star quality player. Fortune did not shine on us, and no one went on to be an NBA Star, but I don't know how unexpected that was:

#7- Simmons- when he was healthy he was a star quality player. He probably would have been a solid #2 option on a good team, who played decent D and rebounded well (if I recall correctly). Probably pretty average compared to the normal #7 pick (certainly not the best, but also not even close to the worst)

#14- Travis Mays- no one will ever know, as injuries derailed him before he truly got started. Seems to me he was pretty decent that first season. And quite frankly, "pretty decent" is usually what you get at #14. Comparing him to guys who went 9-15 this year, I bet a healthy Mays would be somewhat better than a couple and somewhat worse than a couple of Augustin, Bayless, Thompson, Randolph, etc... In short, you might get a good player here, you might not- Mays was decent- decent is what you get at 14.

#18- Duane Causwell- a mid first round big man project. 1 or 2 of the group of Robin Lopez, Spreights, Koufous, etc... will end up no better than Causwell. Likely, none of them are more than role players on good teams. Yeah, Causwell was a bust, but that often comes with being a #18 or so pick. We took a risk, it didn't work.

#23- Bonner- hard to say he didn't live up to expectations. A late first round big man who goes on to be a 7-8 year rotation role player. Not great, but not bad for #23 overall.

The point, is that no one pick is disapointing. All of them had careers that are about par for the course for where they were drafted (except maybe Causewell- but there are more big man flameouts than most positions). I think what is disapointing is not what they did individually, but that collectively, we had four shots to find a steal or a bargain- and we came up with average each time...
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That is, to put it mildly, a very glass-half-full point of view. ALL of those picks were disappointing, some of them outrageously so.

You can't four picks in the first round, and fail to come away with anybody!
 
Mr. S£im Citrus said:
...


That is, to put it mildly, a very glass-half-full point of view. ALL of those picks were disappointing, some of them outrageously so.

You can't four picks in the first round, and fail to come away with anybody!
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And yet, once again, our Sacramento Kings defied all logic and the odds and managed to do the undoable.

I cannot imagine picking anything other than 1990.
 
I looked at the draft list from that year and it didn't look all that exciting. The Kings came away with Lionel Simmons, that's not "nobody".

Having the #1 pick and coming away with a guy who wasn't any better than the #7 pick in the "oh-so-disappointing" 1990 draft means the answer is easily 1989.


...


Put it to a vote! 1989, 1990 or other. :)
 
Well I certainly think it has to be one or the other -- such a disappointing tandem that here we are nearly 20 years later and people are STILL using those two disppointments as excuses not to even bother trying today.

For me I think maybe its the 0-4 whiffer in 1990 as you could kind of see 1989 coming with the lack of a Hakeem/Ewing/Robinson type dominante big, and we had intentionally broken the entire team up in order to set up an all at once 1990 bonanza that did not materialize.
 
The thing that's funny about 1990 is that it's not like there were any colossal blunders with who the Kings chose. It was just a ridiculously horrid draft year. Tony Kukoc and Cedric Ceballos, both picked well into the 2nd Round, were the only two guys who were ever much more than role players from #7 on down.
 
nbrans said:
The thing that's funny about 1990 is that it's not like there were any colossal blunders with who the Kings chose. It was just a ridiculously horrid draft year. Tony Kukoc and Cedric Ceballos, both picked well into the 2nd Round, were the only two guys who were ever much more than role players from #7 on down.
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There was one or two other guys that turned out to be decent. Same in 1989, as far as #1 prospects go. As an Arizona fan I wanted Sean Elliott. So I was screaming. But Pervis was a better pick than Danny Ferry and Sean Elliott had a long but not exactly stellar career and would have been considered a disappointment had he gone #1.

If you're going to look at one draft where you can say we blew it both in retrospect and on draft day, I'm gonna go with 1987. We picked Kenny Smith, fan favorite, runner up in the dunk contest. Ok, not a horrible player by any means. But the very next player picked just happened to be a hometown kid who turned into an all-star, who to this day maintains his Sacramento roots. We also passed on Ho Grant and Reggie Miller. 3 all star players picked in the 5 picks after ours, one who would have had a long career as a hometown hero.

I'll also say the on draft day, Bobby Hurley was a big disappointment to me, I'm biased against Dukies, and by and large they bust out. Because of the way that went down I wound up rooting for him.
 
nbrans said:
The thing that's funny about 1990 is that it's not like there were any colossal blunders with who the Kings chose. It was just a ridiculously horrid draft year. Tony Kukoc and Cedric Ceballos, both picked well into the 2nd Round, were the only two guys who were ever much more than role players from #7 on down.
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This is where "dissapointing" needs to be defined. If dissapointing means the biggest let down from our expectations at the time than 1989 and 1990 definitley qualify regardless of the quality of the other players selected.

If dissapointing means how the Kings performed in retrospect versus other teams and "what could have been," then selecting Joe Klein and watching Detlef Schref, Chris Mullin, Charles Oakley and Karl Malone go with 4 of the next 7 picks seems more dissapointing than either 1989 or 1990.

I actually don't think we did comparatively bad in either the '89 or '90 draft. Pervis was actually a darn good pick. He had never been injured in college so you can't blame the Kings for not predicting his injury problems. And when healthy he put up great numbers, we would kill for for a PF today who could average 20pts, 11 boards and 2.6 blocks per game. Especially when you consider a lot of pundits thought the Kings should take Stacey King, we actually made the right pick. Similarly in 1990, we did not do bad with our four picks compared to the rest of the teams - L-Train, Mays pre-injury and Bonner were all very solid for their respective draft slots. However, if you knew that next year we would have four first round picks and someone told you they could guarentee that we did equally as well as 1990 or we could role the dice, you would roll the dice 100 times out of 100.
 
Circa_1985_Fan said:
HELLLLLO?!?! Joe Kleine, anyone?!?!?
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Wasn't 1985 the draft that happened between the Kings final season in KC and first in Sacramento? It definitely stands out, but as I was in 5th grade I didn't follow the draft then, nor did I care much about the Kings until after they actually played their first game in town.
 
Oh I was only 11, but I was already a big Kings fan!! That was the worst peace of scouting in NBA history I think...'Hey, I'm Joe Axelson and I'm going to draft this 6'10 white guy that thinks he's 7'0, and has no athletism at all!!...Oh, who the hell are these guys: Charles Oakley, Karl Malone, Detlef Shrempf, Chris Mullin...they'll be out of the league in a couple years...Big Joe from Slater Mo. is the real deal!!'
 
nbrans said:
The thing that's funny about 1990 is that it's not like there were any colossal blunders with who the Kings chose. It was just a ridiculously horrid draft year. Tony Kukoc and Cedric Ceballos, both picked well into the 2nd Round, were the only two guys who were ever much more than role players from #7 on down.
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Tyrone Hill would be considered a roleplayer, but I think we would have been better off with him than Simmons with the seventh pick. I'd have been interested in seeing how a frontcourt of Hill and Tisdale would have worked out; couldn't have been any worse than Simmons and Tisdale.

EDIT - Antonio Davis went in the second round of that draft, too... So did Bimbo Coles, whom we drafted and subsequently traded... Has there ever been a precedent for the second round of a draft turning out better than the first round?
 
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