you say grossly managed if he came here no we were managed better than Dallas they just lucked into Luka. They wasted Dirks prime years
I'll stop here.
They won a championship with Dirk and also reached another final. Better than I have seen the Kings in my lifetime, and also during a period we did not play a single playoff game. I guess I'll never understand the "wasted Dirk" when they won a title and guy played his whole career with the org. Would be a storybook career for Kings fans. Oh well. Luka got the GM and coach fired and they've only gone on to be about 1000x worse since. So I guess score one for Vlade's intuition in that regard.
At the time we passed over Luka, we then managed to allow a player's dad to drive a wedge between the FO and the coach in a way that both the top assistant GM and the head coach were leaking conflicting narratives to the press and the coach even went so far as to say the team's top draft pick was not his preferred player.
Vlade blew a pick at 10 by trading it for picks at 15 and 20 the year prior who could have been: Malik Monk or Donovan Mitchell or Bam Adebayo OR John Collins plus any combo of OG Anunoby, Kyle Kuzma, or Josh Hart - all of these players have been linked in various ways to the Kings over the past few years, either ones fans covet or ones Monte may have tried to acquire, save for Spida.
I don't see any metric that can shake the facts that we were a bottom 3 FO for the entire decade of the 10s.
I will give credit where credit is due to the Vlade era Kings and say they did a wonderful job getting talent in Sacramento on reasonable, not crippling contracts. An area where the previous regime had failed, necessitating Vlade's first major blunder with that awful trade for space deal he made with Philly. Still, that is another point in the L column for Vlade as a whole. And you have to wonder if his one major win, FOX, the focus of this thread, directly came about because we lost ground in the 2017 draft due to that move.
That said we're in year 3 of Monte and a lot of overly critical fans felt Monte was wasting Fox or Fox was not an elite talent or some combo of bad all around, so let's just accept fans can be fickle. I hope Fox and Domas and Monte can reach two finals and win a championship for Sacramento. I don't care if they never reach the playoffs again after that run - my life will be complete.