The interruption is essentially only a month old though. Two years ago was the 17 win bottoming out. Last year was the 25 win rebirth and improvement + find a franchise guy. this year was expected to be 35wins and moving into position to matter agan. There's nothing the matter with that progression. Perfectly normal. There are some unrealistic folks who think you just wave a magic wand and go form zero to 60 in no seconds at all, but generally the above is a good solid upward trend. The year after that you aim playoffs.
The disappointment here, the reasonable "we've been saying this for years now" complaint is really only a few weeks old now.
My primary complaint is the stagnation of player development. This has been going on for years now, and is impairing the ability of this franchise to succeed and build for future success. What will it take for the Kings organization to rededicate themselves to improving their talent internally, week to week, season by season? I know that practices are hard to come by during the season, and that developing teams have a lot of turn over, but being in the third year of the true rebuild I would hope they have a formula and strategy in place to develop their core of players who will be around for the next 5-7 years like the great teams do. This involves developing them both in practice, preparation, off court mentorship, and player education, as well as game time experience and accountability. Everyone should be involved in this if the organization hopes to flourish in the future. Ultimately, consistency builds chemistry, but nothing cures cancer like winning some ball games.
Right now the roster has several young talented pieces that could use encouragement, development, guidance, and leadership. The Kings of old did this with a group of hearty bench mobbers (John Barry, Tyrone Corbin, Corliss Williamson, Vernon Maxwell, Scot Pollard), a young talented nucleus (Jason Williams, Peja Stojakovic, Williamson and Webber) a veteran coach (Rick Adelman), and a couple wily veterans (Barry, Maxwell, and especially Vlade Divac). This current Kings team has much less veteran leadership, a less respected head coach, and a much less experienced (though very deep and talented) bench mob. I really like some of the Kings young pieces, even the overlooked ones like Beno, Garcia, Thompson, Donte and Casspi, however the plan to take them from occasional contributors and develop them into perennial productive players is stalled, and has been for several years now. Even Tyreke is having a hard time evolving his game to adjust to the different defensive looks teams are throwing at him. I'm sure he will figure out a way to continue to be productive, dominant even, however, it is too bad the organization isn't more helpful and proactive in this endeavor.
What many of the critics who cover the league are saying about this team is partly true. We do have a derth of team talent and experience. That doesn't mean, however that this team as a whole is untalented, it is however underdeveloped. I would love to see this team succeed with the players currently on the roster, and I feel there is potential for them to do so in future seasons, but there needs to be a restructuring that focuses on harvesting team chemistry, developing a playing style that fits the strengths of all members of the core going forward, and implementing a cohesive plan of attack that is consistent game to game, season to season, and opponent to opponent. This includes addressing personal player improvements as well, and expecting improvement from all players, especially the young nucleus of Casspi, Thompson, Whiteside, Cousins, Green, and Evans.
Retrospectively, there was one thing I really took for granted with coach Adelman when he was with the Kings. He always had a consistent/predictable starting line-up game in and game out with consistent rotations unless absolutely mandated by injury. I recognized that he did this but I didn't understand the significance of it at the time. I often wondered why he didn't try to test Bobby Jackson as the starter over Bibby for a bit more team speed, or why he wouldn't put Keon Clark in the starting line-up for a better defensive punch. This consistency gave the entire team the ability to learn each other's tendancies intimately. Over the course of several seasons this blossomed so well that they didn't even have to run plays sometimes, they just knew where the other players would want the ball and where they needed to move to get it to them. That kind of chemistry was truly rare, and can only be achieved with consistency, and a comfort level from management, coaches, and from the players themselves.
