GDHQNBA15_2pg-Sacramento Kings

Chicago Bulls Gameday HQ

WESTERN CONFERENCE PACIFIC DIVISION Sacramento Owner Vivek Ranadive believes his organization has outside-thebox thinking going on to renovate the Sacramento Kings franchise to where it was a dozen years ago. But really, this is the same old 20-something wins team. For every good action done, an equal bad action has undone the progress. For instance, getting a good player like Rudy Gay. Good. Overpaying him $19 million and looking to lock him up long-term at similar rates. Not good. Locking up DeMarcus Cousins. Good. Making him the leader of your franchise going forward. Not good. You could go on and on—with the decision to replace Isaiah Thomas with Darren Collison. With the decision to draft two suspect shooting guards with lottery picks in consecutive drafts. The Kings won 28 games last season and they may hit that figure once again this season. It puts them right on subpar with what they have done the last five seasons, winning anywhere from 30 to 34 percent of their regular season games. Same old Sac. DEFENSE Mike Malone was known for his defensive tutelage, when he was an assistant coach with the Golden State Warriors and New Orleans Hornets, but unfortunately that rep didn’t translate over to Sacramento, with his 2013-14 Kings rating 23rd in defensive efficiency at 106.3 points per 100 possessions. It’s not hard to find the culprits behind such a porous D. All you had to do was watch one Kings game. Any Kings game. And you’d see an assortment of defending guards on the perimeter masquerading as matadors, ushering the charging bulls into the paint into an overwhelmed set of bigs, who never were given proper chance to defend the paint. The 2014-15 season should be no different. Collison, Ramon Sessions and Ray McCallum are all bad defenders. Ben McLemore and Nik Stauskas are not any better. Yet these are the five men assigned to control Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Chris Paul, Jamal Crawford, Eric Bledsoe, Goran Dragic, Isaiah Thomas, Jeremy Lin and Kobe Bryant? And that’s just the Pacific Division. No matter how high Malone’s basketball IQ, the Kings just do not have the personnel to become a top 10 defensive power. If one were to look on the bright side, we’d see center Cousins knows how to use his body to defend (+1.86 defensive Real Plus-Minus) and rebound (20.4 rebound percentage, ranking sixth in the League). Same is true with his backups, Reggie Evans (21.5 rebound percentage) and Ryan Hollins (+3.91 dRPM). That’s part of the reason the Kings ranked fifth in the League in rebounding, grabbing 51.9 percent of the caroms. In similar fashion, Jason Thompson and Gay both showed their veteran aptitude toward team D with +1.46 and +0.85 dRPM, with attention to defensive detail their younger folk don’t quite comprehend. Such as, the young’uns don’t challenge three-point shooters as consistently as they should. That is why the Kings allowed opponents to make 38..0 percent of their three-point attempts. Plus, the Kings foul too much, gift-wrapping 2139 free throw attempts in the league last season, which ranked fourth-worst in 2013-14. Such is life, again, in Sacramento. The guards don’t guard. OFFENSE Here’s how Kings basketball for the past few seasons worked. Head coach Paul Westphal starts a veteran (Tyreke Evans) at point guard. Offense stalls. In season’s second month, the starting job invariably goes to Isaiah Thomas, who gets offense headed upwards toward mediocrity for rest of the 2011-12 season. It was the same story in 2012-13 with Keith Smart playing the role DeMarcus Cousins Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE/Getty Images


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