Sacramento Kings: 1-7 Start Discouraging For All Concerned

The Sacramento Kings came into 2015-16 with high hopes. A potential Hall of Fame coach in George Karl was going to be leading a team with perhaps the best center in basketball, DeMarcus Cousins, augmented by younger players such as recent first-round picks Ben McLemore and Willie Cauley-Stein.

With contributions from incumbent veterans Rudy Gay and Darren Collison combined with the efforts of new free agent additions Rajon Rondo and Marco Belinelli, the Kings were going to start to turn the corner after a decade of futility since the franchise’s last postseason berth.

The Kings got Cousins back from a strained Achilles tendon on Monday night and the rusty big man returned to play 32 minutes, posting team highs of 21 points and 12 rebounds against the San Antonio Spurs.

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The flip side was that Cousins was 5-for-20 from the floor, missed all four of his 3-point attempts, turned the ball over four times and the Kings were annihilated by the Spurs, 106-88, for their sixth consecutive defeat.

Their 1-7 mark matches their worst-ever start since the franchise came to California’s capitol city in 1985.

“We got some issues that we got to, you know, carve out,” Cousins told CSN Bay Area. “Can’t really speak on that, but one thing is, us players, we’ve got to stick together. Just with that, that will get us over or get us through most battles.

“We got some issues in-house we need to figure out.”

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Cousins said there would be a players’ only meeting that would deal with things other than what is happening on the court.

“I believe in every single person in this room,” Cousins said. “We just got to stay together. That part I’m not worried about, but it is issues we got to figure out.”

Gay backed up what Cousins was saying.

“It’s within the players and staff,” Gay said “We just have to get a winning mentality, get together and try to find a way to win these games. I’m not pinpointing one thing or one thing that’s wrong, but it’s obvious.

“We’ve lost six games in a row, something we have to change and we have to do it fast.”

The Kings are averaging nearly 17 turnovers through their first eight games, with the newly acquired Rondo averaging 3.4 (he had nine turnovers against San Antonio).

Rondo’s shooting woes from last season—he was a combined .426/.314/.397 shooter for the Boston Celtics and Dallas Mavericks in 2014-15—have continued. He’s hitting 42.2 percent from the floor, is just 3-for-16 from 3-point range and a baffling 5-for-14 at the free-throw line.

Rondo was never a good free-throw shooter—his career best was a 64.7 percent mark as a rookie in 2006-07—but he’s a combined 36-for-92 (39.1 percent) since the beginning of last season.

To say it’s tempering his aggressiveness within the offense is an understatement. Rondo once averaged more than three free-throw attempts a game. He averaged 1.1 last season and is at 1.8 attempts this year.

He’s gone from being the player you don’t have to guard on the perimeter to the player you don’t have to guard, period. That makes it tough for the offense to get into a flow.

Karl’s done tough rebuilds before. He brought the Milwaukee Bucks out of the doldrums of the mid-1990s to the brink of the NBA Finals in the early 21st century.

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He took a Denver Nuggets team that started 17-25 in 2004-05 and led them to a 32-8 finish en route to nine straight postseason berths and a Coach of the Year award in 2012-13 (followed shortly thereafter by a pink slip, but let’s not confuse the narrative).

But the Kings are exactly the hot mess many pundits predicted they would be throughout the offseason.

The years of “Maloofness” in ownership, when the Maloof family spent much more time fretting over their crumbling Las Vegas real estate empire than the NBA team they owned, have been replaced by a nose-Ranadive since Vivek Ranadive saved the team from being shipped to Seattle in 2013.

The impetuous Ranadive has already fired three coaches (incumbent Keith Smart, Mike Malone and Tyrone Corbin), two general managers (incumbent Geoff Petrie and Pete D’Alessandro) and wondered aloud why his team didn’t try to cherry pick from the defensive end, going so far as to suggest that to his defensive-minded coach at the time in Malone.

To Malone’s credit, he apparently didn’t react this way:

The Kings are scheduled to move into the new Golden 1 Center in downtown Sacramento next season and Ranadive is desperate to have a contender in place when that move happens.

Based on the early returns, what he has instead are more “issues in-house” and losses piling up. And outside of Cousins and maybe Cauley-Stein, there aren’t a lot of pieces in place that inspire much confidence in Sactown.

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In other words, situation normal.