NBA: Greatest head coach in each team’s franchise history

Greatest head coach in Sacramento Kings history: Rick Adelman, 1998-04

Recent history has shown the position of Sacramento Kings head coach to be a short and largely unsuccessful one, doomed to fail due to a combination of ownership support, poor front office management and placement in a perennially difficult division.

For 13 straight seasons and nine straight head coaches, the Kings have posted a losing record and failed to make it to the postseason. This is not unusual for a franchise that has been around since 1948 but has a franchise winning percentage of just .456. Coaches such as Lester Harrison or Cotton Fitzsimmons were only able to find brief windows of success.

That is why the time when Rick Adelman manned the sideline is so impressive for the franchise. From 1998 to 2006, the Kings won over 63 percent of their regular-season games, making Adelman easily the most prolific coach in franchise history with 395 wins.

He found some amount of postseason success as well, qualifying all eight seasons and tallying 34 of the team’s 80 all-time playoff wins. In 2002, the team came as close to winning the Western Conference as any team has ever come without actually winning it, losing in seven games to the eventual champion Los Angeles Lakers.

The sustained success of Adelman’s term with the team is impressive and all the more so, given the barren lack of any success on either side of his time with the team. From 1986 to 2019, the team made the playoffs just nine times, eight of them coming in his eight seasons. With ease, Adelman is the choice for the greatest coach in franchise history.