I believe the Sacramento Kings could potentially be a top 5 team in the Western Conference in a few years. Their core of young nucleus is unlike any other in the NBA. They have a really bright future and since I am a Sacramento Kings fan, why not write a post about them?
I started following what's going on in California's capital in around 2010, during Tyreke Evans' sophomore year, and DeMarcus Cousins' rookie campaign. To tell you the truth they sucked back (and still do unfortunately), they didn't play well as a team, but the individual skills were there. Seeing Tyreke euro-stepping his way to the basket, or putting defenders on skates was a thing of beauty. And Boogie, who would muscle his way in, take some ill-advises shots, grab 12 rebounds, showed signs of greatness. You could compare them to a poor man's Lakers, during the Shaq-Kobe era. The biggest difference was that they weren't back-to-back champions... at least not yet.
At that time I didn't know much about the owner's or General Manager's role in a team, but I could tell that the Sacramento Kings were a complete mess. I realized that on the 2011 draft night when the Kings got the 7th pick and traded down to the 10th just to draft Jimmer Fredette and trade Beno Udrih for John Salmons' luxurious contract. I don't know why Sacramento's GM thought it was a good idea. For me it doesn't make any sense. Now don't get me wrong, selecting the big college star, Jimmer at #10 was not a bad idea, I just thing we passed on so many great players when we had the 7th pick and could have drafted one of these players: Kemba Walker, Kawhi Leonard, Nikola Vucevic, Morris twins, Brandon Knight, Klay Thompson, Iman Shumpert, Kenneth Faried, Jimmy Butler, Chandler Parsons. Oh man. Plus we got John Salmons who makes around 7mln$ a year and was never really productive for us. Now the internet and the media were pretty hyped about this Jimmer guy, who I knew nothing about, because I cannot watch college ball in Poland. But I could YouTube him. When I saw footage of Jimmer's games in BYU I was mindblown. This guy could pull up 3 feet behind the 3pt line and still make that shot, and also, he made it look easy. Many scouts predicted that in the best case scenario, Fredette could be Steve Nash 2.0, and in the worst case, a JJ Reddick 2.0. For a moment there I got excited and almost forgot about the fact that we could have had Kemba Walker, my favourite player from that draft. But then, the season started and as it went on, I started losing my faith in Jimmer and in the Kings organization. I thought that Jimmer's shooting would translate well into the NBA. Well, I was wrong and so were the Kings. Sacramento was losing game after game and lookes for help from anyone. At some point during the mid-season, coach Westphal put in Isaiah Thomas into the starting lineup. I had no idea who he was, and had no idea we drafted him with the 60th pick. Isaiah, aka Mr. Irrelevant, turned out to be a revelation for Sacramento. To this day I wonder why so many teams past on him, when he should have been a lottery pick. But that didn't matter, what mattered was that we finally got a solid point guard with high potential. Unfortunately this didn't solve our problems, we were still losing and were about to face an even bigger problem-DeMarcus got tired of losing. There have been reports that Cousins was a bad teammate, he was uncoachable, he was a cry baby and that he requested a trade out of Sacramento. I read about some possible trades involving the Celtics, Nets and the Lakers, I just hoped none of them would work out for Sacramento and hopefully they didn't. The reasonI didn't want DMC to leave is because he could turn out to be the best center in the NBA in a couple of year, he was a beast. The problem was with his attitude which was the reason why he was picked #5 behind guys like John Wall, Evan Turner, Derrick Favours and Wesley Johnson. See, a true big man is a rarity in todays game. Rarely do we see centers scoring 20-25 point a game, leading the NBA in scoring and rebounding, dominating each and every game. DeMarcus Cousins had potential to do so and as the season ended, Boogie was, thankfully, still a King but without his crown. Another concern about the Kings was Tyreke Evans, whose stats started to drop since his remarkable rookie campaign were he averaged 20-5-5 and joined the 20-5-5 club with some guys called LeBron James and Oscar Robertson. Tyreke had still problems with his jumpshot and didn't show any progress as his statline droped to around 15-5-3. I don't think we should blame him, it wasn't his fault the Kings organization had no idea what they were doing and how to take care of their players. Plus there was this still question raised upon Sacramento, whether or not the team will stay there or move to Seattle or Virginia. That can be also very troubling for a player, not knowing what is going on around him.
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