Tearing down the Sacramento Bulls

[zimpy27]

You are close to building a team around Sabonis.

Lavine+Ellis+Murray+Sabonis makes sense.
You need a defensive PF like Isaac on this team.

Monk+DeMar needs defensive players off the bench.

[JeffFosters]

Calling Sacramento the Bulls is disrespectful to Sabonis. Chicago never had a player like him.

Having said that, if I were the Kings GM I wouldd tear it down to the studs. Lavine (if he stays healthy) will have a market this offseason, DDR I’m not sure about though.

[R-DAWG]

I don’t know if I’m going tear down mode here. The Sabonis/LaVine combo is still very interesting, and SeRozan is probably a better fit on the roster without Fox on ball.

Long term, there are two big questions with the roster:
A) Is Keagan Murray the guy he was his rookie year - a versatile 3 and D combo forward, or is this years version more reality
B) Can Devin Carter be the guy people thought he was when he was drafted - a solid defender/shooter that provides secondary play making.

With Carter and Keagan as 3 and D guys, the rotation makes sense:

Carter/LaVine/DeRozan/Murray/Sabonis

If Carter develops as a playmaker, you can flip out DeRozan for more of a 3 and D guy.

Idk, I don’t hate the base of this team, even if a team built around Sabonis/LaVine as their top players doesn’t scream contender upside

[The Beam King]

Trade season Is over buddy.

And no way Kings are trading Sabonis they're keeping him and all In with him

This is obviously an off-season trade thread lol.

If you are actually the (Sacramento) Bulls then by definition you wouldn't be torn down but actually stay like this for another 3-4 years

Please don't put that bad juju on us. I'm confident Monte is gone this summer, I hope the next GM isn't committed to fixing this mess.

Dude. This will never change until the ownership changes. You can re-arrange the chairs on the titanic but you're still on the titanic. If you don't want to drown. Change ships.

[The Beam King]

Calling Sacramento the Bulls is disrespectful to Sabonis. Chicago never had a player like him.

Having said that, if I were the Kings GM I wouldd tear it down to the studs. Lavine (if he stays healthy) will have a market this offseason, DDR I’m not sure about though.

Theres becoming a very strong possibility the Kings keep their pick in 2025.

[BoogieTime]

no reality to the trades whatsoever

not the teams direction at all..

Just irrational fans jumping the gun

Management just built the team, and the organization is a win now organization and thats the fanbase appetite

The team hasn't even been joined together or had one practice

Even entertaining that this has no basis in the teams reality, moving DeRozan for nothing is nonsensical. Bad return for Monk etc. LaVine on the bench is a joke

Just a not serious OP on any ground. Only this fanbase has fans that thinks a management would tear down its own team before even watching them concretely play, and if those fans dont believe that not sure the point of making posts that have no basis in reality is what most people do on this forum (is role playing a thing here?)

[the_process]

Clear out DDR, hopefully you don’t have to pay to do it. Probably a good idea to shop Sabonis around for the best offer. Other than that, give the rest a year to settle. And add another lead ball handler.

[BoogieTime]

Clear out DDR, hopefully you don’t have to pay to do it. Probably a good idea to shop Sabonis around for the best offer. Other than that, give the rest a year to settle. And add another lead ball handler.

In what world is it good to shop Sabonis if your trying to win?

Why would we clear out a good player in DDR? Let alone pay to do it. At minimum he's scoring off the bench.

[LightTheBeam]

Dude. This will never change until the ownership changes. You can re-arrange the chairs on the titanic but you're still on the titanic. If you don't want to drown. Change ships.

Oh I know... believe me, something within this franchise is rotten and it's clear who it is.

But we can't force the owner to sell, but we can hope that maybe one day he learns.

No jumping ship, I'll keep dreaming we do it the right way once in my lifetime.

[LightTheBeam]

I don’t know if I’m going tear down mode here. The Sabonis/LaVine combo is still very interesting, and SeRozan is probably a better fit on the roster without Fox on ball.

Long term, there are two big questions with the roster:
A) Is Keagan Murray the guy he was his rookie year - a versatile 3 and D combo forward, or is this years version more reality
B) Can Devin Carter be the guy people thought he was when he was drafted - a solid defender/shooter that provides secondary play making.

With Carter and Keagan as 3 and D guys, the rotation makes sense:

Carter/LaVine/DeRozan/Murray/Sabonis

If Carter develops as a playmaker, you can flip out DeRozan for more of a 3 and D guy.

Idk, I don’t hate the base of this team, even if a team built around Sabonis/LaVine as their top players doesn’t scream contender upside

If you want to save this team, there's a small path, but it's not realistic.

Carter fwiw so far has shown he's not an nba player. He was injured so im willing to give him another year, but his best case is becoming keon ellis, and we already have keon ellis.

Sabonis/defensive center
3&D PF/defensive depth
Keegan/
Lavine/Keon
Lead guard/Monk

So at best, you have 5 guys you can keep. But even then we are at our best the last 2 years when keon plays 30+ mins and you need to add a lead guard, so it becomes hard to find mins for both LaVine/monk. If you got a big point guard you could talk me into lavine getting some sf mins.

So you need to cycle out demar, jval, lyles, carter and cycle in guys like dejounte, PJ Washington, Naz Reid.

It's rare to be able to get 1 guy like this, we need 3-4 + defenders at positions of need. If somehow they could do the above and just using these guys as examples off top of my head, others would fit

Sabonis/reid
Reid/Washington
Keegan/lavine
Lavine/Keon
Dejounte/monk

You'd have a good 8 man rotation. But even doing all this the ceiling is still probably a 1st round exit.

[BrianInPhilly]

It's crazy Kings GM has not been fired by now. 1st of all, Monte McNair's background is in football. How in the world do you hire a GM who clearly does not know basketball on a high enough level to build a team? It is hard yes to build a team, but there are clear holes on this roster all season (and last) ... You have to PLUG THOSE HOLES, but instead the GM is content just putting band-aids on things when it's clear what the issues are, and they still persist. For example, to contend you need to:

1 - If you are committed to Sabonis, you need at minimum - 1 elite long length shot blocker dude next to him OR 2+ lengthy defenders with some size with him in most of the time ... Murray qualifies as the latter, but running DeRozan at SF clearly does not
2 - If you want to have Lavine, DeRozan, and Monk on same time - At minimum you need 2 elite defensive guys to rotate with them at the 1-2-3 positions and play minutes CONSISTENTLY in the 25+ range (Ellis qualifies, but there's no one else ... And Murray can't cover both boxes for #1 and #2)

I could go on ... but you get the point. They need another guy like Murray to be in the rotation AND another guard to D' up consistently also. IN THEORY Devin Carter can potentially be the latter, and if you squint HARD Jake LaVaria could maybe be the former but that's the point. You are saying potentially, in theory, in the future, might etc - That's not enough for a team in their prime now. And all the above is at minimum, they'd still come up short of contending due to no #1 scoring options and too many average / below-average defenders playing big minutes (The Big 4).

[OGSactownballer]

Step 1 is to wage a PR campaign to get the owner to sell.

As far as the trades, the Magic one has legs. The other two do not.

Say what you want about the guy, but he actually seems to care about the city and appears to have learned his lesson regarding meddling (leaving decisions entirely to the front office and him just opening up the checkbook when necessary). Has he hired well? Definitely not. But chances are that if he ends up selling you get a guy who tries to move the team to Vegas in 5 years since it would triple the value of the team.

First off don’t be naive and think he isn’t meddling all this time. Every single stank move has the absolute earmark of a meddling owner who has no idea what the hell he is doing. And noise from that moron Damien Barling - who is only trying to “prove” his connections to be the next national media guy coming out of Sac - about how he isn’t meddling is a lot of hot air.

And as far as the Vegas thing a new owner cannot do that. The deal tied to the team staying for building the arena with public funds is a contract to guarantee staying for a minimum of either twenty or thirty years (I think it’s thirty but not positive) that’s not something that can be broken unless attendance were to fall off to like 50% or so.

So we need to stop worrying about non existent problems.

But do I think that we can pry the team loose from Vivek? Not a chance. He’s a know it all Billionaire and loves his toy team. That’s why he won’t sit back and STFU and let real basketball guys run the team. Most of what hast been listed here by Blind Prophet in the history has been directly tied to Vivek through numerous interviews with many of the principles (the management, coaches and players) involved where the common thread was Vivek’s direct meddling with the situations.

In the end, I feel that there is a lot of FEELINGS involved and that has created a situation where people are not really listening to the true facts coming out about this latest situation which media has ran with because, hey it’s easy to crap on the Sacramento Kings, right?! It’s a gimme story and perfect clickbait.

I’m not going to get into all the detail because it has been rehashed ad nauseum. But if most of what Fox has communicated to the local media guys is true, the facts are:

Monte didn’t want to resign Brown (I said this should have been the case) which obviously leads to losing Jordi (who I think was the real coach and is proving to be a better coach than Brown)

Fox gave an ultimatum at the time (his own words) that if they didn’t resign Brown, to trade him. That should have been done last summer and at a time where we could have obtained younger longer players and likely at least one unprotected first for this draft because it would have Ben an open bidding war. I am
Not going to paint Monte as either a genius or an idiot because that’s not my point here. I am going with the opinion that this was once again Vivek stepping in and meddling in a situation which could have been a perfect opportunity to retool on the fly.

Now to where we stand now. I agree this team is flawed. No question. Now at the same time I have low expectations for the next week or two as obviously there are principle guys who have t played together before or haven’t recently. That’s going to take a minute. But I do think that there is a fair possibility that once things round out that the team can stay k. At least the play in hunt with a perfectly good shot at getting through that to the playoffs. I for one would like to see that so we extinguish the pick owed to Atlanta. Worst case scenario if we miss, it’s a small shot at moving up to that top three and having an instantaneous franchise altering draft. Even as a play in team that doesn’t get further. Yea it pushes the puck out another year, but with the picks traded for that doesn’t become as much of a problem. From Monte’s own mouth, he’s never had a situation of having multiple tradeable picks. It becomes a far better situation to be able to make moves in the off season than has been the case in previous years.

Bear in mind also that in all likelihood in two years, we will have 70-80 million coming off the books for DDR and Zach. That is a huge amount of space and with Domas still locked up and everyone else also that we want to keep at reasonable CJ tracts, it should give a huge space to work with at that time when we can hope that we are ready to make a jump up by bringing in a true number one (if we don’t get lucky in the draft scenario this year).

Finally I think that we can all agree that if we accept that Vivek is still meddling, we cannot trust that a next fri t office would have anyone better than current. More likely nobody who is worthwhile will even give Vivek the time of day and it will be another poor choice in hiring. I’d sooner the fanbase stage a protest to let Monte do his job, consolidate the decision making to one guy (get rid of Wilcox since he is obviously just Vivek’s puppet for the meddling) and move forward without his interference.

[OGSactownballer]

I’ll add a couple more things I missed.

1) drop crapping on Murray “not playing to his potential”. For one the guy is being asked to play totally out of position. He’s is NOT a full time PF in the NBA. He is simply not big enough to do that. Case I. Point the game against Orlando or Minnesota. Those regular sized PF’s (Paolo and Naz) simply abused him or shot over him. It doesn’t work. That’s actually the biggest hole in the team. He would develop nicely and be dominant at the SF position because then HE has the size, speed and length advantage.

2) there needs to be a serious talk with DDR that he is going to have to be the sixth man for this team to do anything. He is a big SG or at best an u despised SF. But he is also at the point of his career where it’s time to sacrifice for the betterment of the team. At current Keon although u detailed is a huge upgrade both ways in the starting lineup and probably the only way things get salvaged. As well he is used to playing with Monk/Domas/Murray and that way they can allow Zach to acclimatize as the primary offensive force and also cover for his deficiencies on defense. If he doesn’t like it (he won’t pout he’s too professional to do that, he will still play his best), ship him in the offseason to balance the roster. He’s will have the most value then anyway, and we have picks to add if it’s for a serious upgrade.

[the_process]

Clear out DDR, hopefully you don’t have to pay to do it. Probably a good idea to shop Sabonis around for the best offer. Other than that, give the rest a year to settle. And add another lead ball handler.

In what world is it good to shop Sabonis if your trying to win?

Why would we clear out a good player in DDR? Let alone pay to do it. At minimum he's scoring off the bench.

Unless you are otherworldly on offense (read: Jokic), you cannot win unless your C is your defensive anchor. Sabonis is not even close to that, and while offensively he is Jokic-lite... it's not enough. Trying to cash out on his value would be smart.

As it pertains to DDR, he is an offense killer. The fact you guys are worse with him in the lineup is completely unsurprising.

[The Beam King]

Dude. This will never change until the ownership changes. You can re-arrange the chairs on the titanic but you're still on the titanic. If you don't want to drown. Change ships.

Oh I know... believe me, something within this franchise is rotten and it's clear who it is.

But we can't force the owner to sell, but we can hope that maybe one day he learns.

No jumping ship, I'll keep dreaming we do it the right way once in my lifetime.

Ummm pitchforks and torches mate.
Lol

Or just stop going to games. Stop watching broadcasts. Stop buying merchandise. Ans tell everyone around you to do the same.

Eventually the minority owners get restless and force a buy out if his shares.

[LightTheBeam]

Dude. This will never change until the ownership changes. You can re-arrange the chairs on the titanic but you're still on the titanic. If you don't want to drown. Change ships.

Oh I know... believe me, something within this franchise is rotten and it's clear who it is.

But we can't force the owner to sell, but we can hope that maybe one day he learns.

No jumping ship, I'll keep dreaming we do it the right way once in my lifetime.

Ummm pitchforks and torches mate.
Lol

Or just stop going to games. Stop watching broadcasts. Stop buying merchandise. Ans tell everyone around you to do the same.

Eventually the minority owners get restless and force a buy out if his shares.

Haven't all year. I watch, but I don't have cable lol.

Lets hope what you are saying works