2010-2011: Rookie season. Paul Westphal not exactly a great manager of personalities in the locker room. Still, team had a lot of momentum through the second half of the season and you could see glimmers of something coming together behind the Reke-Boogie tandem despite the complete fustercluck of a roster (the team had more bigs than this season's "too many bigs" roster and Landry and Dalembert combining to take a lot of Boogie's playing time AND a horrifying hole at SF wherein post-medicine-ball Cisco, Donte Greene, and pre-figuring out how to be an NBA player Omri vied for the starting spot). Team went 24-58 but you could sorta see them starting to go somewhere. Sure Boogie punched Donte Greene, but let's be fair, who didn't want to punch the man?
Best six players: Reke, Boogie, Marcus Thornton, Dalembert, Beno, Landry Not a fantastic bunch, seeing as how Boogie was still a rookie with questionable basketball habits and Reke struggled with the pressure of following up a historic rookie run, but one that you could see winning more games than they'd lose with a little more seasoning.
2011-2012: Ah, yes. The disaster year. This is the moment where the Kings Titanic runs into an iceberg. Over the offseason, the team inexplicably replaces its first solid shot blocker role-player big in half a decade with Chuck Hayes, who in return for his huge contract shows up with a heart condition, gets fat, and sorta just festers on the bench (where he rightfully belongs as a decent effort guy on a playoff team, which we weren't). Geoff Petrie also decides to pass up Kawhi and trade the pick and Beno (who was playing pretty well as our third guard) for a "solution" to our SF debacle, John Salmons, and is pressured by the Maloofs into picking Jimmer, who also immediate shows up and reveals a complete inability to dribble the ball past half court at the NBA level, thus completely crushing our once solid guard depth chart, at least until IT shows up and heroballs his way into the starting lineup. To cap it all off, Geoff decides to trade Omri and a first to Cleveland for JJ Hickson, who also decides to completely suck his way into us cutting him midway through the year. In other words, we got rid of all of our good role player vet-ish guys and a 1st for a bunch of sucky dudes who don't play in the NBA any more and IT.
Then, when the season starts, the team loses any and all momentum left over from the feel-good young guns run of the last season (though to be fair, most of that team's roster was now playing elsewhere) and fires Westphal, who at this point seemed more interested in getting in pissing matches with his locker room than with actually coaching. In his place, the Kings elevate Keith Smart, a friendly natured Nelly-disciple who promptly installed a smallball run-and-gun system completely antithetical to our roster of future All-NBA big men (Boogie and a completely ignored and lazy Hassan), penetrating, defending machine Tyreke Evans, and random old dudes just here for the pay check. To Smart's credit, his system did a good job of giving IT space to grow into an NBA player and I'm sure Marcus Thornton enjoyed jacking up 16 shots a game. Not exactly a winning team, though to be fair, Boogie did have a big role in getting Westphal fired but that firing was probably going to happen sooner or later regardless.
Best six players: Boogie, Reke, MT (rapidly devolving from pesky undersized scorer SG into lazy chucker), IT (before Brad Stevens taught him how to play defense), Jason Thompson, John Salmons. Uh yeah. Anytime Jason Thompson is one of your best players (a running theme as you'll see), your team probably isn't going to be winning too many games. Also that talent drop off between player number four on the list and player number five is horrifying. So yeah, eff Boogie.
2012-2013: In preparation for a Seattle move, the Maloofs starting saving money, scaring Petrie into passing on his favored Damian Lillard to pick Thomas Robinson because he was afraid of not having a power forward on the roster. Marcus Thornton's basketball devolution continues, allowing IT to leapfrog him into the starting lineup. Also Keith Smart was still the coach and John Salmons was still our starting small forward for some reason. T-Rob also completely flames out, allowing Jason Thompson to once more call himself a starting power forward.
To combat Keith Smart's system's aversion to defense Petrie picks up James Johnson who occasionally plays good defense but mostly just spends his time doing dumb things like a blind version of Lebron. Jimmer also still can't figure out how to dribble the ball.
Best six players: Boogie, Reke (now starting to show his propensity for injuries), IT, Jason Thompson, MT, John Salmons. The same six guys so, yay, stability! Unfortunately stability is only good when your roster doesn't feature a backup big man rotation of Chuck Hayes/Travis Outlaw/Thomas Robinson for most of the season. In a blatant attempt to salvage something of value from the T-Rob Hindenburg, Geoff trades him (and more!) to Houston for Patrick Patterson, who finally gives the Kings a power forward option whose main redeeming traits appears to be having the physical characteristics of an NBA big man. Between the out-of-his-depths coach and the complete and total lack of NBA talent, it's hard to put this losing season on Boogie, especially as the last half of the season was spent with most of the league checking out the latest Seattle restaurant recommendations.
2013-2014: A new regime and a new coach! And also a GM who decided to start things off by hemmoraging talent, jettisoning Reke in a clunky sign-and-trade in which we wound up with Robin Lopez, an ideal defensive fit for Mike Malone's system and alongside Boogie, and decided to trade him for Greivis Vasquez, a backup guy who can't play defense and came to the Kings and played the worst basketball of his career, instead. Good going Weasel! He also signs Carl Landry for some reason. Carl Landry then immediately gets hurt and misses most of the year.
The season starts with Malone still installing his system and learning how to be a head coach on the fly. He's also trying to teach defense to a squad that has spent the greater part of the last two seasons actively trying to find ways to let the other team score faster so they could get the ball back and jack up more shots. The front office genius also decide to trade the team's best defender Luc Mbah a Moute to Minnesota for a guy who would later go on to be called a Coke Machine to play small forward.
But hey D-Will actually plays better than expected and it looks like the team might have a not-sucky small forward! And then Pete miraculously pulls off a not-horrible trade, turning a struggling P-Pat, benched Greivis, Chuck Hayes, and the Stanky Fish for Rudy Gay, Quincy Acy, and Aaron Gray. Rudy gives the team a third player how actively doesn't suck and if you squint you can see the makings of some sort of a big three in Boogie, IT, and Rudy. They actually play .500 ball when all three guys are together, which unfortunately wasn't much due to random injuries. IT's heroballing tendencies become a little more pronounced but the team is starting to look like they can get something going if the front office can give Mike Malone a couple of more pieces to work with and stop farting around with guys like Royce White and Sim Bhullar. We also traded swirling pit of basketball despair Marcus Thornton for Reggie Evans, giving us our first legitimate gritty role playing big man since who knows when. Ben McLemore also shows flashes at time (also flashes of suckiness).
Best six players: Boogie, Rudy, IT, Ben Mclemore, Jason Thompson, Derrick Williams.
The Kings manage to make up for the horrific exchange of Reke for a turd sandwich by picking up our first good small forward since Ron Artest. Boogie and IT continue to develop. McLemore and D-Will are exciting, yet frustrating young pieces. Jason Thompson is still there but what the hell. There's room for improvement but the team appears to have finally started getting on the right track after the disastrous end of the Maloof regime. A new arena is coming! Things are coming up roses! Hooray!!!!
2014-2015: Unfortunately, the only thing the Kings love more than being bad at basketball is shooting themselves in the foot.
Not having learned from his last horrible offseason, the Weasel once again gets rid of one of his best assets in IT, this time managing to get even LESS in return than he did in the Reke move. Saving his ultimate bad decision for the actual season, Pete then precedes to accidentally give Mike Malone role players for his system, signing Darren Collison to replace IT, and picking up Omri on a minimum contract. He also signs Ramon Sessions but the less said about that the better.
Vivek also drafts Nik Stauskas, whose main highlight as a King can be primarily attributed to bad closed captioning.
You know the story. Mike Malone's system appears to be working. The Kings are playing defense and Boogie has made the leap and become a bonafide superstar. The starting five isn't just good, it's, according to the numbers, defensively one of the best in the league. The Kings are winning games despite having a horrible bench. Unfortunately Boogie gets a freak illness but the Kings appear to be weathering the storm.
Then disaster strikes. Hurricane Pete randomly decides to fire the first not-terrible coach his team has had in a decade and replace him with Ty Corbin, who he promptly tells to run like hell. The Kings do and the wheels come off the wagon. After playing brilliant defense to start out, the Kings revert to old habits and blow up.
In a desperate attempt to save things, Vivek hires George Karl, who in his defense appears to have only been coach in name only for most of his tenure, delegating a lot of his work to assistants.
There's no way we can really pin much blame on Boogie this season aside from maybe encouraging him to try to boost his immune system.
Best six: Boogie, Rudy, DC, Ben, Omri, Jason Thompson.
PDA accidentally brought in two good free agents in DC and Omri. Rudy is also locked into a new contract (that Pete tricked him into by saying Mike Malone would be here to stay). Boogie is also very good at basketball. Jason Thompson is still here but that may just be by virtue of the Kings having no bench for most of the season.
2015-2016: IT'S WAR!
George Karl decides to open the offseason by alienating Boogie, immediately forging an impenetrable wall between himself and the locker room. He also makes weird comments about some of his players through out the season, including claiming Seth Curry wasn't an NBA player (not sure why though, seeing as he has a dad and all).
Vlade is the GM now and has a busy offseason: doing the infamous Philly swap trade (ridding us of Jason Thompson once and for all), using that space to sign Rondo, Kosta, Marco Bellinelli, James Anderson, and Caron Butler, and drafting Willie. He also brings back Quincy Acy and signs the NBA's most famous sibling in Seth Curry.
All these moves somehow seem pedestrian in the face of the Weasel Regime and Kosta and Rondo have good seasons. Marco unfortunately does not. As the season winds down and there is more drama with Karl and the team, the team starts resting guys and still manages to pull off a 33 win season. Should have been more but the situation was completely toxic and while Boogie didn't help matters, let us not pretend that having notoriously hard to get along with George Karl and Rajon Rondo around really helped matters.
Best six: Boogie, Rudy, DC, Rondo, Kosta, Omri. Hey look! NBA players! And no Jason Thompson. Rondo spends most of the season cherrypicking his way into a great statline and putting up question efforts on defense but he was, regardless, one of the better players on the squad. Boogie also begins turning into a 7 foot tall version of James Harden. Kosta finally gives the team a good roleplaying big man.
2016-2017: New arena! New (non-sucky) coach! New (non-sucky but old) role players! Results still to be determined.
None of these are excuses. They're just the circumstances surrounding the franchise.
Best six players: Reke, Boogie, Marcus Thornton, Dalembert, Beno, Landry Not a fantastic bunch, seeing as how Boogie was still a rookie with questionable basketball habits and Reke struggled with the pressure of following up a historic rookie run, but one that you could see winning more games than they'd lose with a little more seasoning.
2011-2012: Ah, yes. The disaster year. This is the moment where the Kings Titanic runs into an iceberg. Over the offseason, the team inexplicably replaces its first solid shot blocker role-player big in half a decade with Chuck Hayes, who in return for his huge contract shows up with a heart condition, gets fat, and sorta just festers on the bench (where he rightfully belongs as a decent effort guy on a playoff team, which we weren't). Geoff Petrie also decides to pass up Kawhi and trade the pick and Beno (who was playing pretty well as our third guard) for a "solution" to our SF debacle, John Salmons, and is pressured by the Maloofs into picking Jimmer, who also immediate shows up and reveals a complete inability to dribble the ball past half court at the NBA level, thus completely crushing our once solid guard depth chart, at least until IT shows up and heroballs his way into the starting lineup. To cap it all off, Geoff decides to trade Omri and a first to Cleveland for JJ Hickson, who also decides to completely suck his way into us cutting him midway through the year. In other words, we got rid of all of our good role player vet-ish guys and a 1st for a bunch of sucky dudes who don't play in the NBA any more and IT.
Then, when the season starts, the team loses any and all momentum left over from the feel-good young guns run of the last season (though to be fair, most of that team's roster was now playing elsewhere) and fires Westphal, who at this point seemed more interested in getting in pissing matches with his locker room than with actually coaching. In his place, the Kings elevate Keith Smart, a friendly natured Nelly-disciple who promptly installed a smallball run-and-gun system completely antithetical to our roster of future All-NBA big men (Boogie and a completely ignored and lazy Hassan), penetrating, defending machine Tyreke Evans, and random old dudes just here for the pay check. To Smart's credit, his system did a good job of giving IT space to grow into an NBA player and I'm sure Marcus Thornton enjoyed jacking up 16 shots a game. Not exactly a winning team, though to be fair, Boogie did have a big role in getting Westphal fired but that firing was probably going to happen sooner or later regardless.
Best six players: Boogie, Reke, MT (rapidly devolving from pesky undersized scorer SG into lazy chucker), IT (before Brad Stevens taught him how to play defense), Jason Thompson, John Salmons. Uh yeah. Anytime Jason Thompson is one of your best players (a running theme as you'll see), your team probably isn't going to be winning too many games. Also that talent drop off between player number four on the list and player number five is horrifying. So yeah, eff Boogie.
2012-2013: In preparation for a Seattle move, the Maloofs starting saving money, scaring Petrie into passing on his favored Damian Lillard to pick Thomas Robinson because he was afraid of not having a power forward on the roster. Marcus Thornton's basketball devolution continues, allowing IT to leapfrog him into the starting lineup. Also Keith Smart was still the coach and John Salmons was still our starting small forward for some reason. T-Rob also completely flames out, allowing Jason Thompson to once more call himself a starting power forward.
To combat Keith Smart's system's aversion to defense Petrie picks up James Johnson who occasionally plays good defense but mostly just spends his time doing dumb things like a blind version of Lebron. Jimmer also still can't figure out how to dribble the ball.
Best six players: Boogie, Reke (now starting to show his propensity for injuries), IT, Jason Thompson, MT, John Salmons. The same six guys so, yay, stability! Unfortunately stability is only good when your roster doesn't feature a backup big man rotation of Chuck Hayes/Travis Outlaw/Thomas Robinson for most of the season. In a blatant attempt to salvage something of value from the T-Rob Hindenburg, Geoff trades him (and more!) to Houston for Patrick Patterson, who finally gives the Kings a power forward option whose main redeeming traits appears to be having the physical characteristics of an NBA big man. Between the out-of-his-depths coach and the complete and total lack of NBA talent, it's hard to put this losing season on Boogie, especially as the last half of the season was spent with most of the league checking out the latest Seattle restaurant recommendations.
2013-2014: A new regime and a new coach! And also a GM who decided to start things off by hemmoraging talent, jettisoning Reke in a clunky sign-and-trade in which we wound up with Robin Lopez, an ideal defensive fit for Mike Malone's system and alongside Boogie, and decided to trade him for Greivis Vasquez, a backup guy who can't play defense and came to the Kings and played the worst basketball of his career, instead. Good going Weasel! He also signs Carl Landry for some reason. Carl Landry then immediately gets hurt and misses most of the year.
The season starts with Malone still installing his system and learning how to be a head coach on the fly. He's also trying to teach defense to a squad that has spent the greater part of the last two seasons actively trying to find ways to let the other team score faster so they could get the ball back and jack up more shots. The front office genius also decide to trade the team's best defender Luc Mbah a Moute to Minnesota for a guy who would later go on to be called a Coke Machine to play small forward.
But hey D-Will actually plays better than expected and it looks like the team might have a not-sucky small forward! And then Pete miraculously pulls off a not-horrible trade, turning a struggling P-Pat, benched Greivis, Chuck Hayes, and the Stanky Fish for Rudy Gay, Quincy Acy, and Aaron Gray. Rudy gives the team a third player how actively doesn't suck and if you squint you can see the makings of some sort of a big three in Boogie, IT, and Rudy. They actually play .500 ball when all three guys are together, which unfortunately wasn't much due to random injuries. IT's heroballing tendencies become a little more pronounced but the team is starting to look like they can get something going if the front office can give Mike Malone a couple of more pieces to work with and stop farting around with guys like Royce White and Sim Bhullar. We also traded swirling pit of basketball despair Marcus Thornton for Reggie Evans, giving us our first legitimate gritty role playing big man since who knows when. Ben McLemore also shows flashes at time (also flashes of suckiness).
Best six players: Boogie, Rudy, IT, Ben Mclemore, Jason Thompson, Derrick Williams.
The Kings manage to make up for the horrific exchange of Reke for a turd sandwich by picking up our first good small forward since Ron Artest. Boogie and IT continue to develop. McLemore and D-Will are exciting, yet frustrating young pieces. Jason Thompson is still there but what the hell. There's room for improvement but the team appears to have finally started getting on the right track after the disastrous end of the Maloof regime. A new arena is coming! Things are coming up roses! Hooray!!!!
2014-2015: Unfortunately, the only thing the Kings love more than being bad at basketball is shooting themselves in the foot.
Not having learned from his last horrible offseason, the Weasel once again gets rid of one of his best assets in IT, this time managing to get even LESS in return than he did in the Reke move. Saving his ultimate bad decision for the actual season, Pete then precedes to accidentally give Mike Malone role players for his system, signing Darren Collison to replace IT, and picking up Omri on a minimum contract. He also signs Ramon Sessions but the less said about that the better.
Vivek also drafts Nik Stauskas, whose main highlight as a King can be primarily attributed to bad closed captioning.
You know the story. Mike Malone's system appears to be working. The Kings are playing defense and Boogie has made the leap and become a bonafide superstar. The starting five isn't just good, it's, according to the numbers, defensively one of the best in the league. The Kings are winning games despite having a horrible bench. Unfortunately Boogie gets a freak illness but the Kings appear to be weathering the storm.
Then disaster strikes. Hurricane Pete randomly decides to fire the first not-terrible coach his team has had in a decade and replace him with Ty Corbin, who he promptly tells to run like hell. The Kings do and the wheels come off the wagon. After playing brilliant defense to start out, the Kings revert to old habits and blow up.
In a desperate attempt to save things, Vivek hires George Karl, who in his defense appears to have only been coach in name only for most of his tenure, delegating a lot of his work to assistants.
There's no way we can really pin much blame on Boogie this season aside from maybe encouraging him to try to boost his immune system.
Best six: Boogie, Rudy, DC, Ben, Omri, Jason Thompson.
PDA accidentally brought in two good free agents in DC and Omri. Rudy is also locked into a new contract (that Pete tricked him into by saying Mike Malone would be here to stay). Boogie is also very good at basketball. Jason Thompson is still here but that may just be by virtue of the Kings having no bench for most of the season.
2015-2016: IT'S WAR!
George Karl decides to open the offseason by alienating Boogie, immediately forging an impenetrable wall between himself and the locker room. He also makes weird comments about some of his players through out the season, including claiming Seth Curry wasn't an NBA player (not sure why though, seeing as he has a dad and all).
Vlade is the GM now and has a busy offseason: doing the infamous Philly swap trade (ridding us of Jason Thompson once and for all), using that space to sign Rondo, Kosta, Marco Bellinelli, James Anderson, and Caron Butler, and drafting Willie. He also brings back Quincy Acy and signs the NBA's most famous sibling in Seth Curry.
All these moves somehow seem pedestrian in the face of the Weasel Regime and Kosta and Rondo have good seasons. Marco unfortunately does not. As the season winds down and there is more drama with Karl and the team, the team starts resting guys and still manages to pull off a 33 win season. Should have been more but the situation was completely toxic and while Boogie didn't help matters, let us not pretend that having notoriously hard to get along with George Karl and Rajon Rondo around really helped matters.
Best six: Boogie, Rudy, DC, Rondo, Kosta, Omri. Hey look! NBA players! And no Jason Thompson. Rondo spends most of the season cherrypicking his way into a great statline and putting up question efforts on defense but he was, regardless, one of the better players on the squad. Boogie also begins turning into a 7 foot tall version of James Harden. Kosta finally gives the team a good roleplaying big man.
2016-2017: New arena! New (non-sucky) coach! New (non-sucky but old) role players! Results still to be determined.
None of these are excuses. They're just the circumstances surrounding the franchise.
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