Who Disrupts the Disruptors? How the Kings Screwed Themselves

Michael Jordan had to learn it the hard way. The arch-competitive denim thought leader took over the Charlotte Bobcats and ran basketball operations for two of the worst seasons in NBA history before he saw the mess he'd made. Owners are an odious institution as is, but when they toy around with their teams like cats with shiny objects, it tends to be disastrous. The NBA is hyper-competitive and drafting dudes based on who had a good NCAA tournament is myopic and dumb. Jordan had to stew and lose for a while before passing off the mantle to Rich Cho and his staff, and the now-Hornets are a functioning NBA team. Once Jordan removed himself from the equation and let smart people do their thing, his team prospered.

Vivek Ranadive hasn't learned yet. His short reign as Sacramento Kings owner has been a Jordan-esque retread, right down to his commandeering of the draft room. Where Jordan had to overcome his on-court megalomania, Ranadive is still reflexively trying to foist thinkovation on the Kings and turn them into the technology guru's basketball team. You know, the kind that plays 4-on-5 with a cherry picker, monitors its players' sleep habits, and fires its coach, Mike Malone, a quarter of the way through a relatively successful season because he wouldn't bend his flawed team into the size and shape of a contender fast enough. The Kings have to push boundaries to compete with bigger, glitzier teams, but despite their slick veneer, they aren't the futuristic, positionless revolutionaries they think they are. They are a bad basketball team with a trigger happy owner. Thinking you are different and wanting to be different doesn't guarantee success.

9-6 isn't a celestial 15-game stretch, but with DeMarcus Cousins in the lineup, Sacramento navigated a minefield of a schedule by doubling down on its strengths. Malone slowed the game down and ran an uncomplicated offense through Cousins. It was ugly and it worked. However, Ranadive wanted to transition towards a vaguely realized vision of positionless basketball with a Spurs-y motion offense and defensive solidity. Which is not in itself a misplaced ambition, even if it boils down to "win forever and do everything good," but the Spurs have Gregg Popovich and a loaded roster. The Kings play Ryan Hollins and Reggie Evans with a straight face. Malone was coaching to the current roster's strengths. Plugging the now 11-13 Kings into an uptempo kinetic system is a calamitous idea that minimizes Cousins' potential impact. Hewing to Ranadive's naive stylistic ideas would be like buying a refrigerator full of steak only to convert to veganism.

Malone isn't one of the best five coaches in the NBA, but he was the right coach for the Kings right now and his unceremonious dismissal illustrates the uncomfortable gulf between basketball as played and coached on a day-to-day basis and basketball as theorized and imagined by owners and managers. Ranadive thought the Kings should have been competing for a playoff spot and that the best way to get there was by pushing the pace. Even after dropping a bunch of winnable games in creative ways, 11-13 is still a better record than the Kings should have on paper. Ben McLemore is finally developing and the team has real chemistry for the first time in almost a decade. In basketball terms, Malone has been killing it.

But management doesn't have the vocabulary to see Malone's time for the success it was. To Ranadive and GM Pete D'Alessandro, he was holding the team back and failing to live up to their ambitions of effervescent basketball and ceaseless dominance. It's more hubris than high standards, more megalomaniacal impatience than big data-driven calculation. More than anything, firing Malone feels like the concept of creative destruction incarnate. The Kings worked, but not enough for Ranadive's unreasonable standards. So he tore them down to innovate something better. That's standard praxis in his industry, but NBA teams are more opaque and delicate than tech companies.

Ranadive will learn this eventually, but there might be a cost. Team building takes time and good players. You can reinvent the wheel all you want, but there won't be any traction without stars. If the Kings' newfound ambition and restlessness nets them George Karl and a pretty offense at the cost of Boogie Cousins, it's not worth it.

More than impatience, Ranadive's biggest fault has been forgetting that players, not managers, make a team. Cousins trusted Malone, who made him a better player. Revolutionary, self-important ideas should defer to the job of surrounding Cousins with a good team and a system that leverages his talents. There is no inherent virtue in challenging the orthodoxy. Ranadive wants to invent new colors and change how basketball works, but right now, he's running the risk of mangling his team in the name of innovation.