The real person who should be fired by the Sacramento Kings: Owner Vivek Ranadive

A fan vomited courtside Saturday night as the Sacramento Kings lost to the Utah Jazz 123-105. It was a vivid illustration of how sickening this current team is. But firing coach Luke Walton doesn’t address who is really making us ill.

That’s primary team owner Vivek Ranadive.

His meddling in the basketball operations, his penchant for putting the wrong people in important positions and then undermining them led to another firing of another Kings coach. Or, as the team said in a news release Sunday, Walton was “relieved of his duties” as head coach.

Now the team again has another interim head coach in Alvin Gentry and will be paying for another fired coach.

Another generation of young talent looks defeated, plays defeated, after arriving in Sacramento full of fire. Remember when star point guard De’Arron Fox was bright-eyed and brilliant? Look at him now. He’s averaging 19.7 points a game, shooting a horrid 24.3 percent from 3-point range, and has 5.8 assists per game. All those numbers are way off from either of his past two seasons, when he looked like a budding All-Star.

Now, Fox’s shoulders are slumped, downcast, defeated. That’s what the malignant Kings culture of losing does to talent.

That’s what the Kings culture was when Ranadive took over. He has extended and worsened that losing culture, which may have seemed impossible a decade ago. After the Maloof brothers’ tenure as owners, it didn’t seem possible to have worse culture. Sadly, here we are.

Ranadive is the Maloofs, but with way more money. He’s powerful, the Kings are weak.

Firing Walton was inevitable, but solves little.

The problem is ownership. The problem is the guy who can’t be fired but should be fired.

Ranadive fired the coach he should have kept, Michael Malone. Ranadive fired Malone early in the 2014-15 season even though the coach clearly had the Kings playing better basketball than the season before. What more can you ask from a coach?

All Malone has done since leaving the Kings is build a playoff and title contender in Denver, looking like a basketball savant in the process. He took the 2019-20 iteration of the Nuggets to the Western Conference finals. The Kings haven’t been to the Western Conference finals since 2002. They haven’t even made the playoffs since 2006.

While Malone has been building a championship contender in Denver, Ranadive has been fiddling around with the leaders of his team. He’s created more problems than he’s solved. He hired two coaches he shouldn’t have, George Karl and Walton. He handed the keys to basketball operations to men with no experience running an NBA team or even a G League team. In the case of former general manager Vlade Divac, Ranadive fired people just months after giving out a four-year contract.

The Walton era was awkward in its own ways. He arrived in Sacramento and was almost immediately hit with a lawsuit by Los Angeles media personality Kelli Tennant. According to the lawsuit, Walton sexually assaulted Tennant in a Santa Monica hotel room when he was an assistant coach with the Warriors in 2014. Tennant also said Walton sexually harassed her in 2017, when he was coaching the Lakers.

The lawsuit was eventually withdrawn from the courts, but it raised a key question: Did Ranadive do any research before hiring Walton? The Kings reportedly didn’t even bother to interview anybody else. They wanted Walton, history be damned.

The result of that rash hiring was subpar mediocrity. The Kings had a .431 win percentage in each of Walton’s first two seasons as head coach and started this year a lowly 6-11. That’s very bad for a team that was bumping up against the NBA salary cap every season.

You’re supposed to get wins when you spend money. Instead, all we got was sick from watching Vivek waste money. Again.

This story was originally published November 21, 2021 at 1:09 PM.