Ranadive’s Regicide: Cousins, Corbin, and Courting Disaster

In firing Mike Malone, the Sacramento front office royally screwed up.

A lot has been made of a Sacramento screw-job since the Sacramento Kings front office dropped the hammer on Mike Malone and handed the reins to Tyrone Corbin. It was a seemingly unpopular decision that faced opposition in the form of passive aggressive blogs using varying degrees of analytics to highlight anger, confusion, disbelief and even a bit of schadenfreude.

Enough time has passed for a small sample size to accumulate in the post-Malone era for the Kings. The results are not good. On the court they have become a sieve-like defense, had a marginal uptick on the offensive end, and witnessed the return of Bad Boogie. DeMarcus Cousins, who was playing like the league’s best center at the beginning of the season, has had outbursts on the court, made comments to the media and just kind of given up in general at points during the past few games.

With all the options to choose from, how do we decide which piece is the most concerning for the Kings puzzle? Kings owner, Vivek Ranadive, has been a fount of information on how the team should be coached. Based on the numbers we have seen since Corbin took over, it appears that the new head coach is playing ball with ownership demands and the results are…not good.

After starting the season 11-13 under Malone, the team has floundered to 3-7 under Corbin. To make matters worse, the Kings were 9-6 to start the season against a strong schedule of opponents including wins over the San Antonio Spurs, Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Clippers. Then the Kings lost star center Demarcus Cousins to a viral infection and the slide began. Mike Malone struggled to 2-7 without Cousins and that was all she wrote for the deposed coach. With Cousins back in the lineup, Corbin has been unable to employ the fast-paced offensive schemes demanded of him by the front office while maintaining any semblance of defense. And his 3-7 mark as coach comes against a stretch of teams nearly 150 percentage points lower than the competition that Malone’s Kings faced, nearly half of which was without Cousins. The only wins for Corbin have come against the Minnesota Timberwolves, New York Knicks and Los Angeles Lakers. That list reads like a who’s who of teams trying to make the Philadelphia 76ers look good.

Cousins has been trouble since the departure of Malone, a coach that seemed to connect with Cousins and get all the good and nearly none of the bad. Recent games have seem him ejected for throwing an opponent to the ground, not even moving a muscle on an offensive possession late in the fourth quarter of a close game, and make comments to the media about life after Malone. There is plenty cause for alarm in the Kings camp right about now as their star player is on the verge of going full berserk at any given moment.

It isn’t all on Cousins, many have pointed out that the fast pace Ranadive has wanted his team to play at did not suit the powerful center. Cousins gets visibly tired trying to keep up in the offensive scheme and that means he doesn’t have as much energy to spend on the defensive end of court, where the Kings have progressively gotten worse as the season goes along.

The Kings are struggling mightily on defense. Any time your metrics put you in the same category as teams like the Minnesota Timberwolves and New York Knicks, things are not going well. The Kings currently sit 27th in the league in OPPG. With Cousins, Malone had the team working against some of the best in the West to the tune of 103.6, good enough to rank right in the middle at 15th in the league. Without Cousins, Malone’s team took a hit, but overall they still managed a respectable 104.2, good for 19th in the league. Since Malone was fired, the Kings have plunged to 111.6, 7.4 points worse than under Malone, 28th in the league. The less number-centric way to say it: the Kings are terrible on defense under Corbin.

I don’t know how much to blame Corbin. He has been given a chance to be a head coach in the NBA once again. But the price seems to be that he takes orders from Vivek Ranadive, not just as a boss, but also as a basketball mind and master strategist of all things basket and ball related. At some point you have to hope that they see how far the defense has fallen and take note that their system as employed by Corbin isn’t yielding results. The focus was said to be on pace and scoring, but the Kings only moved up one spot in offensive rating in the coaching switch while the defense went from middle of the pack to bottom of the league. Demarcus Cousins is going into Boogie mode too often and has started to let his frustration and displeasure demonstrate itself on and off the court.

Ranadive said that he wanted jazz, but this is much more like a free jazz cover of Weather Report than it is Miles Davis. They are not birthing cool in Sacramento, they are killing the Kings.