The Sacramento Kings are ready to get weird.
The removal of head coach Mike Malone late Sunday has led to a lot of reporting about the strange state of affairs in Sacramento. With Malone reportedly at odds with management over playing style, interim head coach Tyrone Corbin is said to be more open to some of the more quirky requests from higher up.
The Kings have made no secret under owner Vivek Ranadive - famous for his turn as an outside-the-box youth girls basketball coach in Malcolm Gladwell's "David and Goliath" - that they're going to look to go against the grain to gain a competitive edge.
Some of that has been justifiable. Rolling the dice on an overpaid player like Rudy Gay, a player the ilk of who wouldn't have been acquirable in free agency, appears to have been a worthwhile gamble, especially now that he's under a friendly extension. Jettisoning Isaiah Thomas and replacing him with Darren Collison was derided but looks better a quarter of the way through the season. Their insanely-paced D-League experiment has been loads of fun.
The biggest tweak the team may see with a new bench boss is the most extreme and intriguing yet. In an article outlining the clash between Malone and management, who were usually under the directive of Ranadive, Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo Sports provides the following nugget:
The owner played the part of a fantasy league owner, treating the Kings like a science experiment. He shared tactical experiences with Malone about coaching his child's youth team, and pressed him to consider playing 4-on-5 defense, leaking out a defender for cherry-picking baskets. Some semblance of that strategy is expected to be employed with Corbin now, a source told Yahoo Sports.
Yes, the Kings may play some strange form of 5-on-5 defense.
As a refresher, it was reported before the season that Ranadive had mentioned the idea but that the team wouldn't move forward with it in reality (see the story below).
The logic goes something like this. Pressuring the ball a great deal creates turnovers, which lead to easy points the other way. Ball pressure is valued above all else on defense, but the team doesn't care a great deal if the opponent scores once past the initial line of defense, so long as they do so quickly. Leaking a cherry picker turns any turnover or defensive rebound into a nearly guaranteed bucket the other way, and does so quickly. Over the course of 48 minutes (or, more realistically, smaller stretches), the Kings would hope to get enough stops short-handed that the easy baskets win out.
The roster doesn't necessarily fit that style of play, but trying to implement some of the extreme principles they want to play with now will allow some players to get used to it and weed out those who can't. It's bizarre, and it probably won't work, but it could also be a lot of fun.
The team also isn't going to just play a man short, straight up, all the time. There are limits to their D-League strategy when they have NBA stars logging nearly 40 minutes a game and unable to play a breakneck pace throughout, but it's more the general, larger-picture strategy they want to enforce here: Let's get aggressive, and let's play at a crazy tempo.
The Kings' offense currently ranks 15th, with the team playing at the league's 16th-fastest pace. Defensively, they're just 28th in efficiency and force the fewest turnovers in the league. None of those numbers align with what ownership wants from the team, and they appear set to change under Corbin.
