The 2015-16 NBA Season starts in less than two weeks, preseason hoops are in full swing, and playoff prognostications have begun in earnest. Since season previews can get bogged down by team-specific minutiae, and we cover every basketball team, we’re providing our readers reasons why you should care about all 30 teams in the Association.
DIME MAG’s 2015-16 NBA Season Previews
It’s gotten too easy to malign the Sacramento Kings. The former point guard and now-mayor who spearheaded the movement to keep them in Sacramento was then revealed as a sexual predator to an icky degree. Then, the megalomaniac who purchased the team from the the Maloof brothers thought a career making billions off real-time computing that digitized Wall Street prepared him to fire Mike Malone, the first coach DeMarcus Cousins ever developed a rapport with, ceded control of basketball ops from life-long hoophead Pete D’Alessandro to former Kings center Vlade Divac, who has no prior experience running an NBA basketball team. That’s forgetting to mention the way Sacramento bungled the George Karl hiring, treating Tyrone Corbin — who replaced Malone on an interim basis — like dog crap (he’s still an advisor), and inadvertently allowed a rift between Karl and Boogie that only now seems to be settling.
That’s a long-winded way of saying, it’s real easy for the rest of the NBA to laugh at the Kings.
While SB Nation’s Sactown Royalty blog is one of the finest team-specific sites on the web and Ailene Voisin and Jason Jones have done excellent work covering the team for the Sacramento Bee, it’s hard to take them seriously, even with the Maloofs gone. Their coverage is far superior to the product they’ve put on the court, and that’s been the case since Vlade, Webber, Bibby and Peja blitzed the competition in Rick Adelman’s free-flowing offense 10 years before it became the de jure philosophy around the NBA.
(So much so, in fact, Malone got fired for — rightly — not implementing it with last year’s Kings squad. Boogie is the best low-post scorer in the NBA. Why run when you can pound opponents into submission in the paint?)
But that’s what Vivek and Co. wanted to do. Now, after bringing Rajon Rondo aboard for a one-year, $10 million tryout of sorts, the biggest story has to be how he’ll fit on the court and in the locker room because neither will be an easy assimilation. It’s similar to jamming a square piece in his beloved Connect Four.
Kosta Koufos and Marco Bellinelli were actually smart summer signings, but Darren Collison is again backing someone up at the point after a better-than-expected 2014-15 campaign. And it’s not like Rondo — a math genius, and one of the more erudite players in the league today — is the easiest person to get along with.
So how is this gonna work out?
How Rajon Rondo fits in with them on the court
Rajon Rondo has never been easy. For as difficult a personality he can sometimes be in the locker room, the four-time All-Star has always proven an even more difficult fit on the floor. What easily made up for his most glaring deficiencies, though, weren’t just strengths that proved even more blinding, but a team construct uniquely suited to diminishing them.
With the Boston Celtics, Rondo never played with less than three perimeter threats. Ray Allen might have drawn more attention running around screens or spotting up on the weak-side than any player in history. Paul Pierce was a knock-down shooter from all over the floor off the catch or the dribble, and Kevin Garnett is one of the greatest frontcourt marksmen to ever play the game. The Big Three, Boston’s bench players, and Doc Rivers’ system afforded Rondo the floor-space needed to mitigate his complete lack of range outside 15-feet, and there were still times when that crippling condition came back to bite the Celtics.
Just how, then, is a 29-year-old, less explosive Rondo supposed to survive with the Sacramento Kings?
That he couldn’t as a Dallas Maverick alongside Dirk Nowitzki is nearly as damning as his performance alone. Everything that made Rick Carlisle’s team one of the league most potent offenses before it acquired Rondo stemmed from Dirk’s all-encompassing threat as a shooter. By pairing Monta Ellis in the backcourt with another player who needed the ball even more and needed to be guarded to the arc even less frequently, the Mavericks compromised the two aspects that most accounted for their offensive prowess: space and movement.
When they traded for Boston’s long-time point guard in December, Mark Cuban and company understood the potential for those problems to arise. Dallas was simply betting that raw basketball talent would trump awkward stylistic fit.
Now ask yourself this: Are the Kings doing anything different?
No big man in basketball used more possessions last season than DeMarcus Cousins. Rudy Gay has been solid in Sacramento, but still done nothing for anyone to believe he’s a much different player than the one so maligned with the Toronto Raptors and Memphis Grizzlies. Though the Kings are much better on paper defensively with Kosta Koufos and Willie Cauley-Stein, it seems just as likely that an improvement on that end will be marginalized by pairing either of them with Cousins on the other end.
Nothing above suggests Rondo’s time in Sacramento will go much differently than his extremely brief one in Dallas.
Rondo’s defender will leave him to crunch the floor on Cousins post-ups, and the same applies for Gay isolations or ball-screens. The Kings seem committed to playing two traditional big men more often than not, tightening the squeeze on a floor shrunk by the presence of their new floor general. Even when Gay shifts down to power forward and the court opens, there will still only be so much ball to go around. And perhaps most importantly, it remains to be seen how George Karl will adjust his time-honored principles of tempo and free-flowing with a roster that flies in the face of such convention.
Sacramento’s pieces would seem mismatched even if basketball’s most crooked one wasn’t among them. But Rondo is, and the Kings are committed – at least early in the season – to making the puzzle fit. We hope they can pull it off, but Rondo’s recent history suggests almost any other outcome.
How Rajon Rondo fits in with them off the court
This section has to be purely subjective. The various ways humans push and prod one another when in near-constant contact for months on end, like during an NBA season, can never be quantified or even predicted. Some people are like two positively charged ions, they’re just naturally gonna repel one another.
Will this be the case with Rondo and another integral player on the Kings?
So far, despite that blip of sarcasm we all ran with concerning his relationship with the coach, he’s said all the right things.
He said his excitement for playing with this year’s Kings team is on par with his 2008 Celtics team that won the title. And Rondo still talks to KG and Pierce on the phone a lot. So what if it’s a bit of preseason hyperbole. It’s better than if the opposite had happened.
Rondo says he and the team are a great fit for now, and who are we to try and disprove that notion?
He and Rudy Gay are tight, and that friendship was one of the biggest reasons Rondo even elected to sign in Sacramento — though we doubt he was getting eight-figure’s a year elsewhere.
This section is pure conjecture, and while Rondo seems like a fiery enough personality that his addition to a locker room with another strong personality in Karl could have the synergistic effect of Pop Rocks and soda pop. Doc was often barely able handle Rajon in Boston, and he’s considered a player-friendly coach. Rondo ain’t a coach-friendly player at all; if KG and Pierce hadn’t been around to guide Rondo, who knows if he lasts as long as he did with the Shamrock on his uniform.
Obviously, both of these sections are concurrently running in unison next season. Rondo on and off the court is the biggest conundrum facing the 2015-16 Kings. But he could also be their best chance to break out of the lottery cycle they’ve been stuck in since Adelman was patrolling the sidelines.
Rondo isn’t the only reason to care about the Kings, but we think the rest of the league finally understands DeMarcus Cousins ain’t no joke.
