Here’s Hoping Interim Joe Dumars Knows What He’s Getting Into With Kings

In the winter of 2003, Joe Dumars was at his desk in his office in Auburn Hills, Michigan, home of the Pistons. Dumars, a Hall of Fame player the team, was running the show in Detroit, and this would be his peak as an executive—the Pistons won a championship that season. On a white board behind Dumars, the names of every player in the NBA sat on magnets, arranged by their place in each team’s rotation.

I asked Dumars about it. For fun, I picked a random spot, say, seventh down on Atlanta’s chart. Without looking, he spat out the answer. How about 10^th on the list for Orlando? He knew it. On and on, he knew the board as if it were sitting right in front of him.

Dumars knows the game, knows the league. Now that he is being elevated to run the Kings in the wake of Friday’s sudden resignation from Vlade Divac, he must know the challenges he faces—starting with the very notion of having an organization at all. Owner Vivek Ranadive took over a mess of a team in 2013 but the Kings have been only marginally less of a mess with him at the helm since.

That mess started at the very beginning. Michael Malone was the first head coach Ranadive hired, in June 2013. Malone is a defense-first coach who also managed to do something no other Kings coach had done—forge a good relationship with prickly star DeMarcus Cousins. But Ranadive hired Malone before he hired a general manager. When the Kings hired Pete D’Alessandro weeks later, Malone was in the position of coaching under a front office that had not hired him nor shared his vision.

Malone lasted one full season. During the 2014 offseason, he had to fend off the organization’s attempts to bring in Alvin Gentry as a “lead assistant,” a move Malone felt was setting him up to be replaced by Gentry. Just 24 games into his second season, even with the Kings at a respectable 11-13, D’Alessandro pulled plug on Malone, firing him and paving the way for the up-tempo style of George Karl, hired in February 2015.

Of course, two weeks later, in March 2015, Ranadive brought in Divac in the amorphous role of vice president and adviser. D’Alessandro opposed the move, mostly because he knew where it was all leading—Divac’s entry meant D’Alessandro would be nudged out. In June, he left the Kings for a job with the Nuggets.  

For those around the team and around the NBA, the Kings were a circus. The first coach had been hired before the first GM and fired because the GM (predictably) wanted him out, leading to a second coach who was hired just weeks before the GM who hired him was kneecapped in favor of Divac, who had no special love for that second coach, Karl. No surprise that Karl was let go after the 2015-16 season, something Divac would have done except that team owners nixed the move.

Ranadive did express some contrition for the fumbling start to his ownership of the Kings. But, in an interview with USA Today in 2016, he still appeared to deflect blame to other parties, especially Malone and D’Alessandro.

Ranadive went on: “They tried to fire (Malone) right from the get-go, and I was peacemaker. … I sat everybody down and I said, ‘Guys, this is – we’re all in one boat.’ My exact (message) was, ‘You can’t say there’s a hole in the other person’s side of the boat, because if there’s a hole in the boat we all sink.’… They hated each other’s guts. It was like one person would say one thing, and then the other person would say another thing. And they wanted to get rid of him very early on, and I was the one who said ‘No, no, let’s make it work. Let’s make it work.’”

Kings Never Learned Lessons of Ranadive’s Rough Start

Thing is, it did not work. If Ranadive’s job as owner was to put everyone on the same page, he could not even get them reading the same book. In seven years, Ranadive has had four coaches and three GMs.

While the day-to-day has been smoother for the Kings in recent years, this is hardly a paradigm of organizational precision. It’s gone from a three-ring circus to, maybe, a two-ring circus. Last year, front-office executive Brandon Williams and coach Dave Joerger sniped at each other through reporters, the front office and the coaching staff apparently still unable to come to terms on the direction of the team.

Divac fired them both. Shortly thereafter, the team brought in Dumars as a special advisor, the same amorphous job title Divac once held. When, as The Athletic reported, Ranadive (again, predictably) asked Divac to give Dumars a bigger role, Divac could see he was being set up as the next Malone, the next D’Alessandro. He resigned.   

Surely, Dumars knows this history. As for his time in Detroit, it flickered out beginning with two spectacularly bad decisions—giving nearly $100 million to Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva in 2009—but he’d built a champion with the Pistons before that. He’ll also be known as the guy who drafted Darko Milicic in 2003, but that misstep could be excused because of the success the team had thereafter, with a title in 2004 and a Finals appearance in 05.

Dumars is not going to win a championship in Sacramento. It will be enough if he can simply bring some order and harmony to the group. He is in the same position with coach Luke Walton as D’Alessandro was in with Malone, and Divac was with Karl. Those were disasters. But even with that issue looming, if Dumars can push Ranadive into the background, and defuse the impatience and in-fighting that has defined this team, maybe Dumars can at least get the Kings moving in the right direction.

Dumars knows the league. Here’s hoping he knows what he is getting himself into.