The sign that greets you upon driving up to Sleep Train Arena in Sacramento says the Kings have been in California’s capital city from “1985-Forever.”
That kind of statement would have been deemed laughable by most people around the NBA as recently as a year ago, or at best would have been considered promotional material in the city’s fight to keep its team. But after billionaire tech magnate Vivek Ranadive’s ownership bid eventually outlasted its counterpart from Seattle last season and successfully bought (some would say rescued) the team from the Maloof family, it’s a statement much more rooted in fact.
Now comes the hard part, however, for Ranadive and his team, led by general manager Pete D’Alessandro and coach Mike Malone: trying to build a winner in Sacramento for the first time in nearly a decade.
“It’s going to be a process,” Ranadive told The Post recently in a conference room inside the team’s practice facility. “[But] we’ll get there.”
At several points last season it looked as if the franchise was destined to head 750 miles north after the Maloof family agreed to sell the team to the Seattle group. But thanks to a lot of work from Sacramento mayor and former NBA All-Star Kevin Johnson, as well as patience from the league office, Ranadive came to the forefront as a viable alternative to keep the team in Sacramento and eventually prevailed.
The process came with plenty of dramatic twists and turns along the way. On Opening Night on Oct. 30, the Kings showed a several-minute video montage covering the arduous process the city went through to keep the team, showing both good moments and bad.
“I think our fans have been through so much that we just wanted to, I don’t want to say remind, but let them know that we get it,” team president Chris Granger said. “We appreciate what they’ve been through, and now our job is to do everything we can to return the favor.”
It will be no small task to return that favor in terms of putting a winning product on the floor. The Kings have missed the playoffs each of the past seven seasons — a streak that will almost certainly stretch to eight this year — and haven’t won more than 28 games in any of the past five years.
But in the minds of both Ranadive and D’Alessandro, that turnaround will be led by enigmatic center DeMarcus Cousins, a hugely talented player who has been questioned for his temperament, defense and shot selection throughout his young career.
“I always like the question of ‘Why?’ about DeMarcus,” D’Alessandro said, “because people don’t say that about other people with his talent.”
Cousins’ talent was the main reason why the Kings committed a four-year, $62 million maximum contract extension to him before the season began, making him the face of the team’s rebuilding efforts. Cousins still has work left to do with his game – he’s still shooting a significant number of jumpers from out near the 3-point line, instead of focusing on attacking the rim – he’s averaging 21.5 points and 9.9 rebounds and has a player efficiency rating of 25.53.
But talent wasn’t the only reason Ranadive, who along with D’Alessandro and advisor Chris Mullin met with Cousins at center court of the team’s practice facility after the sale had gone through, decided to commit to Cousins for the long term.
“The first thing I did when I bought the team was I sent him a text. I said to him, ‘Hey DeMarcus, I’m the new owner, and my late friend Steve Jobs liked to say: Let’s put a dent in the universe.’ And he’s young, so he was just like one of my kids, and sent me a short reply back of three words: ‘Sounds good, boss,’ ” Ranadive said with a smile. “So that’s how it all started.
“Everyone paints him as this bad guy, and I see it very differently. I see a very talented guy, a very caring guy, a very loyal guy, a very hard-working guy, and I told him: ‘This is what I expect. These are my values, this is my mission, buy into all of these things.’ And he said yes. He’s been the hardest working guy in the preseason, in practice, so I think it’s going to be really exciting to have him be one of the foundation pieces of the new-era Kings.”
The other young foundation piece on the roster is rookie shooting guard Ben McLemore, whom the Kings took with the seventh overall pick in the draft in June. D’Alessandro went to see McLemore at Kansas last season when he was the assistant general manager of the Nuggets, though he never thought he would have the opportunity to draft him with Denver on its way to 57 wins.
Though his numbers aren’t eye-popping – he’s averaging 8.5 points and 3.2 rebounds while shooting 38 percent from the field and just under 35 percent from 3-point range – the 20-year-old McLemore recently was moved into the starting lineup by Malone, and has impressed the Kings with his work ethic.
“We look at him as a guy who we’re not putting it all on right now,” D’Alessandro said. “It’s going to be a process for him, as well. We feel very comfortable with what he’s doing.
“The thing that impresses me most about Ben is just how much work he’s done since he’s been here. The guy comes in and he puts the work in. That’s the part … you don’t see a lot of young guys do it. Ben and I text each other quite often after games and after practices, and I always reinforce in him that ‘I’m proud of you, but I’m proud of the work. That’s what I’m proud of. That’s what’s going to make you great.’”
Outside of Cousins and McLemore, however, there aren’t many players who factor into the long-term plans for the Kings, which isn’t surprising given the team’s record over the past several seasons. Given Ranadive’s background as a tech magnate who helped digitize Wall Street in the 1980s, a large part of the way he and the Kings hope to find the rest of those players is through data and analytics.
“My background is in big data,” Ranadive said. “I have this hypothesis that math is trumping science now, and what I mean by that is you don’t need to know the why – you just need to know the what, as in you need to find the pattern. If A and B happen, then C will happen.
“So my software is used to find, on the one hand, cures for cancer. What combinations of drugs will cure certain kinds of cancer. But it’s also used by stores to make [their] customers offers before they leave the aisle of a store, before they actually walk from one aisle to the next.
“To me, basketball is a big-data problem, and the data is there. And now we’ve got these six cameras [the SportVU cameras installed by the league in every arena], so we have the data. Combinations of players, where you need to stand, how you need to defend the other team … there’s a lot of data there that can be put to good use.”
With the perpetual talk of the franchise’s location now firmly in the past, the Kings can look ahead to the future, one that could get brighter very quickly, depending on how this season goes and where they land in the lottery for the star-studded 2014 draft class.
But for D’Alessandro and Malone, the work of figuring out who is going to remain on the team alongside Cousins and McLemore has already started.
“To me, it’s steer the ship, get it in the right direction, get it going in that direction, and then opportunities come and we build it,” D’Alessandro said. “With the group of people we have and the wealth of knowledge we have in this organization right now, we should be well-equipped to do it as quickly as we can.
“But the first thing is on the court, and so at 7:00 at night, it’s about how are these guys playing, and not just wins and losses, but how are they playing as an organization? Do we care? Are we out there fighting hard? That’s the first step. But look, I spend my nights thinking of the next thing, what are we doing, where are we going.”
Sactown trumped NBA job
When Granger decided to join the Kings as team president this summer and leave his position with the league as Executive Vice President of Team Marketing and Business Operations, it came as a surprise to many. He was considered one of the front-runners to take over as deputy commissioner when Adam Silver moves up to replace David Stern, who is retiring in February after 30 years on the job.
But Granger, who was sent to Sacramento in 2011 to work with the city to get an agreement for a new arena in place following the Maloof family’s failed attempt to move the team to Anaheim, said joining the Kings was something he couldn’t pass up.
“I think this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” said Granger, who had worked closely with the Kings from his position in the league office since 2004.
“I think the combination of the fan base, which I think is truly second to none, our ownership group, Vivek and the entire group in terms of their ambition, their intellectual curiosity, and just the fact they want to win so desperately, and third, to be able to build what I think will be the most talked about arena in the world, while also sort of revitalizing downtown Sacramento … it’s a legacy project.
“It’s something that will last the test of time, so for me, it’s very rare to get the opportunity to do one of those things, let alone have all three of those things come together at once, so it was a no-brainer for me.”
Granger also admitted he likely wouldn’t have made the decision to join the Kings if he hadn’t spent those several months living in the city in 2011.
“I had my wife out and my girls out several times during that first stint out here, just randomly because I was here for so long, and we just like it,” Granger said. “We really think it’s a neat place. So it just seemed like the right opportunity, and I wanted to finish the job.”
Asik on the move
Rockets center Omer Asik returned to the rotation this week after being dropped from the team’s starting lineup for two games, but it’s hard to envision any scenario in which he will stay in Houston past the trade deadline.
Asik has been asking for a trade since the Rockets signed Dwight Howard this summer, knowing he was going to become a backup again after leaving Chicago a year earlier as a restricted free agent to land a starting job. The Rockets tried pairing both of their centers together, but with neither capable of stretching the floor Houston separated their big men with a majority of the time going to Howard.
The problem for Houston, beyond that knows they have to move Asik eventually, is he is set to make around $15 million next season because of the poison-pill contract Rockets general manager Daryl Morey used to sign him away from Chicago. Although the cap number is actually only a little over $8 million, that larger number is a tough bill for a lot of teams to swallow.
Ideally, the Rockets would like to move Asik for a power forward with shooting touch to help space the floor for Howard and James Harden, but perhaps the best answer is already on their roster in second-year power forward Terrence Jones, who is averaging 14.4 points and 8.4 rebounds in five games since entering the starting lineup.
Randle the next Randolph
Given the amount of attention the 2014 draft class is getting, we’re going to try to highlight a player each week in this space. This week’s player is Kentucky’s Julius Randle, one of arguably the three biggest stars in the class, alongside Duke’s Jabari Parker and Kansas’ Andrew Wiggins.
Multiple people who saw Randle put up 27 points and 13 rebounds against Michigan State last week in Chicago as part of the doubleheader of games (the other being Duke-Kansas) that drew representatives from virtually every NBA team compared him to Grizzlies forward Zach Randolph because of both his game and body type.
Randle is one of several candidates to be the No. 1 pick next June in a draft that is considered to be the deepest since LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Carmelo Anthony and Chris Bosh came into the NBA in 2003.