Sacramento Kings break Alvin Gentry in his first game back

The Kings broke Alvin Gentry. 

Maybe it happened while he was in lockdown recovering from covid-19 and he was forced to watch his team play on television. Maybe it came in the third quarter when the Kings laid down against the Memphis Grizzlies.

Whatever the moment was, Gentry snapped. The end result was an NBA head coach destroying his team in a postgame interview.

“This is the most disappointed I’ve been in 34 years in the NBA, I can honestly say that,” Gentry said in his opening remarks. “That performance was absolutely ridiculous. We didn’t play hard. We didn’t compete. We gave up 19 offensive rebounds for 37 points or some astronomical figure. We didn’t guard the ball. We didn’t guard the screen-and-rolls. We didn’t follow the game plan. All of those things.”

Gentry didn’t stop there. He questioned his team’s competitiveness. He even started to mention the Grizzlies clowning his players, before catching himself. 

Gentry’s N-95 mask couldn’t disguise his anger and frustration. In fact, he only seemed to get more amped up as the press conference went on. According to the Kings’ interim head coach, this is the exact message that he relayed to his team moments before in the locker room.

Where does Gentry go from here? Will this team listen or does the blame for this mess start to shift to the real culprits -- the players themselves, the management group that has sat idly by while another season slides out of control and the ownership group that spends but can’t stay out of basketball affairs?

Changes have to come. This isn’t about a covid outbreak that has left the team shorthanded for the last two weeks. Almost every team in the league is dealing with the same issue, including the Grizzlies, who were down multiple players. 

Terence Davis tried his best to explain what is happening, but how fair is that? He’s a player who just came back from covid and actually played well in the lopsided loss. 

If anything, he made one of the most astute statements we’ve heard from a Kings player this season.

“I don’t think we lack leadership, I think we lack a leader’s voice, if that makes sense,” Davis said. “We don’t really have a leader's voice. We have leaders, but their voice isn’t being heard enough, honestly. That’s just my opinion.”

The 2021-22 Sacramento Kings roster has talent. How much talent is debatable, but they should have enough to at least compete for a play-in spot in the Western Conference. The sixth seeded Denver Nuggets currently sit at .500. Teams 7-10 all have losing records and still the Kings are on the outside looking in.

There doesn’t seem to be a light at the end of the tunnel. This team is starting to feel like the 2014-15 Kings season when the term “basketball hell” was coined by Rudy Gay. It is spiraling out of control and that usually leads to worse and worse decisions from the franchise.

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How does the madness stop? Personal accountability is a starter. Players have to play better. Coaches need to hold players accountable or move onto the next group. Management needs to stop saying that they think they built a team that can compete, because clearly they did not. Ownership needs to back away and let the basketball people try to fix the problem. 

A more likely outcome is that none of this will happen. The season will continue to slide off the rails. The February 10 trade deadline will come and go and the only outcome will be losses, not gains. This is the modus operandi of the Kings brand, regardless of who is running the show.

This is all the cycle of futility in Sacramento. It is everyone’s problem. It’s no one’s problem. How do you change something when no one wants to take true ownership for their part in the mess. 

Alvin Gentry was the first one to break. He might be thanking his lucky stars that the Kings refused to give him a three-year contract like he wanted when he took over the team from Luke Walton in late November.

Gentry won’t be the last. You can already see the players holding on by a thread. They’ve let go of the rope in plenty of quarters this season, but when a team truly quits, and we’ve seen it in Sacramento multiple times over the last 15 seasons of chaos, it feels even worse than this. 

Another three game losing streak and we’re back on the brink. How this team responds will be telling, but expecting anything other than the same inconsistency from this group would be a bad bet at this point.