Sunday Musings: Luke Walton fired, but can anyone fix what ails the Kings?

Saturday night at Golden 1 Center may have been a perfect metaphor for the last 16-years of struggle and pain in Sacramento. With 9:32 remaining in the fourth quarter, a fan sitting courtside threw up all over the court. And then he threw up some more.

Sitting directly across from the puddle of vomit was Kings Chairman Vivek Ranadivé. Sometimes having a front row seat isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The 20-minute delay in the action may have given Ranadivé the clarity he needed. That is, if looking up at the jumbotron and spotting the score of the game wasn’t enough. 

Saturday night was vomit. Sunday morning was the attempt at the cleanup.

The Luke Walton experience is over in Sacramento. After a 123-105 loss to the Utah Jazz,  the Kings relieved the 41-year-old head coach of his duties Sunday morning after just 161 games at the helm. 

The team confirmed that veteran Alvin Gentry will replace Walton on an interim basis. The Kings considered throwing a curveball in the form of first-year assistant and former Kings player Doug Christie, but in the end, chose a more conservative path. 

Gentry has an uphill battle over the final 65 games of the season. The Kings are a mess on the court after dropping their seventh game in eight tries.

It’s a disappointing turn of events for the Kings. The franchise has run through coaches at an alarming rate over the last 15 years. Their next coach will be the 11th since Rick Adelman left the team following the 2005-06 season and more than likely, there is a possibility that there will be a 12th coach running the squad next season.

How should Walton be judged during his time in Sacramento? That is a very complicated question to answer. 

He tallied a record of 68-93 over his tenure with the team for an overall win percentage of .422. Surprisingly, Adelman is the only coach in the Sacramento-era with a better record. 

But the players quit on him this season and by doing so, quit on themselves. Now it’s on Gentry to bring a team together that has shown very little interest in holding themselves accountable for their play on the court.

Why did Walton have to go? 

The Kings are in a tailspin of epic proportion. After a 5-4 start, they can’t get out of their own way. The identity of the team is missing on both ends of the court and most of the players on the roster are underperforming. 

The Kings have been one of the most manic teams in the league. They’ve had stretches where they played hard and picked up wins against quality teams, but a 1-3 road trip followed by back-to-back losses at Golden 1 Center while fans chanted “Fire-Luke-Walton” was too much to ignore.

When the losses started piling up, like they did last season, this outcome was inevitable.

Why now?

It was a surprise when Kings general manager Monte McNair decided to bring Walton back for a third season, but he was hoping for some continuity and he and Walton had built some solid chemistry. 

When the team got off to a solid start, there was hope around Sacramento that Walton could be the coach to snap the franchise’s 15-year playoff drought, but with the season already spiraling, the time was now. 

This isn’t a comparable situation to when Ranadivé fired Michael Malone 24 games into the 2014-15 season, although the outcome could be the same. Only time will tell.

The Kings went through both Tyrone Corbin and George Karl on their way to an 18-40 record after Malone’s dismissal. Not only did the season spin out of control, but the turn of events did massive fracturing to the franchise and ended up costing a ton of money in coaches’ salaries for years after.  

It should be noted that Walton still has a year remaining on his contract after this season, which the Kings will continue to pay moving forward.

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Is it fair to put the blame on Walton?

Walton’s first two seasons came amidst extreme circumstances with injuries and the covid-19 pandemic. He deserved a shot to start this season, but a 17-game sample size was plenty. 

His inability to get the team on the right path with better talent and depth was his undoing. Whether a different coach or a different voice can lead to a turnaround will take time to figure out.

The players deserve plenty of the blame for their coach’s ousting, as well. There is a core group, including De’Aaron Fox, Buddy Hield, Harrison Barnes and Richaun Holmes that have been together for a while. The fact that they can’t seem to find success is an issue that McNair likely needs to delve deeper into.

Walton is the first domino, but no one should feel comfortable about what’s happening. It’s not Walton’s fault that his players missed shots, missed assignments and mishandled the ball in crunch time. 

Gentry or whoever else might take over the team in the coming months has a lot of work in front of them. They inherit a team that plays soft and despite saying the right things, the players failed to step up and save their coach.

What did Walton do well?

There are a few things that the Kings can take away from the Walton era. First up, he wasn’t afraid to make a big move. Walton is the guy that benched Dewayne Dedmon and allowed Holmes to grow into the player he has become.

Walton is also the guy who moved Hield to the bench and has spent the last two-plus seasons  empowering Fox to become a star. 

Barnes had a career-year under Walton last season and is off to another strong start this season. Tyrese Haliburton has also been given plenty of room to grow in his first season-plus and is developing into a quality starting shooting guard.

Some of this praise goes to the development staff, but again, if Walton is going to be fired for the negative, he should also share in some of the positives.

Is the 2021-22 season salvageable? 

Maybe? But barring a big trade, the next Kings coach is stuck with the same 15 players who just let one coach down and continue to get pushed all over the court.  

66 games is a lot of basketball left, and at 6-11, the Kings are just a game and a half out of the 10th seed for the play-in tournament and three games out of the eighth seed. 

The coming weeks will tell a lot about who this team is. They quit on Walton and themselves over the last two weeks. Will they quit on the next coach or step up to the challenge?

If they continue to struggle, McNair has to make changes to the roster. Some of those changes should have already happened.

What happens next?

Seeing a coach lose his job is never fun. The Kings have run through one coach after another for the last decade and a half and Walton is just another name to get chewed up and spit out.

Gentry is a seasoned veteran coach that has taken over a team mid-season three times during his career. He is a steady hand, but it’s also his offense the team has been running for the last two seasons.

During his 33 years in the NBA, the 67-year-old has been a head coach with the Heat, Pistons, Clippers, Suns and Pelicans. He has a career record of 510-595 and he’s led three teams to the postseason.

Gentry’s contract runs through next season and he’ll have an opportunity to have the interim tag lifted, but he should be considered a stop-gap for now while the Kings reassess their path forward.