The Sacramento Kings Do It To Themselves

The Sacramento Kings have their white whale, and are chasing it in a leaky bass boat with a misspelled name on the back. That Moby Dick is this: no superstar player has ever willingly committed his long term future to Sacramento, Chris Webber excepted. It takes a lot to be a successful NBA organization: a dialed-in coaching staff, a capable and nimble front office, an ambitious owner. But a team won't win, or win enough, without superstars, which would seem to be good news for the Kings, given that they have one already. DeMarcus Cousins was a deserving member of the All-NBA second team last season, is on one of the best value contracts in the league, and has improved every season despite playing with a procession of flawed point guards and for mostly overmatched coaches. He also excels at social media. Cousins is, at 24, one of the best and most valuable players in the NBA.

And as the league speeds up and rushes to imitate the Warriors, Cousins' balletic cage fighting game will only become more valuable. He can play both ugly and pretty basketball. The new Kings fell ass-backwards into the chance to build around him after the old regime drafted him in 2010; it was the best thing that happened to the team since the end of the Webber Administration. Naturally, there are reports that Cousins might be traded by Thursday's draft. The new owner doesn't want this to happen. The new coach really does. The new GM, who was one of the team's greatest players and has never before held such a position, seems out of the loop. The Kings stay the Kings.

Dig into those reports and it's as bad as it is confusing; George Karl allegedly wants to get the A Few Years Ago Kind Of Good Denver Nuggets back together, and then chase the all-time wins record. Vivek Ranadive is desperate to get into the playoffs by the time the new arena opens in downtown Sacramento in October 2016. The person who has the most to gain by Cousins moving to a bigger market is his agent Dan Fegan, and he is probably chief agitator here. Fegan is the only one who benefits from the perception that the organization has turned on Cousins. For every other party, conflict, whether real or fabricated, only makes their jobs harder. It's impossible to see through all the smokescreens and bluffs and counter-bluffs at the moment, but it appears that there are multiple parties attempting to wrest control of the organization. This is just as it's been ever since Ranadive took over.

This isn't dysfunction. Dysfunction is a split between coaching and the front office on who to draft. No, this is a failed state comprised of feudal fiefdoms, each cannibalizing the other without any central authority to shut it all down. George Karl has been the Kings' coach since February and has already agitated for acquiring Ty Lawson, Kenneth Faried, and JaVale McGee, among other former players. We are, admittedly, in the midst of the worst time for rumors and lies, but it sure looks like George Karl—a coach Cousins was opposed to hiring, if only because he replaced Mike Malone, the first Kings coach with whom Cousins had any meaningful bond—would rather coach the veteran players he coached a few years ago than work with a purportedly difficult superstar.

Karl has publicly denied the rumors, but here we plunge deep into the toxic ambiguity that has defined the Kings for so long. This denial could be for leverage purposes, and Karl has a history of bullying stars (as well as a thorough rap sheet that testifies to his possible serpentine origins). Also, everyone agrees that the Kings aren't sniffing the playoffs anytime soon, but that if Karl and Ranadive really want to win now in the loaded Western Conference (which seems to be all they can agree on), trading Cousins would be the worst possible thing to do.

Ranadive appears to have a choice between Karl and Cousins. If he has to decide, Cousins is the correct option, but this is not a decision he should even be facing. When Malone was coach, the Kings were winning and Cousins looked like an MVP. Then he got hurt and Ranadive, the dude who looked at Nik Stauskas and saw Steph Curry, fired Malone, empowered GM Pete D'Alessandro, and ended the 2014-15 season with the season's third coach and a deeply fed up group of players. D'Alessandro is now the GM of the Denver Nuggets; he hired Malone to be the team's new coach.

The Kings, for their part, have a new front office, a new coach, and the same problems they had a year ago, which boil down to the fact that nobody trusts each other. For all the friction each hire brings, the personnel churn itself and the accompanying reorientation of priorities is perhaps more draining. And Cousins, because of his overstated reputation as a leering malcontent, looks increasingly available to other teams. Teams like, for example, the much-hated, mostly hateable Lakers. Somehow DeMarcus Cousins—arguably the best player the team has ever had and one who has been implausibly loyal to a franchise where serial meltdowns are the only constant between ownership groups—still gets painted as the bad guy.

Kings fans are caught in the middle of all this. After Ranadive snatched the franchise from the metastatic Maloof family, he looked like a savior. After firing Malone, he looked like he was figuring things out on the fly. Now, he looks clueless and very much like a mark, one as liable to be taken by Chris Mullin or any other credentialed huckster looking for power. Vlade Divac is his latest chief executive, and he has a reputation for building relationships and not letting himself get intimidated. Divac was an integral member of the only good Kings teams ever. Fans trust him, and not just because they watched him play beautiful basketball while gunning cigarettes at halftime.

Still, it's hard to shake the sense that this latest crisis and the accompanying power struggles will snuff out the embryonic progress the team made early last season. With Boogie Cousins around, the Kings have some stability, and a cornerstone to build around; at the very least, they are less of a sad joke. If he's traded, he becomes part of a long lineage of tubercular, mangled team-building projects. And the Kings are the Kings again.

This sad history has blistered over into an inferiority complex. The Kings have had a series of different owners, but they haven't been able to shake the specter of catastrophe, like they are paying protracted spiritual homage to Sacramento hero Joan Didion. The team, especially now, feels cursed. But there are no such things as curses, only fools.