The Sacramento Kings owner Vivek Ranadive controversially stated earlier this week that he is not to blame for any dysfunction during his tenure.
Ranadive claimed that when he bought the franchise, he had to fast-track the hiring process due to a lack of personnel, as per Sam Amick of USA Today:
“I walked in, and there was nobody who wanted to be here,” said Ranadive. “There was no coach, no GM, it was a ghost town.”
At the time however, the Kings did have a coach in Keith Smart and their general manager during that period was Geoff Petrie. When speaking to Kevin Draper of Deadspin, Petrie expressed his displeasure at Ranadive’s comments:
“The way it came across in the article is like [Ranadivé] came in there and there was nobody there, nobody wanted to be there,” said Petrie. “Keith Smart wanted to be there! He had a year left on his contract. He didn’t get a discussion or an interview, he got a 90-second phone call in his car that they weren’t going to keep him. How do you arrive at a statement that he didn’t want to be there?”
“Leading up to the actual sale of the team, it was obvious the team was going to be sold. What became of the bidding match between the Ballmer group and ultimately Vivek’s group, through the league office, people were concerned about their jobs, what their future was going to be, what it would hold for them. And really, we had a group of people there that had been there, and we had worked together for a long time and were part of the best heritage that the Kings have ever had in Sacramento. I brought everybody together at different occasions and said, ‘Look, we’re going to be professional here, we’re going to continue to work like we’d work any other year, we’ll prepare for the draft like we would every other year, and ultimately we will assist any new people that may come in here and try and make them comfortable and get them situated.’”
“We took all of our draft information, statistical information, put it all on iPads and gave it to him and other people so they would have it. We had ongoing draft workouts, we had them scheduled. We went over to Greece to scout Giannis [Antetokounmpo], the kid that Milwaukee took. We had a workout set up for him to come in, highly recommended that they work this kid out, and of course they didn’t.”
“The thing about this particular part of the interview, it’s just totally untrue. The idea that everybody wanted to … that there was nobody there to do any work. These are people that spent 10, 15, 20 years working for the Kings, who were part of the most successful period they ever had, and they’re now, it’s like, ‘because they don’t matter anymore, I can say anything I want about them.’”
The Kings are one name on a list of teams that slept on Giannis Antetokounmpo in the 2013 NBA draft, but the fact that the team did not bother to even work him out wont sit well with fans of the organization.
Although he didn’t work for Ranadive too long, the owner left a lasting impression on Petrie:
“I only had about an 8 or 10 minute little meetings with him. I found him to be a very arrogant and dismissive little chap. He doesn’t seem to understand that he owns it. He was the one that came in with Basketball 3.0, and changing the culture, ‘I have the smartest guys in the room, they’re four steps ahead of everybody else, I have 80 gigs of data, nobody else has that.’ Well, okay, you know?”
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