SACRAMENTO -- Despite the seemingly positive vibes surrounding the Kings franchise with the opening of the Golden 1 Center, owner Vivek Ranadivé has found himself in a he-said-he-said controversy following a sit-down with USA Today’s Sam Amick earlier in the week.
The two-part Q&A is chock-full of information. There are plenty of bits and pieces that could use a good Politico fact checking, but one answer drew the ire of former Kings frontman Geoff Petrie.
“I’d never been here before,” Ranadivé told Amick. “I walked in, and there was nobody who wanted to be here. There was no coach, no GM, it was a ghost town. Then I went into the arena, and literally the roof was falling down.”
Petrie, who spent 19 years running the Kings basketball operations, reached out to Deadspin on Wednesday to clarify a few issues. Known for his stoic demeanor and cautious approach to media, Petrie uncharacteristically unloaded on the Kings owner.
From the interview:
The main reason I reached out, [the interview] is long and covered a lot of territory, but when it comes to some of the representations about myself and Keith Smart and the management group that was there at that time, it was basically totally untrue, what was represented there.”
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.
And that’s what we did.
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As someone who was on the ground in Sacramento during the transition from the Maloof family to the Ranadivé-led group, I can attest that the arena was a ghost town, but not the practice facility.
Petrie and his staff worked the draft like they had the previous years, bringing in prospects while assistant coaches worked them out. They scouted and prepared for the selection knowing that most of the group wouldn’t be kept on to actually make the pick.
The architect of the greatest era of Sacramento Kings basketball, Petrie built a roster that cruised into the playoffs eight consecutive seasons from 1998 to 2006. During his final few seasons in Sacramento, he made plenty of mistakes both in free agency and through the draft. But he was also hamstrung by an ownership group that boasted a league minimum salary for multiple seasons. The margin of error for Petrie and his staff was razor thin.
According to multiple sources, Petrie stayed on with the understanding that he would not return following the transition to new ownership, but he continued to work the job in hopes that the organization would retain portions of his management and support staff, which included his son and others that had spent more than a decade with him in Sacramento.
When Pete D’Alessandro was hired as his replacement in mid-June of 2013, Petrie, general manager Wayne Cooper and assistant GM Mike Petrie, along with most of the basketball ops staff was let go, including portions of the media relations staff and executive assistants.
“They basically cleaned house,” Petrie told Deadspin. “They kept a few people, but most of them were gone within a year.”
This statement from Petrie is 100-percent accurate. A lot of very good people lost their livelihoods. Whether or not Ranadivé had an active role in any of those decisions is unknown, but it doesn't change the way things played out in the ownership/management shift.
Keith Smart continued to work for the team until the first week of June when Michael Malone was hired as the team’s next head coach. Smart and his staff were relieved of their duties, which according to Petrie came via a 90-second phone call.
Malone continued to work with Petrie until D’Alessandro was brought in. At that point, Petrie turned over all of his draft information to the new regime and walked away.
Smart had one year remaining on his contract, which the new ownership group bought out. His son was playing high school sports in the Bay Area and he repeatedly said that he hoped to return to the Kings and start fresh under new ownership.
But Smart had also been through an extremely similar situation during his time in Golden State. He was relieved of his duties with the Warriors when the team was sold following the 2010-11 season.
It’s clear from Petrie’s comments that an old wound was opened and it’s understandable why he felt the need to give his version of his final days in the Kings front office, if nothing else, out of respect for the group that worked alongside him. He built a loyal group of employees, many of which could have left during the earlier relocation attempts, but instead stayed on board.
It’s unfortunate that Ranadivé chose to reopen this discussion and shocking that Petrie came out of his retirement hiding spot to comment. Either way, the Kings will open their 2016-17 campaign on Oct. 26 in Phoenix.
