I Regret To Inform You That The Sacramento Kings Are Back To Acting Like The Sacramento Kings
The Kings may have a new front office, but when challenged with their first big decision, they sure as hell look like the same old Kangz. This isn't just a hot take by yours truly in an attempt to seem smarter than a current NBA GM. I most certainly am not. But you look around the basketball world and there are a bunch of people a whole lot smarter than me that will also tell you this was a terrible decision from Sacramento.
Allow me to explain the situation for anyone out there that might not really know what's going on. The Atltanta Hawks offered Bogdan Bogdanovic a 4/72M offer sheet since he was a restricted free agent. The Kings had 48 hours to decide between two options
1. Match the offer sheet and keep Bogdanovic in Sacramento
2. Decline to match and Bogdanovic goes to the Hawks for nothing.
Now, as someone who roots for a team that is very close to losing an extremely valuable asset for nothing in free agency, I can assure you that it's not the best decision in the world. In fact, some might call it bad. It doesn't matter what you get back, getting ANYTHING is better than losing a really good player for nothing. I think we can all agree there. So, the Kings had some options. If they matched, they could always immediately trade Bogdanovic to someone other than ATL in a sign and trade to help bring back actual assets. I'm sure there's a market out there for him, and even if you have to carry him into the season and trade him at the deadline, who cares! His offer sheet wasn't an outrageous price, and you're the Kings! Who cares about your cap, you're not bringing in free agents anyways. Even if you end up trading him at the deadline for 60 cents on the dollar, you know what that's better than? Zero cents on the dollar, which is what they got.
What confuses me is that idea of roster flexibility. Well, you lose that flexibility if you lose Bogdanovic for nothing you dumb dumb. You can flip him, or you can try different lineups, and we have no idea what Haliburton will look like yet! The other part about building around their young core of Fox/Hield/Bagley made me laugh too. Buddy Hield is 27 to Bogdanovic's 28. It's not like he's 23. What it sounds like to me is they simply chose to roll with Hieldm which is fine. He's a good player. But you can move on from Bogdanovic and still not receive nothing in return, I'm not sure anyone told this to the Kings which is a bit troubling.
In the end, I just feel for Kings fans. Even if all they ended up getting back was a trade exception, at least that's something to hold onto. You can convince yourself of anything when it comes to an 18M+ trade exception. But instead, they are now forced to deal with one of their best players leaving town for nothing, all because their front office didn't want to match an offer sheet. That's tough, especially because it wasn't an outrageous overpay. 4/72M is about market value for a player like Bogdanovic and is certainly not high enough to where you don't match. If he got like $25M or something OK cool, but that deal? That should have been a no brainer to match.
This new Kings front office better hope that Buddy Hield suddenly changes his tune and actually wants to be in Sacramento now, and that Haliburton can play right away and make an impact. If those things don't happen, this decision is 10000% going to come back to bite them in the ass.
Just goes to show that sometimes the more things change, the more they stay the same.