Last year’s Kings team dealt with a metric f-ton of injuries and still ended up with only the 13th worst record. Will we really drop 8+ spots? Possible I guess, but I just don’t see it.

TZ’s point about a potential Miller trade would definitely change things. Even when he seems to be playing poorly, the team is much better with him on the court.

and I think this has been discussed previously, Reggie won’t be coaching for his NBA life from a wins and losses standpoint. It’s absolutely unrealistic to assume this team, with this roster, even with Miller, is going to sniff a playoff berth. I love Martin, but Iverson and Anthony can barely carry a team to an 8th seed. I won’t say the West’s gotten that much tougher, but the parity has unquestionably increased between the haves and have nots. We’re presently a have not, but by design mind you, not by accident or panic. This roster, this season needs to show cohesiveness, competitiveness, composure and chemistry. Those are reasonable requests for a rebuilding team and said team’s coach. If Theus can get this group to display flashes of the above he’ll stay employed, even if we’re front and center for the Ricky Rubio/Blake Griffin sweepstakes.

And what does it matter, we all know no matter where we pick, as long as he’s available, Petrie’s going to draft Stephen Curry anyway.

I think he has a lot to prove and a lot left to show on the floor. I guess I feel like I did when Vlade got dumped, there’s too much knowledge left in these guys to just trade/dump them. I still wish the Kings had kept Vlade one more year to coach Miller, I think he’d have been much better as a player if that had happened.

-ducking back down under my tinfoil conspiracy hat now.

Even if you just remove those first 7 games, that’s only 18 games to look at . . . I don’t know how much can be reasonably predicted based on that small of a sample set of data.

Is that this team is better when it’s healthy. :)

With all the injuries the team suffered last season, I think it’s kind of hard to quantify the impact of Ron’s loss by our record with/without him. You’d have to look at the opponent’s involved, the other players who were sidelined, etc.

I think plus/minus numbers are probably the closest you can come to getting a general idea of the impact, but even those are probably flawed with the somewhat small sample size involved.

Theoretically, Salmons should be able to pick up a good portion of Ron’s slack on the offensive end and is a decent defender. What he probably can’t replace is Ron’s ability to single-handedly take over a game for minutes at a time when needed.

There are a lot of ifs for this team – if the squad stays healthy, if Kevin takes over the leadership mantle and makes the leap to superstar (or near-superstar) status, if Spencer improves a bit, if JT is the real deal, if Brad comes back in shape, if Beno can handle a full season as a starting PG in the league, etc.

But it’s hard for me to see the team dropping anywhere from 10 to 15 games due to the loss of Artest. It’s not like there isn’t some potential production replacement on the roster.

on Portland hype – but I don’t really care

I was in the middle of posting almost the exact same thing. It’s seems that he’s too young, but maybe he can be drafted and he just couldn’t play here for another year. Where as with Americans if a HS senior was drafted they’d lose their college eligibility, so they wouldn’t declare.

My bet is there were no takers. Besides, this deal puts us at 15 players, unless ’Reef retires.