Is that it shook up the roster to the point where only the players who have any real future here are left. Well minus Kenny Thomas. And eventually he won’t be on the roster anymore either.

Kevin has had his ups & downs this season. I’m very interested to see how these remaining games play out. (One reason I bought the half season league pass I suppose.) How Kevin performs is part of that.

Kevin Martin isn’t suddenly going to become the next Bryant, Garnett, MJ, or Paul in the leadership area. But he can definitely score with them.

That said, I think he is a hard worker, and more than worth the contract Geoff Petrie gave to him. He is the best this horrible horrible team has going for it and I have been a big fan of his since he was drafted. I pretty much watch the Kings to see Kevin get his (sad I know), but younger and older players alike can learn a lot from Kevin’s hard work.

I look forward to seeing the new look Kings and I hope they find a great coach this off season, I feel that is the true weakness of this team.

I know that the Kings wanted to clear cap room this week but are they officially tanking the season? Are they the first team to shoot for a better draft position? And how many wins can the Kings end up with? Will they win five more games this year?

I think had Martin’s ankle not first been dinged up, then misdiagnosed, it’s possible that he’d have been in contention for an All-Star slot, even from an awful team. The improvements that Z mentioned will be about all KM will be able to take from an otherwise dismal season.

But as to leadership, that’s something else. Kevin is a fantastic player, and tough, but generally seems to be soft-spoken. If he could develop the impulse to do the lapel-grabbing, even off the court and in private, it’s possible he could show leadership in the manner that Doug Christie did, although Martin seems less inclined to let it rip than DC did.

What the Kings need, and I repeat this for the thousandth time, is a guy like Chris Webber.

“Duh! Wouldn’t that be nice?”

It’d be nice if this neo-Webber had those kinds of skills, but we have had a guy like that since C-Webb left: Ron Artest.

The team needs a player, who is the lightning rod. He’s going to get too much credit when the Kings win, and take too much blame when the Kings lose. Webber had broad enough shoulders to handle it, occassional tantrums aside, and even Ron-Ron, nutty as he is, seemed to be able to deal, although that may have been more out of practice after the media glare of the brawl fiasco.

I’m not advocating to get Ron back, but the team needs a leader of this type. Bibby claimed he was going to be that guy after C-Webb got traded, but it’s not in his nature to do so, and I’m not sure if it’s in Martin’s either, absolutely no disrespect intended. The best thing that could happen for Martin is for a Kings player to steal all of the ink while K-Mart quietly drops 26 a night.

Yeah, it’d be nice if this unnamed player could be an All-Star. Dare to dream, I say, we’re down to a .200 winning percentage. It won’t last forever, I feel good about the future, cloudy though it remains.

did wonders for K-Mart’s ankle. Which is why his defense was so good last night. If he can play d like that every night, he’s going to be an All-Star next year.

I would almost say this could have been written 55 games ago. He is something special, surrounded by spare parts.