30Q: Has Geoff Petrie Really Changed?

I personally dont think Petrie has changed either. He’s simply drafting the best talent available, and he has done an excellent job! If the Kings improve drastically I could definitely see Petrie winning GM of the year award…..

I think that Petrie clearly has made a shift in his selection of talent. In any decision there are multiple factors. Those factors have not all changed, but I think, IMO, the importance given to each of them is different now.

Is he still picking skilled players? Of course, but they have to be tough. Toughness as a factor has been elevated as equal or greater than some other factors. I think that the point has been made previously that the Maloofs have wanted a tougher and more defensively minded team. I did hear the Maloofs were considering buying the Spurs and that they prefer a more defensive oriented team. There are stories of how the Maloofs were upset that Adelman would not pull players if they didn’t try hard enough defensively. Are these things all not true. And if true doesn’t this speak to the current selection of players.

This has been coming for a while, but I think came to head in the last few years. There have been a lot of stories about the Maloofs interfering. They have been said to push for changes in the team and wanting to be more involved in coach selection. Why would they do this unless it was to push for a style they want played. More defensive intensity. More toughness.

Sure GP has selected and brought in defensive talent, but when given the choice can you honestly say he would choose either toughness or defensive over offensive skill? Or that it at least carried equal weight? Seems that you are making the case for that here, but I just don’t see it at all. Sure versatile is still a priority. So is his preference for combo guards, but the toughness factor did not, IMO, seem to be such a high priority.

One of the guys that has been getting a lot of recent burn as a potential lottery selection for the Kings is Greg Monroe. Invariably, there is a statement that runs something like, “He is a Geoff Petrie type of player,” or “he could be successful in the Kings Princeton-style offense.” Never mind the fact that the Kings really have not run the Princeton for the last couple of years, I am intrigued as to what kind of draft pick is a Petrie pick. I mean, I know that GP has had a penchant for signing certain types of free agents (prefers bigs that can hit a mid-range jumper), but is there a pattern to his 1st round draft picks? For brevity and relevance, let’s stick to the last ten 1st round picks.

Jason Williams (7th pick, 1998) – Williams was a bit of an unknown and arguably a reach at #7. He was a ball handling wizard and a halfway decent shooter with a spotty reputation, which included a background in imbibing in weed. Williams really didn’t really replicate any Petrie pick prior to J-Will’s selection or since.
 
Hedo Turkoglu (16th pick, 2000) – This pick cemented Petrie as an international man of mystery. Turkoglu marked Petrie’s 2nd foray into drafting 1st round Euros (Peja being the first), and if you include GP’s 2nd round selection of Dejan Bodiroga, Petrie was now regarded as having a leg up in the foreign markets. It would be another nine years before Petrie used a 1st round pick to draft his next foreign player.
 
Gerald Wallace (25th pick, 2001) – Wallace was very highly regarded coming out of high school, but a disappointing freshman year at Alabama dropped him into the lower portion of the 1st round. Wallace was known as a freakish athlete, but no one was sure how his game would translate to the NBA. The young man could finish with authority, but couldn’t really shoot a lick.
 
Kevin Martin (26th pick, 2004) – Martin was known as a scorer, but the ugly hitch in his shot, coupled with his small college background, had most NBA teams looking the other way.
 
Francisco Garcia (23rd pick, 2005) – Garcia was pretty well known for his leadership at Louisville, especially in the NCAA tourney. The question on Garcia was whether he did anything exceptionally. He was a good (but not great) shooter. He was a good (but not great) floor general. He was a good (but not great) defender. He was thought to be a pretty good pick at 23, maybe a guy that could have a decent NBA career.
 
Quincy Douby (19th pick, 2006) – Ah, the downside of selecting a guy that kills it in workouts. Douby shattered all known Kings workout shooting records, and the Kings were certain that they had drafted (at best) the next Bobby Jackson or (at worst) Eddie Johnson. They wound up with a ‘tweener that could not forge a niche for himself in the NBA.
 
Spencer Hawes (10th pick, 2007) – This was called a Petrie pick, but I just don’t see where any of the above mentioned players replicate Hawes. Certainly, one could draw comparisons to Vlade Divac (free agent) and Brad Miller (trade). But Hawes was the first of his kind as a Petrie draft pick. And it would have been interesting to see who Petrie would have chosen if he would have had his choice of Hawes, Joakim Noah and Brendan Wright (both were selected just prior to the Kings pick).
 
Jason Thompson (12th pick, 2008) – On the surface, this would fit that perceived mold of a Petrie player – a big guy that can handle, pass and shoot. But what we have found out about Thompson is that he has a little more banger in him and a little less polish on him. And as has been discussed around StR, Hawes and JT are really more different than they are alike.
 
Tyreke Evans & Omri Casspi (4th & 23rd pick, 2009) – The tough guy draft. The draft where we went away from white collar players in favor of blue collar players. And I’ll buy that to an extent, though I think that (especially) Garcia and Thompson are tougher than they are given credit. Petrie must have completely eschewed the shooting drill results when it came to Evans. Casspi fits the Turkoglu/Stojakovic mold inasmuch as he is a foreign-born player, but his game is more Shawn Marion than it is Hedo or Peja.
 
So, how does this help us determine who Petrie will select this year? Well, he will select either a guard, forward or center, between 6 and 7 feet tall, weighing somewhere between 165 and 245 pounds (sorry about that, DeMarcus). The pick will be male, and will hail from the planet earth. He will be a college or foreign player. If he comes from the college ranks, it will be from a larger or smaller school. He will be smooth or rough. The selection is likely to catch at least a few people by surprise.
 
And that is the definition of a Geoff Petrie pick. Really, it’s that simple.

The notion that Petrie has been a “one-trick pony” is short-sighted and lazy. The man has certainly had his share of misses to go with his hits, but predictable and one-dimensional he is not.

How can taking Cousins be any more risky that bring in Artest or Webber? Is drafting Reke and moving him to PG any different than doing the same with Douby? Petrie has always been a risk taker, but his judgement when it comes to assessing true basketball talent can not be denied.

Maybe, his roots at Princeton, give him a higher option as to the value of passing and catching the ball, but it doesn’t seem to make him overvalue players that possess those talents. If anything has altered Petrie’s choices over his time with the Kings, it’s been his willingness to work within the desires of his head coaches & his owners. No, GP is the same man with the same instincts that he was when he first arrived here.

As far as this comment:

the idea that there is one way to win a championship and that that way is through hard-mouthed, head-down power basketball.

I might like to point out the prior to winning a world championship, that in 87/88 Chicago with Jordon lost in the Conference Semi-Finals to Detroit. In 88/89 they lost in the Conference Finals to Detroit. And in 89/90 even with the great Phil Jackson coaching, they lost to a hard-mouthed, head-down power basketball team that was the Detroit Pistons for the 2nd time in the Conference finals. Granted, after the Bulls dominance, GM’s started looking at a different blueprint for getting to the Championship. But, as with every else, trends seem to be cyclical, and maybe Petrie is just ahead of the rest in trying to building another hard-mouthed, head-down power basketball dynasty.

But Championship teams have historically almost always been good half court teams. On offense and defense. Good execution in the half court.

To me, good half court execution has always relied heavily on strength and skill inside. Some would say the Bulls were an exception – but certainly not on defense or rebounding, they were excellent in those areas.

A Super (duper) Star didn’t hurt either.

I’d also argue that the Jazz would have won some Championships except they were unlucky enough to have met the Bulls in thier prime as the Suns met Houston in thier Prime.

The nature of the Kings roster and style of play has changed, so the person most responsible for it must also have altered his thinking.

Crapola.

Samuel Dalembert is not Vlade Divac, Jason Thompson is not Chris Webber, and Tyreke Evans is not Mike Bibby. Black is white, dogs are cats, and you now love the Lakers and the Yankees.

And Michigan. Barf.

If Petrie has changed, does that mean that he is now not considered to be one of the brightest, most capable GMs in the league? I doubt you’d find that opinion among astute observers, and you won’t find it with me, either. Exactly.

Just because very few people in this country seem capable of remembering things that happened more than a month ago, I’d like to offer that Petrie assembled a championship-caliber team, probably stuck a little too long with a flawed plan to maintain a playoff (if not championship) capable squad, and has spent the past couple of years assembling a team that, by any measure, is likely to give the association fits for the next several years. Championship? There’s a lot left to be done, but fortunately, the guy running the show is the same guy he’s always been.

There are too many sports writers, and not nearly enough sports historians.

I think saying the Lakers are not a hard nosed team is a little unfair.
The Lakers are so talented across the board they don’t need to be that way for 82+ games BUT THEY CAN BE THAT WAY. Look at game 7 of the finals. It might have been one of the greatest defensive performances I’ve ever seen.

Look at the close Kings/Lakers games last season. Obviously the Lakers were a far FAR superior team but they couldn’t finesse there way to an easy win agianst our toughER young Kings. So when crunch time came they put the clamps on us.

That was the problem with the Suns. For whatever reason(coaching/players/etc) they were incapable of playing defense even when their season depended on it.

I think a lot of this is context. If a team is drafting late in the first round exactly what is best player available becomes increasingly subjective. It’s no longer just the objective talents of a player, but also how those talents syncopate with a heretofore successful team. Sacramento historically in the recent Petrie drafting era (Martin, Garcia, Douby) has fallen in that latter category.

But if you look at his selections in that first rebuilding era, between Jason Williams, who was an available option because he’d been kicked out of FLORIDA for a weed problem (Joakim Noah is laughing) and Stojakovic, who Sacramento had to wait for, this logic that Petrie went out of his comfort zone to draft Cousins is assumptive at best, convenient at worst.

seems kind of self-evident.

The Petrie philosophy has always been to draft players he thinks can make the most impact on the court, regardless of position and skill set. I think he has stated in the past he looks for tangible qualities first: size and speed and athleticism. Then he looks at basketball skills and how they translate to NBA game. No magic formula.

(Note: Personality is not in this formula. Only in the expanded version of the formula is there a personality variable, which only would effect conclusion if the input is quantified as an outlier, several standard deviations from the norm, i.e. Michael Beasleyville).

Secondly, even if Petrie were to have a fixed blueprint for building a team and drafting a players that fit an exact mold of players past, could he? No! If he wanted to find the next Mike Bibby, Doug Christie or Peja, he could try. But those players don’t exist! Thats what is fun and intriguing about the NBA. Every player has unique set of skills, strengths and areas to improve.

The reality is GMs have to make best of circumstances of where they are picking in draft, and studied comparison of pool of talent year-to-year. Change is dictated primarily by external factors, not altering a right philosophy rooted in hard and fast objective analysis balanced with a degree of subjective expertise.

I contend if there was a small schooled version of Kevin Durant, with preying mantis physique, a 6’9" coordinated freak of nature with SG skills, and the Kings fell in love with his translatable skills, then he gets tabbed over DMC. But there wasn’t. Petrie is just playing the hand he is dealt.

It is just basketball. It is not that complicated. Projectable upside is the name of the game. Those best at it win. Those who stink at it are named David Kahn.

The Maloofs put the kibosh on the b. SCOTT candidacy? I am a S-Grape fan of B. Scott and Coachie what would have been…fan.
Finding the key to the King’s treasure chest of a handful of lost rings is found by simply reading the list of player’s "past over" in the past X years of King j P’s rule. There are approximately 3 non-miscue solid draft picks. Few too many non-solid hiring-firing Coaching decision’s, and credit it was a fluk Mr. Web went down with a bad knee-and Mr. La La D Vah subconsciously tossed the ball short making up for a poisoned cheeseburger. Game 7 was…We all know that story is a King jP pass.
The over all recent lost treasure key was Jeff P not replacing B Scott over Aldermen the end of B Scott first season…I.e. Once B Scott showed respect for and made it obvious having excellent skill sets standing next too and keenly absorbing rubbing shoulders with the mastery of BB God’s-The master of all set-play chief’s- sir Coachie. Alderman-every cotton pickN time would draw circles away from an almost guaranteed C_WEB Elbow with a built in (if Elbow doubled) open slashing player without the ball catch and shoot-but drawn miscued at numerous crucial times. Keep in mind, I am not talking trash about anyone person…this was a true love affair-a match made in heaven with B Scott and Sir Coachie. HOWEVER, this caused a subconscious change in Alderman. His bad calls (limited-but crucial) hit an all time covetousness over lost Coachie admirations too B. Scott-perhaps unknowingly; but Alderman screwing up the circles did happen Z.
No-The Brothers pride played no major roll over Jeff keeping Alderman over B. Scott
first shot at getting him tied up for ten years or more…it was Jeff doing another air ball over loyalty of two old NBA player mates. Why do you gather why Coachie took off in a huff…? It was reported health-but it was a broken heart and disappointment of his student King J.P. Plus, I had seats a few times behind the bros. pride. And I have big monkey ears…good night or day.