by Charlie O Mallonee

SACRAMENTO–In last week’s firing of Sacramento Kings former coach Mike Malone was it a matter of the Kings pulling the trigger too early or too late? Kings General Manager Pete D’Alessandro decided that the best style of play was the issue on why he released Malone. That should not have come to any surprise because Malone really set the tone for who you really wanted to be as a basketball player as coach in his first season.

You have a team that played defense first that set up the offense and you really wanted to go with a rather conditional set up offense who really can set it up on the floor. So we knew who Malone was before he came in. Now the Kings are talking about an up tempo San Antonio Spurs style, extra pass, lot of outside shooting running team.

Well that’s not who Malone was, so if you say at the end of the year “Mike your not building the squad that we want, were going to let you go” that would have been a little bit more understandable. But to let the guy come in and have a 9-6 start, he won nine of his last 14 games before the slide. Of course things fell back a little bit when DeMarcus Cousins got sick with meningitis which is nobody’s fault.

Then to shoot Malone out the door over style of play is just insane and it makes the franchise look unstable. D’Alessandro begs to differ and says, “look at the franchise, look at the planned management, look at me and at the team were very stable” I’m sorry you don’t look stable when you shoot a man out the door when your style of play is not right. When Cousins caught meningitis there was no indication that Malone’s job was in jeopardy.

The one thing that we know about the Kings right now and it shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody is that they lack depth. They really have no one to step in the gap when Cousins wasn’t there. Kings guard Ryan Hollins came in and he worked hard and forward/center Reggie Evans other than one game that Evans put up 22 points he is really a defensive guy. There was not a tougher defender or rebounder in the NBA than Evans.

Evans isn’t going to give you those 25 points plus the 12.5 rebounds a game that Cousins is going to be able to get. So with the lack of depth nobody should really be surprised about what was happening to the Kings other than the fact that they were going to be facing some eastern conference teams that everybody was hoping would kind of level that playing field a little bit but it didn’t.

Cousins was not happy about Malone getting fired, the one thing about Malone Cousins liked was Malone was a no pulled punches coach. Malone tells everyone on the team he’s happy and if he’s not happy he’s telling everybody including the members of the media he’s unhappy. If you look at the progress of Cousins under Malone particularly in the maturity area where it was a bad call I’m going to keep playing you. Even his goal coming in having less than ten technical fouls for the season that was all maturity things because of Cousins relationship with Malone.

The Kings host the Los Angeles Lakers on Sunday afternoon at Sleep Train for a 3:00pm tip.

Charlie O covers Kings basketball for http://www.sportsradioservice.com