Young Kings team goes from bad to worse

Tyreke Evans and the Kings have the NBA

A pretty bad season wasn’t difficult to forecast for the Kings, who are giving a lot of minutes to young players. Growing pains, and all of that. But perhaps what has been surprising is how much worse this young team (5-21 entering Thursday’s game with Milwaukee) is playing than the young team that went 25-57 last season.

Here is a list of categories in which the Kings have declined this season:

• Points scored per 100 possessions: from 105.7 last season to 101.7 this season. That’s huge, and it’s the most important overall number you’ll see in this post.

• Overall field-goal percentage

• Three-point percentage

• Opponents’ field-goal percentage

• Opponents’ three-point percentage

• Turnover rate

• Free throws per field-goal attempt

• Defensive rebounding rate

• Opponents’ free throws per-field goal attempt

• Opponents’ shooting percentage from every two-point range/distance

There are probably more.

And here’s an accompanying list of areas in which the Kings have improved over last season:

• Points allowed per 100 possessions (from 109.9 last season to 109.5 this season — improvement!)

• Offensive rebounding rate (from sixth to fourth — a legitimate strength, which helps when you miss so often)

• Rate of forcing turnovers (from 23rd to 16th — solid)

• Field-goal percentage on shots at the rim (from 60.7 percent a very fine 64.2 percent)

That’s the whole list of improvements for a team that entered this season full of hope for its future. This season has been a disaster, one that reached its low point Tuesday, when the Kings blew a 16-point fourth-quarter lead against the Warriors and television cameras caught DeMarcus Cousins making what turned out to an embarrassingly premature choke sign at Reggie Williams. Kings coach Paul Westphal then compounded the embarrassment by fining Cousins and removing him from the starting lineup, calling the gesture “unprofessional” and “childish.”

The benching smacks of a decision made ex post facto, out of humiliation that Sacramento lost the game after one King so publicly taunted the other team. If “unprofessional” and “childish” behavior were truly worthy of major discipline, Doc Rivers would have been compelled to fine Paul Pierce for bowing to the New York crowd, George Karl would have fined Sam Cassell for his famous and semi-vulgar “I’m clutch” dance routine and Nate Robinson would be broke. It is absolutely fair to discipline Cousins for talking back to his coaches to the point where they have to kick him out of practice. It’s also fair to throw up your hands when he shouts at officials for not getting a call in the post — an act that surely contributes to the fact that he doesn’t get as many calls in the post as he should. He fouls too much, he shoots too many jumpers and he turns the ball over too often.

But the Cousins issue is a sideshow. The main problem is the offense, a Bucks-level mess. With Kevin Martin gone and Carl Landry in his place, the Kings have no reliable three-point shooting beyond Omri Casspi, whose minutes have actually dropped this season. As Zach Harper at Cowbell Kingdom notes (via the stat-tracking service Synergy Sports), the Kings rank 24th in points per possession produced in spot-up situations. The team doesn’t really have a traditional shooting guard, unless you count Francisco Garcia, who splits his time close to equally between the wing positions. The lack of shooting mucks up Sacramento’s spacing and creates crowding issues for Cousins and Tyreke Evans inside.

In addition, the rotations have been a mess. Donte Greene went from starting at small forward to getting DNP-CDs to starting again, and Westphal hasn’t been able to decide which position Jason Thompson plays or how to divvy up minutes between his young big men and veteran center Sam Dalembert.

That’s not necessarily a knock on Westphal, who is probably dealing with more locker room issues than anyone outside the team understands. Young players make mistakes and develop fitfully, and I can’t imagine how hard it is to figure out the right way to react to each player’s unique developmental path. Players tend to dislike the minutes yo-yo, but coaches do this to young players all the time. Remember when Austin Daye was Detroit’s starting power forward? Or when Cleveland’s J.J. Hickson was going to wow us 30 minutes a night this season? Or when New Orleans’ Marcus Thornton couldn’t get off the bench — this season and last?

The more important decisions are going to happen upstairs, in president Geoff Petrie’s office. This team needs some shooting and more veteran know-how. Evans and Cousins should be untouchable, while Garcia and Beno Udrih are tied to contracts that are going to be tough to move. Sacramento’s best assets are its own cap space and the expiring deals of Dalembert ($13.4 million) and Landry ($3 million), but the market is glutted with big expirings and the huge trade exceptions in Cleveland and Toronto. Dalembert has helped on defense (and is by all accounts a fantastically charitable guy), but he’s shooting 39 percent and looking sluggish on offense, even by his standards. Teams always need size, but I can’t see how Dalembert would bring much of a bounty on his own. Packaging him with Landry might yield something, though. The Kings are a good bet to rent out a chunk of their nearly $15 million in cap room in exchange for some asset — perhaps just cash — from a team seeking to cut its luxury-tax bill or cap number.

Looking ahead, Sacramento has one of the cleanest cap sheets in the league. No player will make more than $6.9 million next season, and the Kings are set to have loads of cap room this offseason and every one after that. That doesn’t mean any big-time free agent is coming here, but it’s better than being capped-out with a bad team.

As bad as all of this seems right now, none of it is totally shocking. This is a young team with a weird roster and a star player in Evans who is dealing with plantar fasciitis. The long-term picture remains the same as it was before the discouraging losses started piling up.