The Sacramento Kings fell to 2-7 on the season after dropping a lopsided game at home to the Hawks on Friday.
The team’s record isn’t a surprise to the league pundits who predicted yet another rough season in Sacramento, but the players who have to live with it day in and day out are already growing tired of the team’s losing ways.
A players-only meeting was held after this latest loss, one that was called by two of the team’s oldest members.
Cowbell Kingdom has the details:After another embarrassing loss in front of their home crowd, the Sacramento Kings are beginning to show major cracks. Just nine games into the 2012-13 season, veterans Chuck Hayes and Francisco Garcia called a players’ only meeting last night while media members waited anxiously outside their locker room door.
“Very frustrated,” Hayes told Cowbell Kingdom following the loss to Atlanta. “We came in with a good mindset, but things are going bad right now and we’re starting to break and we can’t have that.”
“Obviously we want people to know that we’re not satisfied with what’s going on,” forward Jason Thompson told a group of hungry reporters. “So we thought it was only right to make each other accountable and say what was on our minds because at the end of the day, when we put our hands together, we say ‘family’ and we mean it.”
Players-only meetings can be a good sign that a team is aware of its issues, and is concerned about taking the necessary steps to do something about them in the hopes of enacting some change. But they’re usually reserved for clubs with a lot higher legitimate aspirations than those of this Kings team, so we’ll have to see exactly how this will end up playing out.
DeMarcus Cousins getting suspended two games for an avoidable incident certainly didn’t help matters, and the team is still trying to come together under second-year head coach Keith Smart. But a team in its rebuilding phase needs to play harder than most just to compete, in order to compensate for the overall lower level of talent -- and that consistent level of effort is really all the fans in Sacramento are hoping to see.