It wouldn’t be the first time Kings owner Vivek Ranadive didn’t read the room.
The Ringer’s Zach Lowe told a story on his podcast this week about a Kings training-camp dinner where team owner Vivek Ranadivé reportedly gave an extended roast of the team that didn’t land as he intended.
“They went out to a fancy training dinner, team, the whole team, the staff, everything. And at the dinner, Vivek Ranadivé spoke, and he kind of turned the dinner into a roast of lots of people in the room, telling them all the ways in which they have been failing as players, coaches, executives, whatever.
“Some people were alarmed and were like, ‘This is not going over the way you intended.’ Some people thought, ‘I get what he’s doing, he’s using the fact that we’ve become a media punchline to motivate us.’ He was not saying, ‘I, Vivek Ranadivé, believe these things about you, but here’s what people say about you, prove us wrong.’”
That motivational speech take is how Kings general manager Scott Perry said he read it.
“Like I said, it’s all motivational about, okay, ‘we’re behind you, totally supportive, let’s move this forward as a collective and let’s figure out how we can prove all of the naysayers wrong this year. And that’s what he’s pulling for...
“One of the things that he did when he started his conversation, the first thing he did, was really light-heartedly, was talked about himself and how he’s been viewed or treated in the media for a number of years. And then started saying the same to a number of the guys in the room and then everybody that I visited with afterwards all kind of had the same take I did, was very motivational, because he started with himself in such a light-hearted manner, then to talk about players, and how they may have been disrespected or how we’ve been counted out as an organization and let’s all use that as a collective to prove people wrong. And that was the clear messaging in the whole meeting from him.”
It is probable that how Perry read it is exactly how Ranadive intended it — but it clearly didn’t land that way with everybody, or a source would not have told Lowe the story. Roasting someone, even in a situation where there is a positive intent — hypothetically, the start of a Best Man speech at a wedding, or something like that — can go sideways quickly if the speaker doesn’t read the room because this is not the setting for a roast. You don’t get to be Nikki Glaser.
Perry nailed the point, however, that the Kings are a punching-bag organization around the league, so everyone assumed the story was true and the talk went over poorly, even if Lowe himself said some in the room read it as motivation. Welcome to being the Sacramento Kings.
