After dismissing head coach Mike Brown following a 13-18 start to the season, the Sacramento Kings made longtime assistant Doug Christie their interim leading man. But now that the 2024-25 NBA season is over, will Christie get his interim tag removed and become the Kings' newest head coach?
Christie responded to his opportunity by going 27-24 in 51 games. This figure was significantly better than the win percentage Brown had put together to start the season. But still, Christie failed to get the Kings out of the NBA Play-In Tournament. So, it is not like he knocked the ball out of the park in his chance.
What are Christie's chances of sticking around after this season? According to a recent intel dump, that answer seems to be pretty good.
Vivek Ranadive could be pulling the strings in Kings' coaching search
In a recent edition of the Stein Line substack, Jake Fischer and Marc Stein dumped all the information they had on the Kings' offseason plans.
In that post, it was mentioned that new general manager Scott Perry would have his final decision about Christie as the head coach in the next week or so.
However, the portion on the Kings also included this eyebrow-raising blurb:
"Yet one of the attributes that led to Perry's swift implementation as Sacramento's replacement for Monte McNair was the belief that he can collaborate more successfully with Ranadivé than various predecessors have after some hopeful signs in that department during Perry's previous short stint as a Kings executive in 2017."
So, it seems that a big reason Perry was tapped to be Monte McNair's replacement was because of his willingness to work with Vivek Ranadive (co-owner and chairman of Kings) while making coaching/personnel decisions.
This is meaningful because Ranadive has been a huge supporter of Christie throughout the season, even choosing him to be the team's interim head coach despite pushback from McNair. Maybe Ranadive has enough decision-making power in this instance that Perry decides to keep Christie as the team's head coach for next season.
Christie was thrown into an impossible situation midway through this year, and given all the moving pieces/uncertainty around him, he did as good of a job as you could have asked. Still, it doesn't seem wise to hire people (like Perry) only because they are willing to let ownership have their say. Hopefully, whatever the team decides to do with Christie doesn't backfire on them completely, like so many of their decisions have over the past few years.