If you keep up with the basketball news cycle, you probably remember a story from a few months back about the Sacramento Kings possibly experimenting with a radical new defensive strategy.
The brainchild of team owner Vivek Ranadive, the defense, according to Grantland’s Zach Lowe, would involve the positioning four players in the backcourt and one under the opposite hoop, available to turn a defensive stop into an easy bucket — or cherry-picking, as they call it on the playground.
You probably thought, “Well, that just sounds ridiculous. They’d never try that in a real game.”
Well…
Adrian Wojnarowski penned an article Monday about the flawed and ultimately doomed relationship between Ranadive and recently fired Kings coach Michael Malone, and in it he noted that Malone’s interim successor, Tyrone Corbin, is, in fact, expected to use a defense that at least resembles Ranadive’s.
“The owner played the part of a fantasy league owner, treating the Kings like a science experiment,” Wojnarowski wrote. “He shared tactical experiences with Malone about coaching his child’s youth team, and pressed him to consider playing four-on-five defense, leaking out a defender for cherry-picking baskets. Some semblance of that strategy is expected to be employed with Corbin now, a source told Yahoo! Sports.”
And the craziest thing about all of this is that the Kings really aren’t that bad. They’ve struggled of late during star center DeMarcus Cousins’ nine-game absence (illness), but at 11-13, they’d be in line for the seventh or eight playoff seed if they played in the Eastern Conference and not the loaded West.
Thumbnail photo via Ed Szczepanski/USA TODAY Sports Images
