The Kings made the right call with Dave Joerger

12:00 AM ET

What a strange world, this NBA: Dave Joerger, good NBA coach of a good NBA team, decided he wanted out after internal strife with the Memphis Grizzlies front office, and somehow came to the conclusion that the Sacramento Kings might offer a more stable working environment.

It will now be on everyone, including Joerger, to make that long shot a reality.

The Kings did offer double the money, and that mattered to a coach who signed an extension in Memphis before it became clear how much the new TV revenue flood would warp the coaching salary structure. First-time head coaches now routinely get $5 million per season. Scott Brooks, entering job No. 2 after taking criticism for his X’s and O’s, just got $7 million per season — more than nearly any other coach who doesn’t double as his team’s general manager.

The Kings, of course, are a mess at just about every level. Bad picks, poor decisions in free agency and awful trades have left an incoherent roster — a mishmash of mediocre veterans, lottery busts, pending free agents about to get overpaid and positional overlap centered around a malcontent, DeMarcus Cousins, who sours the overall workplace climate. They have cycled through a coach a year for the past decade, and exactly one of them, Michael Malone, appeared to make any headway. The Kings promptly fired him.

They are short-staffed, with a murky decision-making hierarchy topped by two guys — Vlade Divac and Peja Stojakovic — who do not appear qualified yet to make major basketball decisions.

But the Kings have done two smart things in the past two weeks: hiring Ken Catanella from the Pistons as assistant general manager, and snaring Joerger.

Both hiring processes were a little messy. The race for the spot that eventually went to Catanella was marred by miscommunication, per several league sources. Coaches asked out of the Kings’ hiring process, and others simply used them as leverage to prove they could make the short list of at least one team.

The Kings ended up in a good place with both hires. You can’t praise one team for a thorough interview process and then mock the Kings, just because they are the Kings, for interviewing everyone who would visit. The speed with which they scrapped that process to hire Joerger suggests the Kings had at least an inkling he would become available, though no one involved would go there. (It appears they didn’t consider Frank Vogel, which bolsters that theory.)

Joerger can coach. He is an X’s-and-O’s wiz who can rattle off the play calls of every team with zero notice. He draws up a nice out-of-timeout set. He can go adjustment-for-adjustment with almost anyone; he rejiggered defensive matchups in optimal ways during several playoff series, and was one of the first coaches to try snuffing the Stephen Curry-Draymond Green pick-and-roll by slotting a wing player on Green. Joerger helped set the template, now common, for encroaching further and further off of Oklahoma City’s role players to strangle the paint and smother the Thunder’s stars.

He found something, at least briefly, using Jeff Green as a small-ball power forward off the bench. And year after year, the grit-and-grind Grizzlies won more close games than their point differential suggested they should.

You could nitpick some stuff — overplaying Tayshaun Prince, burying young guys in favor of Ryan Hollins, shooting too few 3s, a couple of attempted stylistic revamps …

continue reading in source espn.go.com