Kings' owner Ranadive: Divac making all basketball decisions

With myriad changes over the past two seasons and a crowded front office structure, the first step in figuring out the Sacramento Kings offseason is figuring out who's calling the shots.

Despite a slow-growing reputation as being a bit hands-on with the proceedings, owner Vivek Ranadive was clear in a recent interview with Ailene Voisin of the Sacramento Bee that he's not pulling the basketball strings. Instead, he's empowered new vice president of basketball operations Vlade Divac to be the key decision-maker, all but confirming reports from early April that Divas had quickly superseded general manager Pete D'Alessandro as the main basketball shot-caller in the organization.

To hear Ranadive tell it, Divac will be the only person in basketball operations that reports directly to the owner, and Ranadive has high hopes for the FIBA Hall of Famer:

Vlade makes the decisions. Two people report directly to me. Chris Granger, who runs the business side, and Vlade from the basketball side. I want to make that clear as we move forward. We have a lot of work to do, and we are all in this together.
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All of us have different skills and everyone has their roles. Vlade is a unifier, a conductor, and he is very smart ... And he has a strong stomach. He wears big-boy pants. George, he is a future Hall of Fame coach. I have always respected him as a coach, and now I am getting to know him as a human being. And, yes, I ask dumb questions, and I am still an irritant. But I am counting on Vlade to pull this all together.

Underneath Divac, the Kings also have D'Allessandro, Mitch Richmond as a special assistant and former ESPN stat guru Dean Oliver as director of player personnel and analytics, among others. It's always better to have more smart people around you, and Divac will have plenty of brains and experience at his disposal, should he decide to leverage them in consideration of his relative lack of experience.

Coming off of a 29-win season that has them likely to pick sixth in the draft, the Kings face an interesting offseason. They have a superstar in DeMarcus Cousins but little else that seems nailed down, and they could conceivably wiggle their way into enough cap space to be a player in the second tier of free agency.

While Ranadive has appeared to make moves without a particular vision or plan in mind so far, he remains adamant the Kings will succeed:

I made mistakes and I’m sure I’ll make more mistakes. Hopefully, I’ll make different ones. But I am successful at everything I do, and that’s not going to change. We are trying to build something special here, not just for one year, but for many years. And I’m learning that the journey is not going to be easy.

It starts on May 19 with the draft lottery, which could change the team's fortunes swiftly. From there, the attention turns to finding pieces to complement Cousins and head coach George Karl.