Off-Season Trade Targets: Larry Sanders

indeed. personally, i've long been in the favor of the legalization of marijuana, but that's not exactly the issue here, is it? pot and its users may be stigmatized to a cartoonish degree, but if larry sanders is a full-blown proponent of recreational marijuana use, as his "belief in marijuana" seems to suggest, well, then i have serious doubts about his ability to maintain professionalism as an nba player...

pot is decidedly not a performance-enhancing substance. it's not going to turn larry sanders or any other athlete into superman. as a lifestyle choice, regular marijuana use is often accompanied by extreme bouts of lethargy, and that's simply not a trait i'm looking for in a rim protector. if i had confidence that he could effectively modulate his habit (as i'm sure many professional athletes are able to do), then i'd happily take a chance on him. but really, sanders strikes me as the kind of knucklehead who won't "get it" until he's scrubbed out of the league altogether, a la keon clark...

Video from that nightclub fight.


Here's video of him protecting the hell out of the basket.


Then being an idiot/fake tough guy




My final conclusion to him is even if we do desperately need a shot blocker I just don't think we need a guy with his character especially since DMC has worked so hard to restore his reputation around the league a guy like Sanders could do some serious damage to our chemistry. I would look to the draft or package the pick in a trade somehow to find a better option.

Character is obviously a massive issue here! Sanders' play last season is worth the contract he was given in the off-season. He can play but his character flags are real. They remind me of Keon Clark. Now at $5-6 million, you take the risk on the character that comes with it but at $44 million over 4 years, that is a monstrous gamble.

People compare this tool to Cousins but as far as I remember, DMC never got into a punch up in a bar and lie about it. DMC has never mailed in a season or given up after signing his bog contract and he has never been accused of not earning his pay cheque by anyone, let alone a team mate.

I would not be surprised if Sanders' contract turn up to be a massive **** up of the Eddy Curry proportions.

Cousins just had by far the best season of his career after signing his contract. Sanders' reaction to new contract was a lot of missed games and a step back to sophomore year in production. There's nothing to compare on the court.

You're right, Cousins was a hopeless headcase but he's turned his attitude around so all is forgiven. Sanders is incapable of making the same progress seeing as he just had a poor, injury plagued season in which he still would have been the best defender on our roster. There's no comparison at all.

I'm coming across here as some kind of Larry Sanders fanboy, but some of these opinions are so extreme I feel compelled to poke fun at them. I believe in the possibility of a basketball team in Sacramento winning with solid defense and I'll keep looking for ways to make that happen until it's reality. You're just not playing to win if you have nobody on your roster who can lock down the paint IMO. And like it or not, we aren't the Lakers or the Knicks-- we have to take chances on flawed players because the sure-thing players can pick their own team and 29 times out of 30 it's not going to be the Kings.

You don't get the gist of my post: Cousins got the money, and produced better than ever, Sanders got the money and took a big step back. I'm not questioning his ability to play defense, but rather his motivation to be as productive as he was last year.

How big a fan of Cousins would you be if he got into fights in bars and you knew he sat around and smoked pot. What I'm getting with Sanders is excuses for his behavior, and the end justifies the means. I understand where your coming from, and like you, I think a team like the Kings needs to take risks at times to be able to contend with the rich and famous. But Sanders is a huge risk financially. If it doesn't turn out well for the Kings, they're in capspace hell with no where to turn, and a cancer on the team. Sorry, that's a risk I'm not willing to take.

I got the gist -- you think Sanders' behavior is evidence of his unreliability and that unreliability renders his basketball ability moot. I don't like his attitude any more than you do, but I think it's correctable. Artest if you recall, remained a damned good defender until his body broke down. I was willing to defend him as long as I believed in his ability to play basketball. Same with Cousins, same with Sanders. They're not out there killing people. A bar fight is a problem, it does not make him untouchable in my opinion.

I get that Sanders is a risk. And $44 million and 4 years is a gut check for sure. But Sanders from last season is untouchable for a different reason -- Milwaukee was looking at him as a franchise guy. This could be a good opportunity for us, that's all. Artest behaved himself when he was here, Webber rehabilitated his image, and Cousins is in the process of doing the same. Just think about that a bit before you say "No way!"

Well fortunately the decision isn't up to me. And as I said, I get where your coming from. If Sanders had four year contract for 5 or 6 mil a year, I'd probably be on board for the risk, but then if that's all he was making, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation. There are a lot of players that aren't angels. Hell, Griffin just threw water on a Warriors fan at the game today and tried to make it look like an accident. Just my opinion of course. My apprehension is not so much about his bad behavior, which I don't like, but about whether his great year was an aberration or not. I've dealt with people that were excessive in their use of pot, and other drugs as well. I've dealt with employee's that I hired that I had to fire because of being on pot, showing up late for work, or not showing up at all. My best friend that I grew up with, died of an overdose. So yeah, I'm wary of dealing with someone like Sanders. So you give me a guarantee, and I'm on board.

I'm willing to bet that someone like Demarcus could keep him motivated. But it's a fair point. There's more than enough warning signs to warrant an "I told you so" down the road. From what I've read he seems like a humble hard-working guy who gets carried away from time to time but I'm not in his head so I can't know for sure.

Incidentally, I'm far more worried about the front office deciding to extend Rudy Gay. I don't like the way he plays and he's exactly the kind of player who could have us chasing first round exits for the next five years if we make him a cornerstone of the team. I may be equally wrong about that, but my instincts say go with the defensive difference maker and aim higher.

If the choice came down to Sanders or Gay, the front office would go with Rudy Gay over Larry Sanders 100 out of 100 times. Character does matter to our new owners

NO on Saunders. Not the Kings culture.

This is not debatable which is what your 100 out of 100 means. I think Rudy's skills are being underplayed also. If he is an iso player and can do nothing else, I'll take him in part because of his demeanor. If he can do more, and I wonder if he has ever been asked to do more, he could be a great #2 to the monster in the middle.

I also don't see us as desperate for a shot blocker. The fact that Boogie has stepped it up takes away the desperation. Note I didn't say we don't need a shot blocking man in the middle but lets not jump off a cliff in the middle of the night and hope it's only a 4 ft. fall and find out it's 400 ft. It has been said so many times but it bears repeating that if Sanders is a mistake, he is a cap constricting 4 year mistake.

One difference between Boogie and Sanders (and White) is that Boogie knows when he has done wrong. Sanders doesn't know that or at the most, admits it with a lot of qualifications. In other words, he thinks what he is doing is right if it wasn't for those pesky rules.

Personally I'd like to see another year of Gay before making up my mind. When we first traded for him I wasn't that thrilled. Other than we had cleared away some pieces that had no future with the Kings. However, he's turned out to better than advertised. He adjusted his game and improved across the board statistically. He's also shown to be a willing, and good passer at times. He's also shown the propensity to make bad passes as well. I admit that up to now, he's been mostly an isolation player, and I'm not a big fan of that type of basketball. However, there are times when you need a player like Gay to make a big play. Plus, has Gay ever been asked to be something other than an iso player?

I guess what I'm saying is that he's the best SF this team has had since Artest, and I'd be very reluctant to just let him walk. On the other hand, I don't want the Kiings to overpay for him either. Now if Gay opts in, and the Kings get lucky and draft Parker, and Parker in his first year shows that he's a player in this league, then all bets are off the table. We should be so lucky....

The thing with Rudy Gay is, isolation scoring is what he's good at. If you want him back to spot up at the three point line and handle the ball on the pick and roll from time to time, you don't need Rudy Gay you need a different kind of player. Trouble is, his scoring is a double edged sword. When he's on the floor our TOs go way up without much of a boost defensively to make up for it. McLemore under-performed all year until he finally got a chance at the end of the season with Rudy and IT out or playing limited minutes. Is it purely a coincidence that was Cousins best stretch this season as well?

It's a snowball effect -- when Rudy is really on, no one else is. With Cousins on the team especially, I don't think we need that. If this were an individual sport he's exactly what you want in a wing. Big, athletic, can score from anywhere, no glaring weaknesses. But having watched him this season up close for an extended period of time, I think he'll either have to completely change the way he plays or he'll never be on a championship winning team. He reminds me of a poor man's Tracy McGrady. He was one of the most talented players ever but he never figured out how to translate all that individual talent to team success.

Bottom line for me is simple -- Rudy was as good as he's ever been after he got to Sacramento this year and we didn't win. If Cousins/Gay is going to be the 1-2 punch on a legit contender, we should have won more than 28 games regardless of supporting cast. And I think there's a better chance of 22 year old Derrick Williams figuring out his mental block or 25 year old knucklehead Larry Sanders getting serious about having a career than Rudy Gay completely changing who he is 10 years into his NBA career. This is one of those "I hope I'm wrong" situations because I just don't feel good about locking up Rudy with a big contact mere months after his last big contact was considered untreatable.

Kinda unfair to relate an entire season featuring 28 wins to the relatively small fraction of the season where Cuz and Rudy were actually playing together. Rudy played 55 (21-34 record for the team in that span, which isn't spectacular but is at least better than 28-54) games for the Kings this season (18 games before that for the Raptors). Cuz played 71 (the Kings lost every game he didn't play because science), missing all ten games after Rudy had joined the roster. Then of the games that you had Rudy and Cuz playing together, you also have to factor in the games where Rudy or Demarcus got injured (that Houston abomination) and the games where Rudy and/or Demarcus were coming right off of injuries/the team stopped caring about winning (essentially all of the games Rudy managed to play over the last two or three weeks of the season. So pretty much, I want to judge the Gay/Cuz combo over a span of games in which they weren't injured, and weren't forced to play in a starting line-up featuring zombie MT at the SG slot with B-Mac and Ray at their most rookie-tastic points of the season.

Yeah, that's fair. I'm not totally opposed to Rudy as a long-term option, but I do think the small sample of data we have isn't enough to justify a 4 or 5 year extension at this point. If he decides to pick up the one year option we'll have a chance for a more extended trial run which might make it easier to see if that lineup has long-term viability or not. I just don't want us to walk into another Marcus Thornton situation.