The Sacramento Kings will not be bringing back interim coach Alvin Gentry for the 2022-23 season and will begin searching for a new coach, the team announced on Monday. Sacramento will seek its ninth coach since 2011-12.
“The entire Kings organization is grateful for the leadership of Alvin Gentry, who stepped up when he got the call mid-season,” Kings general manager Monte McNair said in a statement. “We appreciate his leadership on and off the court.”
Jason Anderson of The Sacramento Bee and ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski report that the Kings have a wide variety of names on their list, including former coaches with a history of turning teams from the Draft lottery to a playoff squad. That list reportedly includes Mike D’Antoni, Mike Brown, Steve Clifford, Terry Stotts and others.
Gentry took over as coach of the Kings after the team fired coach Luke Walton 17 games into 2021-22 with Sacramento at 6-11. The Kings went 24-41 under Gentry and flirted with a spot in the Play-In Tournament before being eliminated from that chase on April 1. Sacramento has not made the playoffs since 2005-06 and its 16-season playoff drought is the longest current active streak in the NBA.
Sacramento has young pieces to build around, particularly former All-Star forward Domantas Sabonis, young guard De’Aaron Fox and fellow swingmen Davion Mitchell and Donte DiVincenzo. The Kings have gone through 11 different coaches during their playoff drought and have not had more than 39 wins in any season since that stretch began.
The situation in Sacramento has been so bad that Walton’s .422 winning percentage with the team was the second-best of the 18 coaches since the franchise moved to California in 1985.
Rick Adelman had a mark of .633 and led the Kings to the playoffs and a winning record in all eight seasons in charge. Sacramento hasn’t had a winning record in a season with any other coach since leaving Kansas City.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
