Vivek Ranadive was apparently looking more like the head of Dunder Mifflin than the head of an NBA team.
The Sacramento Kings owner Ranadive recently addressed the team during a fancy dinner around the start of training camp, Zach Lowe of The Ringer reported this week. Ranadive then reportedly went on to roast team figures over all the ways that they had been failing as an organization.
“They all arrived for training camp, they went out to a fancy dinner, the whole team, staff, everything,” said Lowe of the Kings. “At the dinner, Vivek Ranadive spoke. He kind of turned the dinner into a roast of lots of people in the room, telling them all the ways that they had been failing as player, coaches, [and] executives.
“Some people were alarmed and were like, ‘This is not going over the way you intended,'” added Lowe. “Some people thought, ‘I get what he’s doing. He using the fact that we’ve become a media punchline to motivate us.’ … But it was described to me as a prolonged roast that landed with some of the audience, and some of the audience not as much.”
For the 69-year-old Ranadive, who has owned the Kings since 2013, there is certainly a lot of material to roast his organization over. Sacramento has had just two winning seasons and only one playoff berth ever since Ranadive took over, and they also just went a miserable 22-60 last year. On top of that, even the team’s media figures are getting into scandals these days.
But that style of leadership from Ranadive seems much more like Michael Scott from “The Office” (“boom, roasted”) than like a professional sports owner. Ranadive himself has also seemingly contributed to a lot of his team’s problems, including in-fighting with team executives and other unsightly issues.
