The Kings are finalizing a contract with veteran NBA executive Scott Perry to be their new general manager, reports Shams Charania of ESPN.
Charania’s report has been confirmed by several other outlets, including The Athletic, Yahoo Sports, Fox 40 Sacramento, and TheKingsBeat.com (all Twitter links here).
Sacramento and former GM Monte McNair mutually agreed to part ways after the team was eliminated from the play-in tournament on Wednesday night.
The Athletic reported overnight that Perry was the frontrunner to replace McNair. Mere hours later, he will be rejoining the Kings, having previously served as the team’s VP of basketball operations from April-June 2017.
Perry’s first stint with Sacramento was brief because he was hired away by New York to be the Knicks’ GM, but he reportedly had a strong working relationship with owner Vivek Ranadive. That connection undoubtedly helped him land his new position.
Perry, 61, played college basketball in the 1980s and then transitioned to coaching, primarily working in his home state of Michigan. The Detroit native got his first NBA job back in 2000 as an executive with the Pistons.
He had two separate stints in Detroit’s front office and also worked for Seattle and Orlando. Perry was the Knicks’ GM from 2017-23.
The Kings haven’t even conducted their exit interviews, tweets Sam Amick of The Athletic, yet they’ve already found a new head of basketball operations. Perhaps the impetus for hiring Perry so quickly is that he was rumored to be a candidate to join the Pelicans’ front office under Joe Dumars, his former boss and longtime colleague in Detroit.
Perry, who has also worked as an ESPN analyst, was reportedly one of four candidates who received serious consideration to become the Pistons’ head of basketball operations last year. Trajan Langdon was ultimately hired for the job.
Oh he was gm for the knicks for 5 years, how’d that turn out
Pretty good, all things considered. Knicks were one of the worst teams in the league when he became GM and by the time he left, they were perennial playoff contenders. You can give more of the credit to Rose but the Knicks unquestionably improved while Perry was with him.
The bar in Sacramento is low, just like it was when Perry came to the Knicks. It’s not a bad move. Will it make Sacramento championship contenders? No. But for Ranadive it qualifies as a solid move.
Perry was a disaster. Was also the reason the Knicks continued to fail (with Mills) and it was Rose who got them to where they are today. Perry also failed in Orlando. I guess it’s not what you know, but who you know. Looks like he’s succeeded there.
“Perry was a disaster. Was also the reason the Knicks continued to fail (with Mills)”
I don’t necessarily agree and I think it was the other way around. Mills was the primary one holding them back. Mills was Dolan all the way.
Again, not saying Perry is going to turn Sacramento into a powerhouse but considering Ranadive’s moves up to now, it’s a solid hire. All about relativity. Kings could do (and have done) a lot worse.
Well said. Not bad… by Kings standards
Knox. Topin. Instead of Haliburton with whom we needed and fell to us, and Knox over Alexander, who we needed and fell to us. His best moves with the Knicks were IQ and Grimes, but neither has cemented themselves…yet.
The dysfunction lives on in Sacramento
Obviously watching last night the Kings need a lot of defense. So it comes down to who do they trade for quality defense players?
Lonzo is available. 2/20M contract. Not bad. Give us a pick or something.
First dumars and now this guy. Does the NBA not know how to develop front office talent
The issue isn’t the NBA. The issue is bad owners who don’t know how to get out of their own way.
Love that the kings can fire and hire a GM within 12 hours
Kings still have no plan. To think Derozen and Lavine would work again if it failed once before is insanity. Then again sixers still trust Embiid so…
The same NBA franchises love perpetual mediocrity
Sometimes I feel like I should be a billionaire too because there are quite a number of them with a few screws loose. If they can be one, why not me?
1 of his picks has made some contribution to the Knicks but is always injured – Mitchell.
He got Brunson by hiring Brunson. And he traded a disgruntled KP.
Kings future is super bright. Like a soft light bulb.
Perry was only nominally part of the Rose regime, not a decision maker. None of the moves made by Rose & Co. (good or bad) should be attributed to him. He was kept around because that’s the corporate way at MSG.
Perry was hired by Mills (2017-20) in the summer of 2017, and was the principal talent evaluator during the Mills regime. That’s his only record with the NYK. His FRPs were Knox (at #9, 2018) and Barrett (at #3, 2019). He drafted Mitch at the top of the second round (at #36, 2018). He was part of the clown show that saw:
1) the hiring of Fizdale (17-65, 4-18),
2) the mismanagement of the KP6 situation, resulting in a back room trade deal (ala Nico) to trade him for peanuts,
3) the year-long claims of FO confidence that NYK were well positioned to get both KD and KI (which the media bought only because it was inconceivable a FO would lie about something like that), and
4) using their massive cap space to overpay 4 PFs as their Plan B.
That’s what SAC is signing up for.
“the mismanagement of the KP6 situation, resulting in a back room trade deal (ala Nico) to trade him for peanuts,”
KP was oft-injured and wanted out. Please note the horrible returns that Dallas and Washington subsequently got for Porzingas. For a supposedly impact player he’s been traded for peanuts three times now.
KP6 did some things he probably regrets, like rehabbing in Europe. But he NEVER requested a trade. In the end, he had to be moved ASAP to keep a year of FO lies (to the player and the fans) and other missteps from being made public.
What KP6 netted in later trades isn’t relevant to what we could have gotten for him in a trade in the market at the time of the DAL deal. We’ll never know the latter exactly, since we didn’t go to the market. But the quotes out of other FO’s in the aftermath of the DAL deal suggested we would have had a lot of better options.
In any event, this was not a proud moment for the NYK FO of which Perry was a part. It also led to further misleading statements by the FO about how the cap space was ticketed for KD and KI.
Nothing but a brown noser.. All he did with Knicks is make sure he kept his job. Don’t get how these failures keek getting jobs.
Yup. Surprised Leon kept him on
Change GMs, change coaches, change players, etc. The one constant in Sacramento’s dysfunction is the owner.
I always said SP (not Pippen) has 9 lives, but I was wrong. Scott Perry has way more than 9.