**IN EARLY AUGUST**, just four months into his tenure as Sacramento Kings general manager, Scott Perry took assistant GM B.J. Armstrong and coach Doug Christie to Latrobe, Pennsylvania.
For three nights, Perry, Armstrong and Christie stayed in the dorm rooms at Saint Vincent College and were given unfettered access to coach Mike Tomlin and the Pittsburgh Steelers.
“I went to the offensive line meetings,” Christie said. “Defensive back meetings. Quarterback meetings.”
The reason was simple: Perry, who joined the Kings in April, wants his new team to emulate the Steelers and needs the leaders across his organization to feel that same spirit.
Perry, a Steelers fan with a 15-year personal connection to Tomlin, is also a longtime NBA executive who has worked in the front offices of the Detroit Pistons, Seattle SuperSonics, Orlando Magic and New York Knicks.
But this opportunity with the Kings provides him with a level of autonomy to mold an NBA culture to a degree he never quite had before. Handpicked by team owner Vivek Ranadive, Perry, 62, is the unquestioned voice guiding the direction of the franchise.
Perry is transparent about what lies ahead -- a second go-around with the organization after a brief stint under former GM Vlade Divac in 2017 -- and the challenges he faces.
Ranadive has cycled through five different front offices and eight coaches since he bought the team in 2013. The Kings are about to miss the playoffs for the 19th time in 20 years, generating a natural and deep-rooted skepticism among a loyal but demoralized fan base about any front office declaring it’ll be different this time. Perry knows his ultimate success inevitably depends on the patience of a man who has rarely shown any.
“I was hired to create and build a sustainable winner,” Perry said.
This is where Perry hopes to emulate the Steelers. Under Tomlin, the Steelers haven’t had a losing record in 19 seasons. They’re always competitive, built on a brand of toughness and defense in the image of their city.
That’s the language Perry speaks. His plan centers on “six pillars,” as he calls them -- wanting his employees to be competitive, tough, disciplined, accountable, team-oriented and professional. And he retained Christie, in part, because Christie agrees and drills that messaging daily, projecting a passionate portrayal of what Sacramento and the team are supposed to represent.
“I watched Scott’s first press conference,” said Christie, who took over in December 2024 after Mike Brown was fired. “I was like, ‘Damn, that sounds like me.’ I was vibing with it.”
But the reality is as inconvenient as it is daunting. The Kings resemble the Steelers in few conceivable ways. One has continuity in ownership and a healthy distance between the front office. The other does not, though team sources say Ranadive has kept his word in allowing Perry full decision-making freedom the past four months.
One organization has had three coaches in the past 57 seasons. The other has had 27. One has six championships. The other has zero. The Kings have been perpetually irrelevant -- famously missing the playoffs for 16 straight seasons between 2007 and 2022 -- while the Steelers have made the playoffs 17 of the past 25 seasons.
What’s more pressing: The Kings’ roster is ill-equipped to execute the style and brand Perry and Christie preach. So they sit at 8-29, stuck near the bottom of the conference again, reeling with the league’s 28th-ranked defense and 29th-ranked offense.
Reversing such a position, and doing so to a sustainable degree, is an enormous task. Beyond trying to emulate the NFL’s gold standard, Perry also knows he must answer the most enduring question in Kings lore. _What the heck is the plan here?_
“You can use the term rebuild,” Perry said. “I’m not a big labeler. But what I’ve said, from the very beginning, \[is\] we know it’s going to be a heavy lift.”
**IN BROWN’S SECOND** season, 2023-2024, the Kings dropped from 48 wins to 46, but the conference standings proved unfriendly. The two-win dip dropped them from third in the West to ninth. The Kings then failed to escape the play-in bracket, which generated a tense summer and an appetite for aggression.
League sources described Ranadive as extremely motivated to land DeMar DeRozan, nudging former general manager Monte McNair and former assistant general manager Wes Wilcox -- his previous front office -- to improve their offer in time for Ranadive to walk DeRozan out to their courtside seats in front of fans at halftime of a summer league game.
The Kings ultimately sweetened their offer to land DeRozan, delivering the Spurs a 2032 unprotected first-round pick swap as part of the three-team sign-and-trade construction. That could prove to be a dangerous and ill-advised move considering the current arc of both franchises involved. And then they gave DeRozan a three-year, $74M deal, one that just a year later holds little value across the league.
This, team sources indicated at the time, was the first glaring sign that Ranadive was grabbing back firmer control of basketball operations from McNair, who had won Executive of the Year after the franchise broke the playoff drought in 2023 just one year prior, but had missed on a few fringe moves that had failed to improve on the 48-win Beam Team.