Mark Kreidler
In so many words.

Back when I was spending time around the high-flying Sacramento Kings of the early ought-oughts, I had a stock answer for anyone who asked about the relative personalities of the team’s stars.  What I said was that if my sons had only one minute to meet a player, I’d want it to be Chris Webber – but if they had a week, I’d want it to be Vlade Divac.

That’s the two in a thimble.  Webber could make that one minute last a lifetime for most kids; with his brilliant smile and his empathetic, almost folksy approach to his young fans, he could create an instant memory.  He was – and remains – every bit that magnetic.  Off the charts.

Divac, though, went deeper on so many levels that the comparison is almost unfair.  Here was a man who had really lived, who had come to America from some other place to find his opportunity and stardom, who had seen his beautiful Serbian homeland ravaged by war and political strife.  Here was a family man, a socially active man, a world-connected, sometimes weary, very, very funny man – a sweetheart encased by more than 7 feet of frame and 260 pounds of bulk.  Vlade was a three-dimensional star, and you don’t have to be around pro athletes long to realize how incredibly rare that is.

With that said, the Sacramento Kings are about to make their second mistake of the season.  Having already retired Webber’s jersey, they will do the same with Divac’s No. 21 on Tuesday night.  It’ll still be the wrong call amid all the great vibes, standing ovations and video memories.

I don’t go old-school very often, but on the subject of jersey retirement I’m willing to draw the line.  Hanging up the jerseys of guys who never won the Kings a championship?  It just screams mediocrity.  What, you’re never going to have a ring to celebrate?  Good grief, aim higher.

Divac and Webber were central to the winningest seasons in Kings history, and that is absolutely worthy of annotation.  But jersey retirement signals something so far beyond just piling up some wins that it doesn’t even compute here.  Why stop at two non-titlists?  What about Jason Williams?  Mike Bibby?  Doug Christie?  Rick Adelman?

Where’s a Ring of Honor or Circle of Fame when you really need one?

Two retirement ceremonies, for beloved players who nevertheless both spent more years in the NBA with other teams than they did with the Kings, has struck many ticket-holders as a bald-faced money grab by a franchise struggling at the gate and (obviously) on the court.  I don’t see that, but I understand the take.  That’s a ticket-holder kind of a mindset – What are they hoovering out of our pockets now? – and it’s symptomatic of the kind of antipathy being aimed directly at pro sports for their outrageous pricing structures.  At a billion dollars a ticket, you’d better win.

As for Divac, I’d build the man a statue and put it next to Webber’s on the lawn at the main entrance to Arco Arena, then move it to the new place, wherever that may be.  Divac, the three-dimensional modern star, is certainly worthy of whatever superlatives anyone wants to throw his way.  But the next time a Kings jersey gets retired, it really ought to be that of the player who brought the Sacramento franchise its first title.  Anything else is something else.  Until then, put some handprints in wet cement and call it a day.

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It’s almost axiomatic that, in a life spent in the NFL, there’ll never be a clear paper trail.  You don’t always get all the way back to Point A when you’re looking for the place where something went either tremendously right or horribly wrong.  And for that reason, no one can say definitively that Mike Nolan wrecked Alex Smith’s career.

Wrecked, wrecked, wrecked it.  You can’t say that.  Although I just did.

But listening to Smith speak so openly about trying to give something back to a 49ers organization that made him the No. 1 draft pick in 2005, it’s hard not to wonder what might’ve happened had Nolan not been the coach of record when Smith separated his shoulder early in the 2007 season, the year everything went blooey.

You may remember that.  If you’re a 49ers fan, it’s hard to forget, because after struggling out of the gate as a rookie, Smith was showing the promise of a young talent coming into his own.  He didn’t set the league’s hair on fire in 2006, but he threw 16 touchdown passes, engineered a couple of very good late-season comeback wins on the road, and in general gave the impression that – despite the 49ers’ constant turnover of offensive coordinators – he might just get the hang of the whole leadership thing in the NFL.

But when Smith separated his shoulder four weeks into the ’07 campaign, his head coach, of all people, was the last to believe it.  Smith tried to play through the injury, a decision no doubt fueled in part by Nolan’s win-to-save-my-job approach to all things football.  It was a ridiculous decision for which Smith is still on the hook, one he’ll regret for years.

What ensued was a clown act.  Smith tried to play and was awful, with reporters waaaay up in the press box above Candlestick Point easily able to see that he wasn’t right.  Nolan essentially intimated that a real man would play through it.  Smith, at one point frustrated beyond belief, went public with some of what he was feeling, which in the NFL is Cardinal Sin No. 1, and it was all downhill from there.  His post-season surgery, way too late, was the first of two procedures on his right shoulder, costing him the last year and a half.

Now Smith is back, having agreed to a radically restructured contract to get the 49ers out from under the $9.6 million they’d have owed him this coming season.  He’ll go to San Francisco’s minicamp with an arm that is still rebuilding – and with an honest chance to compete with Shaun Hill for the starter’s job.  How do we know it’s an honest chance?  Because Mike Singletary said so, despite Hill’s 7-3 record in games he started at QB.  And because, unlike some of his predecessors, Mike Singletary’s words can be taken seriously.

It’s pure speculation what Alex Smith’s career arc would’ve been under a different coach, and it is certainly worth noting that his college coach at Utah, Urban Meyer, was among those who weren’t sure in 2005 how Smith’s skills would translate to the pro game.  The only thing we know is that, during the 2007 season, Smith played several games with a fully separated shoulder, and he did so under a coach who thought playing through pain was a grown-up’s job – the sort of throwback, old-school mentality that has ruined many an NFL talent when applied ineptly.

The irony, of course, is that 2005 was Mike Nolan’s first draft as an NFL head coach – and as the man holding virtually all the decision-making power in the 49ers organization at the time.  Nolan debated on Smith vs. Aaron Rodgers, and Rodgers subsequently fell all the way down to Green Bay at No. 24 in that draft.  Who’d have guessed?  Aaron was the lucky one.

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Watching Don Nelson, Chris Cohan and the whole nutty crew at Golden State make such a cock-up of what not so long ago was a decent NBA team, long-suffering fans of the Kings have to be sensing the obvious: It could be worse.

Sure, Sacramento has the league’s poorest record, and it says here the Kings will finish that way.  You need a scorecard to track the personnel changes.  The arena issue sticks to the collective leg like a crudded-up hot-dog wrapper in a stiff wind, and in general, life around the franchise since the Rick Adelman gaffe has been a depression.  But that’s not actually as bad as it can get.

Nope, if you want a close look at that, just spend a few minutes trying to dissect the hideous beast that has become the Warriors, from the front office right down to the arena floor itself.  While Golden State still is capable of playing respectable ball (mostly, if the team’s in the mood), it has become a cartoon version of itself in almost every other way.

Nelson long ago lost his taste for this stuff; he just can’t resist the money that comes with coaching an NBA team.  But he is disastrously wrong for the contemporary player – which is too bad, considering that his offensive style ought to be a modern, me-firster’s dream.

Nellie’s relationship with guard Monta Ellis has devolved into one of mutual distrust, constant misremembering and an elite-level lack of candor, going back to Ellis’s Jeff Kent-like attempt last summer to cover up a moped injury by claiming he got hurt while playing pickup basketball.  The capper came this week when the two couldn’t even agree on why Ellis has missed the last seven games (ankle problems primarily, the team said; family matter only, Ellis insisted).

As much as I like Chris Mullin and wanted him to succeed, there is no question that his stint as GM has been checkered and ineffective, and Cohan, who has always tended to listen to the loudest voice in the room, has essentially marginalized him now.  At Monday’s practice, meanwhile, four Warriors were absent – two with vague excuses and two just not really explained.  Nelson’s benching of Jamal Crawford, and his threat (which Nellie denies) to trade Crawford unless he opts out of his contract, is a pungent crock worthy of its own treatment.  This team just gives off such a bad vibe; it’s almost miraculous that the Warriors can still rise up – again, if they feel like it – and play entertaining, up-tempo basketball.

The Kings’ struggles have been expounded upon at eye-bleed length, but the reality is, there’s the hint of a future there.  Kevin Martin is a genuine NBA scorer (if he plays any defense at all, he goes to the top shelf of the league), and it’s hard not to appreciate the upside of guys like Andres Nocioni, Spencer Hawes and Jason Thompson.  If the Kings continue to bottom out and get the No. 1 pick in the draft, Blake Griffin replaces Thompson, and that’s an upgrade people could grow to absolutely love.

Sacramento gets OKC tonight, and perhaps there’s a chance for a cheap win there, but overall the Kings will struggle down the stretch, finish with 20 or 21 victories, and likely get interim coach Kenny Natt whacked in favor of a veteran from the ever-burgeoning list of summertime availables.  That’s not all bad, actually.  Natt will be warmly regarded as the man who kept the team’s attitude in a surprisingly good place, even when the potential was there for it to slide off the table.  You don’t have to look far to realize just how crucial that kind of thing can be.

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The easy temptation, with Jerry Jones intimating so much criticism of Terrell Owens that you need an extra page just to read between the lines, would be to use this week’s release in Dallas as an excuse to dredge up all the old T.O. gunk from before and jump to conclusions.  Let’s do it.

But in doing so, let’s also acknowledge the obvious: Some of us remember the other guy.  And it’s that kind of memory, to say nothing of Owens’ clear and present ability to play football, which will get him signed right quick – hopefully by the Raiders, since there’s nothing like a good freak show at the Coliseum on Sunday afternoons in the fall.

Owens can be arrogant, yep.  He’s got a penchant for making every catch except the one that you need the most.  He has displayed the dropsies more than once.  He’s a furor waiting to happen, and the particulars – pushups on his front driveway, sideline-stationary-biking while wearing a full cycling outfit, insinuations that Jeff Garcia is gay, the “attempted suicide” mini-drama, open feuds with his quarterbacks, coaches, teammates and opponents – are pushing him inexorably into Dennis Rodman territory.

If T.O. comes out in full-boa regalia for next week’s newest contract announcement, you’ll know he’s finally all the way there.  At this point, it appears to be a short step.

But one of the reasons that Al Davis will find himself in long conversation about Owens over the next several days is that Davis, too, remembers the other guy.  You may know that Owens: He’s the player who is really borderline brilliant on the front edge of his newest employment, as he was in Dallas, as he was in Philly – as he will be this season.

Davis may remember what we remember, which is Owens’ blossoming in San Francisco.  He may remember the way that Owens, before he became the NFL’s designated kabuki theater artist, burst spontaneously into real tears after making the dramatic catch of a Steve Young pass for the TD that beat Green Bay in the playoffs after the 1998 season.

It’s a distant view from here, but the reality is that Owens came into the league with no portfolio.  He was no mega-bonus baby.  He was a third-round draft pick from Tennessee-Chattanooga, drafted on ability more than college production.  He didn’t come into his own until his third year in the league.  Armchair analyzing, we’d be tempted to say that Owens is the most insecure player in the league.  In pre-school, we’d call what he does “acting out,” but in the NFL there’s really no Quiet Circle to which to send T.O.  So he keeps getting shipped out (and paid, of course).

The Raiders have a crying need at wide receiver.  In terms of reputation, Owens is certainly no threat to Al Davis’s bunch.  He won’t cost them a game in the standings.  Oakland is upside-down on salary-cap issues, but no biggie.

And T.O. won’t really be a problem until Season 2 – by which time, the Raiders will at least have been able to enjoy the other Owens for a while.  Good value.

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To see the reaction in both San Francisco and Los Angeles to the news that Manny Ramirez chose (shocker!) the Dodgers and their $45 million, you come quickly to the realization that the NL West doesn’t have a leader.  Does … not … have one.  Ramirez, a huge signing for whichever team was finally bound to blunder into his bank account, doesn’t actually change that.

In L.A., Dodgers fans are guardedly thrilled about Ramirez while acknowledging the obvious: They don’t pitch well enough to be a serious contender, period.  Gone from last year’s rotation are Derek Lowe, Brad Penny and Rent-an-Icon Greg Maddux.  Maddux wasn’t setting anybody’s hair on fire down the stretch, but he was the consummate pro – and the departure of Lowe is difficult to overestimate.  Lowe was a major gamer on a staff otherwise without an engine.

Chad Billingsley inherits the role of ace, which is almost immediately subject to review.  L.A. needs for 21-year-old Clayton Kershaw and free-agent pickup Randy Wolf to be very good, and for Jason Schmidt to actually make a few starts – and the Dodgers still can’t be completely sure what they’ve got in Jonathan Broxton, who had a Jekyll/Hyde experience in the closer’s role last fall.  If Broxton can’t finish, that’s another matter entirely, but the potential for brilliance is there.

The Giants, on the other hand, pitch well enough to make it interesting.  Behind Cy Young winner Tim Lincecum come Matt Cain, Randy Johnson (assuming health), Barry Zito (assuming emotional well being) and perhaps Noah Lowry or Jonathan Sanchez.  They’ve got a strong – if potentially weird – rotation heading into the season.  Brian Wilson makes you crazy just about every time he steps on the mound, but he saved 41 games in 47 chances last season.  Middle relief is a question mark, the same as it is on almost every flawed team in the league, but overall you’d have to feel pretty good about the staff.

Alas, sooner or later S.F. has to come to the plate.  It’s almost painful watching manager Bruce Bochy try to squeeze runs out of a lineup that considers Pablo Sandoval its power guy and Bengie Molina a cleanup hitter.  The Giants’ collective lack of punch is an almost immediate equalizer in every game they’ll play; Lincecum and Cain enter the season already knowing they’ll have to be utterly great to win.

(When’s the last time Bochy had a decent lineup to manage?  Between the Padres and these Giants, you get the feeling that he and third-base coach Tim Flannery would have about as much luck at the plate.  Just incomprehensible, especially for a team that considers itself worthy of contention.)

Brian Sabean, who looks worse and worse in comparison to cross-bay GM Billy Beane in Oakland, is on the hook this season for having visibly improved the offense by almost zero: He added an overpaid Edgar Renteria and not much else.  Beane got the A’s Matt Holliday, Jason Giambi, Orlando Cabrera and Nomar Garciaparra.

Of course, the A’s have to deal with an Angels team that won 100 games last year, and a 95-victory wild-card threshold.  The Giants?  Just trying to figure out how to push past the 84-win Dodgers of a year ago, who lost their best pitcher.  As of this minute: not there yet.

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It’s easy now to forget how excited the A’s once were about Bobby Crosby, but he was going to be the next Miguel Tejada.  Remember?  It seems like a million years ago.  In some ways, for the A’s, it really was.

Crosby came blasting out of Sacramento and the minor-league system as the next great thing at shortstop, a late-season call-up to Oakland in 2003 who clearly was going to make the A’s roster in ‘04.  Tejada, a free agent, wanted MVP money.  The A’s were the A’s.  End of negotiation.

It all set up so beautifully.  Crosby, son of a former big-leaguer, batted only .239 in 2004, but he had pop – 22 home runs – and he led all rookies in hits, doubles and walks.  So what if he struck out nearly once a game?  The A’s had found their man, and he was the AL Rookie of the Year.  It was going to be so great, Crosby and Eric Chavez on the left side of the infield.  It was set in stone.

You almost forget, seeing the way Crosby’s career has diminished and now faded, that the A’s actually had strong winning teams in those first few years post-Tejada – 91, 88 and 93 victories from 2004 to 2006.  But after his rookie campaign, Crosby had less and less to do with any of it.  Constantly injured, bafflingly unable to take his game to a higher level, he stands today as a 29-year-old backup, a career .239 hitter who just lost his job to Orlando Cabrera.

Miggy?  He made out OK.  Baltimore threw $72 million at Tejada, who promptly delivered them 150 RBI in 2004.  The mechanics of his offensive production have been loudly questioned – Tejada’s name has surfaced in almost every steroid conversation of the decade – and he played for terrible, terrible teams, but the checks all cashed.  Tejada only occasionally lost his good humor, even when ESPN exposed him as having lied for years about his true age.

Today, Tejada is playing out the string in Houston; he last reached 100 RBI in 2006.  Crosby, meanwhile, said this week he’ll ask the A’s to trade him to a place where he can be the starting shortstop.  Hate to say it about a guy who arrived with such promise, but it’s hard to imagine where that place might be.

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A very quick Monday roll, with more to come…

·        Bruce Jenkins, blogging for the SF Chron, raises the point that, win or lose in court, the delay in Barry Bonds’ federal perjury trial effectively ends his baseball playing days.  Absolutely correct.  Then again, Bonds’ career has been over for at least two years – three, if you count straight back to the 2006 debut of “Bonds on Bonds” on ESPN, a career-killer if ever there was one.  Take that man’s SAG card and burn it, boys.  You won’t be needing it anymore.

·         Meanwhile, in an alternate universe, trainer Greg Anderson goes on seeing clients in Foster City, girding for another jail term for his refusal to testify against Bonds.  Anderson’s lawyers say the man thought he had a deal with prosecutors way back when, that his plea bargain in the BALCO case meant he’d never have to testify against his longtime pal.  (The idea that Bonds would never go to jail to protect Greg Anderson, though illuminating, is apparently secondary here.)  Anderson thinks the feds lied to him and tricked him into his deal, and if so, they did a hell of a job, because Anderson hasn’t got a shred of documentation to back up his claim.  He’s headed for prison again.  Pathetic.

·         With Scott Boras having gone public with his 437^th counter-counter-proposal down in L.A. and Dodgers owner Frank McCourt acting like a kid whose buddies won’t play the cool new yard game he just invented, we still assume that Manny Ramirez will wind up a Dodger.  Strange, then, that there’s still such a good feeling around the punchless Giants right now.  But the week down in Arizona has been full of pitching promise: Matt Cain lighter and stronger; Tim Lincecum throwing bullets; Randy Johnson healthy; Barry Zito freezing hitters with the wave-like break of his curve.  It’s barely March, and it barely counts – and they may barely score enough for it to matter – but the Giants have plenty in the rotation, with or without Noah Lowry, to make this season very, very interesting.

·         So here come the 49ers, marching right up to the table with Kurt Warner, full of naïve enthusiasm and a sort of “Hey, he’s says he’s interested!” desperation.  Not that S.F. has a superior option to Warner at quarterback, but, look, the front office is getting played like a woodwind.  Warner, said to be a man of high moral character, has gotten his feelings hurt by the Cardinals just enough to take the meeting – but, in the end, nowhere near enough to actually leave a Super Bowl entrant and a first-rate receiving corps over a few silly comments here and there.  Not so long ago, Warner said flatly that it was Arizona or retirement (why not both, really?).  San Francisco?  Not gonna happen.  It’s grandstanding in the extreme.  But enjoy the visit.  Have a good meal.  Send a postcard.

·         Absolutely love the Cavaliers’ potential pickups this week vs. what the Celtics have done, and they well may determine the Eastern Conference championship.  Danny Ainge, either panicking or deeply in love, brought aboard toxic Stephon Marbury (and Mikki Moore), which leaves Cleveland free to pursue Joe Smith and the mending Drew Gooden, each of whom will clear waivers Wednesday.  If the Cavs somehow pick up both, they’re loaded for the post-season – which will be just about the time that Marbury’s bad vibes take down a defending NBA champ’s team chemistry in Boston.  I just don’t figure it.

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