Geoff Petrie responded strongly to an interview Vivek Ranadive had with Sam Amick of the USA Today in which he reflected upon his three-and-a-half years owning the Sacramento Kings.
Petrie wrote in an email to Deadspin that Ranadivé’s interview was a “sophomoric attempt at revisionist history,” and that the “representations regarding Keith Smart, myself, and our professional staff” were in fact “an ugly lie.”
Petrie was asked to explain his thoughts about Ranadive's interview.
"Well, like I said in my email, I thought it was kind of a rambling attempt at revisionist history," said Petrie. "A lot of what he said doesn’t really ... if you look back on the three-and-a-half years that he’s been the managing owner, it doesn’t really fit with a lot of the history. The main reason I reached out, [the interview] is long and covered a lot of territory, but when it comes to some of the representations about myself and Keith Smart and the management group that was there at that time, it was basically totally untrue, what was represented there."
Petrie tried to make the handover to the new regime as smooth as possible and even recommended they bring in Giannis Antetokounmpo for a workout.
"I only had about an 8 or 10 minute little meeting with him," said Petrie of Ranadive. "I found him to be a very arrogant and dismissive little chap. He doesn’t seem to understand that he owns it. He was the one that came in with Basketball 3.0, and changing the culture, “I have the smartest guys in the room, they’re four steps ahead of everybody else, I have 80 gigs of data, nobody else has that.” Well, okay, you know?"