Boom, Roasted: The Kings Deserve Better Than Owner’s Odd Michael Scott Impression at Team Dinner

In the two-part episode titled “Stress Relief” in Season 5 of The Office, chaos ensues in the Dunder Mifflin office.

The cold open is one of the most iconic in the show’s history: Dwight Schrute stages a fire to test if his coworkers were paying attention to his fire-safety talk from the week prior. “Today, smoking is going to save lives.” Spoiler alert: They were not ready for it. Windows were broken. A cat falls through the ceiling. Stanley Hudson suffered a heart attack. In response, the fun-loving-yet-scatterbrained boss Michael Scott throws a roast of himself, à la Comedy Central and Tom Brady, to try and ease his employees’ stress.

In predictable fashion, though, Scott can’t take a joke during the roast. He walks off the stage welling up in tears. The next day, Scott returns to the office to fire some one-liners back at his employees.

Jim, you’re 6’11” and you weigh 90 pounds. Gumby has a better body than you. Boom, roasted. Dwight, you’re a kiss ass. Boom, roasted. Pam, you failed art school. Boom, roasted.

None of them land, though, until he gets to Stanley: Stanley, you crush your wife during sex and your heart sucks. Boom, roasted.

Stanley chuckles at his desk, and then the whole office begins to crack up. Like he does throughout the series, Scott—somehow—comes out as a winner.

Well, Kings owner Vivek Ranadivé apparently tried to do the same thing leading up to the upcoming 2026–27 NBA season. At some point over the past few weeks, he hosted Sacramento players and staff at a team dinner and ... oddly turned his speech into a roast. In similar fashion to Scott, it seems Ranadivé’s jokes didn’t land with everyone in attendance.

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“[The Kings] went out to a fancy training camp dinner—the whole team, staff, everything,” Zach Lowe said on his latest podcast. “At the dinner, Vivek Ranadivé spoke. He kind of turned the dinner into a roast of lots of people in the room, telling them all the ways in which they have been failing as players, coaches, executives, whatever. … Some people were alarmed and were like, ‘This is not going over the way you intended.’ Some people thought, ‘I get what he’s doing. He’s using the fact that [the Kings] have become a media punchline to motivate us.’ He was not saying, ‘I, Vivek Ranadivé, believe these things about you. But here’s what people say about you. Prove us wrong.’

“It was described to me as a prolonged roast that landed with some of the audience, and some of the audience not as much. The Kings are the Kings.”

So @ZachLowe_NBA shared an interesting story about how the Kings' owner, Vivek Ranadive, addressed the team at the start of training camp...

Weird one all around. pic.twitter.com/5Auqo0IWGC
— Brenden Nunes (@BrendenNunesNBA) October 9, 2026

Look. We’ve all made jokes that don’t land at work. I average about 1.5 bad jokes per Zoom meeting. But I get why the roast wasn’t received well by everyone in attendance.

Ranadivé has done a few great things since he purchased the Kings in 2013. For one, and most importantly, he kept the Kings in Sacramento. He also was crucial in building Golden 1 Center, which opened in 2016 and, 10 years later, remains one of the best atmospheres in all the NBA despite the team’s lack of success.

But the one word that has plagued Ranadivé and the Kings over his tenure: Impatience. Since 2013, Sacramento has had nine head coaches lead the bench in a full-time or interim role. In comparison, the Hornets—a team with a similar amount of success the past 14 seasons—have had five. The Heat have had one.

Two of the Kings’ nine coaches in that span have gone on to win NBA titles elsewhere after getting fired—Mike Brown with the Knicks in June, and Michael Malone with the Nuggets in 2023. Brown and general manager Monte McNair built Sacramento’s first playoff team in nearly two decades in 2023. A short 20 months later, Brown was fired, and McNair was out the door after the 2024–25 campaign. No head coach has survived more than three full seasons in Sacramento since the late, great Rick Adelman from 1998 to 2006.

Ranadivé has had the right people in the building over the years, and it’s been his choice to see them out much too soon.

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Presumed to be in the audience at said team dinner was coach Doug Christie, entering his second full season as head coach, and general manager Scott Perry, who took the role in April 2025.

Entering the new season, the Christie’s Kings have exactly one reason for optimism—No. 7 pick Darius Acuff Jr., who looks like he can develop into something special. Otherwise, Sacramento is staring down another bleak season that likely will be more about trading away players than winning games. Rebuilds have been a constant over the years in Sacramento, but the people in charge of them have not. Except the owner himself.

So, yeah, I wasn’t there at the team dinner. I haven’t heard audio of the roast. Maybe there were some bangers! Maybe it will motivate them? But I get why the roast didn’t land with everyone at the team dinner. Christie, Perry and the Kings—and their fans—deserve better.

Boom, roasted.

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