Category: Sacramento Kings Blog

SI.com’s Ian Thompson reports: Beno Udrih (Sacramento Kings) has gone from a 5.2-point scorer over three in-and-out years with San Antonio to a 14.3-point starter in his brief time with the Kings. The 25-year-old point guard has added 4.0 assists, 3.3 rebounds and 1.2 steals in his 35.2 minutes as the Kings have gone 6-5 since his Nov. 10 debut (though the return of Ron Artest from a season-opening suspension of seven games has a lot to do with it, too). While sidelined with a broken finger in the preseason, Udrih was traded by San Antonio and waived by Minnesota before arriving in Sacramento for the minimum $826,046 as a replacement for Mike Bibby, who underwent preseason thumb surgery. The 6-3 Udrih showed he had recovered from the loss of Gregg Popovich’s confidence in him by haunting San Antonio with a career-high 27 points in a 112-99 Kings’ win last week. If Udrih keeps this up, he’ll make it easier for the Kings to eventually trade Bibby and further hasten their rebuilding.

The Sacramento Bee reports: “What Beno calls style, Brad calls something else. Kings center Brad Miller has been giving Udrih a hard time about his fashion, and his ridiculing became public on Sunday. “He’s a typical, goofy European with tight pants, tight clothes – pretty standard,” Miller said with a laugh. A metrosexual, one might say? “Definitely a metrosexual,” Miller said. “He has the nice accent. He’s telling us, ‘This team was loaded with lots of Europeans before (in the days of Peja Stojakovic, Hedo Turkoglu etc.), so everybody knows what’s going on.”