Mike Malone’s sin wasn’t that he was incompetent, it’s that he was unspectacular. The deposed Sacramento coach was coaching the Kings like a basketball team. Team owner Vivek Ranadive wants them to be an evolutionary basketball experience.

There are plenty of rationales floating around as to why Ranadive fired Malone. Almost none of them implicate the 2-8 slide since DeMarcus Cousins came down with a nasty case of meningitis as anything more than the Trojan horse that provided cover for the decision. The most revealing answers Ranadive has given have been about style. He wants the Kings to play fast and reactive, like a jazz band. He wants them to abandon their plodding, grinding ways for a hyperkinetic style without classical restrictions like positions. Ranadive wants to re-engineer the Kings from the circuits up. That they have only one true 3-point threat to fan out to the corners on a fast break doesn’t factor into the philosophical revolution Ranadive is planning. Winning isn’t so much the point as the theoretically inevitable result of innovating a new coordinate system and language for basketball.

The problem is that Ranadive isn’t a decorated basketball thinker; he’s a wildly successful Malcolm Gladwell-lauded technology businessman. Ambition looks like hubris, because he doesn’t have any credentials beyond coaching his daughter’s youth team to a national championship game. There might not be another basketball revolution out there for Ranadive to innovate up, but he’s going to try. The NBA is in a golden age of discovery and advancement, fueled by new-money owners and veterans of the technology industry. Analytics have changed how players are scouted, the way the game works possession by possession, and how fans interact with their favorite teams.

Ranadive is at the forefront of this wave and his Kings are as much basketball team as they are science experiment. Where even the most ambitious of his contemporaries are working for marginal gains, he is a heart-on-sleeve futurist. Exhibit A: The system that Sacramento’s D-League affiliate, the Reno Bighorns, is running. Holding on to Malone would have been the sensible basketball move, as he helped create an environment where Cousins could thrive and presided over improvements from most other Kings. But at his best, Malone probably rates out as a good, traditional coach. “Good” and “traditional” would be desirable adjectives for most coaches in the league, but not for the Kings. They’re dreamers.

Ranadive has spoken with grandiose effect about NBA 3.0. He’s teased Sacramento’s new arena as “one of the most iconic structures on the planet,” and pitched Nik Stauskas as a taller Steph Curry. His whole professional career, Ranadive has thrived by seizing on little opportunities and untouched ideas, then blowing them up to an extreme. You don’t make it as a tech pioneer without aggressive self-belief. It’s logical to assume he’ll run the Kings like he’s run many successful companies, and early returns bear this out. He is betting that the NBA is ripe for another strategic renaissance and he’s not settling for a coach who is simply good and traditional.

Ranadive’s intergalactic ambition makes for a revealing contrast with Robert Pera’s tenure as owner of the Memphis Grizzlies. Pera is the youngest owner in the NBA at 34 and, like Ranadive, he entered the league with big ideas. He also sent away Lionel Hollins early in his time as owner and, this summer, was very close to letting Dave Joerger walk before he eventually retained him. The Grizzlies are now second in the West at 21-4 with a core largely unaltered from the time before Pera took over. Pera intended to make big moves that marked the Grizzlies as his territory, and he did. But they were confined to the front office, and never affected the Grizzlies’ on-court chemistry.

Pera had his own ideas about how the team should work, yet he ultimately resigned himself to the inarguable fact that team success is primarily tied to personnel. The Grizzlies organization is one of the most analytically progressive in the league, from Joerger up to Pera, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the Grizzlies play revolutionary basketball. Style isn’t a relevant indicator of how forward-thinking a team is. Playing ugly doesn’t mean playing inefficiently.

The idea that Ranadive will force the Kings to play 4-on-5 with a cherry-picker is a paper tiger, an easy target that’s been blown out of proportion, but it’s a signifier of how he sees the league. Rather than focus on acquiring the best players he can and hiring a coach to spin them into a functioning unit, he is concerned with acting as chief visionary, and that’s the central tension of the Sacramento Kings. In a vacuum, looking toward the future and refusing to settle are beneficial organizational strategies. But centralizing capital-I Ideas at the expense of the actual basketball team can be detrimental. Instead of asking “How can I put DeMarcus Cousins in the most efficient structure I can?” Ranadive is asking “How can I change the fabric of basketball?"

The NBA won’t continue to evolve without powerful people like Ranadive actively pushing boundaries and taking risks. But there is too much entropy in the NBA world. Where Ranadive sees firing Malone as the first domino in an evolution toward an elite, innovative Kings team, Cousins might see the signs of a trigger-happy ownership group that wants to implement an unfeeling vision no matter what. Unlike Ranadive, Cousins does the boots-on-the-ground work of winning basketball games. Essentially, Ranadive is gambling on his ability to see the future and get there before any other team.

It’s a tremendously risky proposition, one Kings fans are totally unfamiliar with. After seven glorious -- nearly great -- seasons with Rick Adelman, the Maloofs' reign in Sacramento was the diametric opposite of Ranadive’s relentless ambition. After a long period of malaise, Ranadive’s impatient time at the helm looks tinged through with megalomania. Casting off Malone abruptly while things were going bumpy feels impulsive and rash, yet it was in service to an ideal. He envisions himself an auteur -- as evinced by his draft room takeover -- but the crucial point that Ranadive misses is that innovation in the NBA is player-centric.

This is the orthodoxy that Ranadive thinks he can overcome, that the system can somehow supersede the player rather than simply amplify his talents. The honeymoon period he enjoyed as Sacramento’s savior is now over. With the firing of Malone, Ranadive will now be judged on his own merits, not against the Maloofs. Philosophical ambition and snappy mantras will play only as long as the Kings win basketball games. Malone’s dismissal would have been understandable if he was inadequate, but he clearly was not. The first quarter-season of 2014-15 has been the best stretch of Kings basketball since Adelman left, and Ranadive threw it away because Malone wouldn’t buy into his eccentric ideas. It’s not about basketball, because if it was, Malone would still be the coach. As Ranadive ignores the present, his futurism rings hollow. It is still early in his tenure, but right now, he looks more like an ideologue than a visionary.

Patrick Redford is a contributor to VICE Sports, Deadspin and The Classical. Bug him on Twitter @patrickredford.