Six years after stepping down as the Detroit Pistons president of basketball operations, Joe Dumars is back in the general manager chair.
At least, temporarily.
Vlade Divac has stepped down as general manager of the Sacramento Kings. Dumars, who has been with the Kings in an advisory role since 2019, will step into a larger role as interim executive vice president of basketball operations and lead the search for a new general manager.
Dumars led basketball operations for the Pistons from 2000-14 and was named NBA Executive of the Year in 2003. He engineered Detroit’s 2004 championship and delivered six consecutive Eastern Conference Finals appearances, but left the organization after five straight years of missing the playoffs.
The 1989 NBA Finals MVP was a vital cog on the Pistons’ first two championship teams as a guard.
This is Dumars’ first time running a basketball team since he left Detroit in 2014, when the team hired Stan Van Gundy to be head coach and president of basketball operations. Outside of the NBA, he most recently was the president of the basketball division for the sports agency Independent Sports & Entertainment (ISE).
Divac had led the Kings since 2015, and is stepping down after Sacramento’s 14th-consecutive non-playoff season.
Contact Omari Sankofa II at osankofa@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @omarisankofa. Read more on the Detroit Pistons and sign up for our Pistons newsletter.