If the play-in tournament is good for anything, it’s throwing an annual spotlight on some of the NBA’s most stuck-in-the-mud franchises. Whereas 9- and 10-seeds used to be able to slink into the offseason in relative anonymity, they are now dragged into the light for one more nationally televised, win-or-go-home game that is sure to leave everyone who watches muttering something like, “Oh boy, this is a mess.”
This year, it’s the Sacramento Kings whose asses are in the jackpot. This is thanks to the humiliating 120-106 loss they suffered to the post-Luka Mavericks on Wednesday night, bringing an end to a season in which the Kings went 40-42, fired their coach, and traded their best player. A casual observer tuning into last night’s game, checking in on the Kings for maybe the first time all season, would have been confronted with some alarming developments: DeMar DeRozan needed 28 shots to score his 33 points; Domantas Sabonis could muster only 11 points while committing five turnovers; Zach LaVine is on this team now.
This is not how things were supposed to go. Just two seasons ago, the Kings won 48 games and claimed the Western Conference’s third seed. They accomplished that feat by rolling out one of the more dynamic and entertaining offenses in the league, piloted by Sabonis and De’Aaron Fox. They had a well-respected coach in Mike Brown, and young players with room to grow. The Kings looked, for the first time in a long time, like a competent franchise, one with a future ahead of it. Even that season ending with a first-round loss to the Warriors couldn’t put a damper on things—the beam was lit.
How does a team with a good coach and a good young core get from there to here in just two seasons? I suppose it starts with the front office’s reaction to the regression of 2023–24, which was represented by just two fewer regular-season wins, but saw the Kings drop to ninth place and miss the playoffs in a much more competitive conference. The organization’s chosen solution to this problem was swapping Harrison Barnes for DeMar DeRozan, an idiosyncratic faux-star who does one thing very well—hit mid-range shots over increasingly frustrated defenders in isolation—and not much else. DeRozan got his numbers this year, but it was immediately clear that he was not a fit. The Kings’ whirring, DHO-based offense was already being squeezed by savvier defenses, and DeRozan’s iso-heavy preferences only made things worse.
It only took a couple weeks of bad basketball for the organizational incompetence to return. Brown was hastily and confusingly fired—he had just signed a three-year extension in the summer—and an agitated Fox was quickly identified as the most poachable star in the league. Before even taking a breath to consider if moving on from their best player was a good idea, the Kings panic-traded him in a three-team deal that brought in LaVine and some first-round picks. The Kings now have two highly paid and deeply flawed perimeter players who both want to shoot the ball as much as possible, a big man who can’t really do much if he’s not allowed to be the offensive hub, and not a whole lot else. You look at this team, and you see five more seasons of play-in tournaments.
Maybe the Kings had a little too much dip on their chip following that third-place finish in 2022–23, and maybe the following season’s step back was a sign that some fundamental changes needed to be made. Where the Kings were a year or two ago matters less than where they ended up, which is nowhere. This is a team that now lives in a prison it built for itself, well outside of serious contention but not flexible enough to start over. DeRozan and LaVine are both signed through 2027, and they’ve each flopped in too many cities at this point to present as desirable trade targets. Sabonis has a $186 million extension that runs through 2028, and his value is only going to steadily decrease the longer he plays on a roster that’s not designed to disguise his limitations. These guys aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, which means the Kings aren’t, either.
Pity the GM tasked with getting the Kings out of this mess. They need a new one of those, by the way. Right after last night’s loss, they fired theirs.