Imagine for a moment that you are the Sacramento Kings. I know, scary, right?
No NBA team has lost more games than the Kings. They’ve been the standard-bearers of suck for much of my lifetime. In the past 20 seasons, Sacramento has only appeared in the playoffs a single time (more on this team later).
Want to know about a record that seems almost impossible to set? Can you think of a way for a team to lose 43 (!!!) straight road games? No need, the Kings already found a solution to that problem. For a year—almost to the day—Sacramento didn’t win a road game from 1990-1991.
They’ve had good players over the last 20 years. DeMarcus Cousins was an excellent and skilled center, and Tyreke Evans won Rookie of the Year. But there was always some sort of issue with a coach, the front office, a player, or any combination of them.
Vivek Ranadivé feels impossible not to like, but his tenure as owner of the Kings has been plagued by poor front office decisions. For example, (and sorry Kings fans) in the 2018 draft, Sacramento used their No. 2 overall pick to select Marvin Bagley III, instead of Luka Doncic. It seemed at least semi-defensible at the time, but now, the pick is horrendous. Bagley has enjoyed a bit of a career resurgence this year but is a fraction of the player that Doncic is.
There have been flashes of success. That lone playoff appearance was a special one. In 2022-2023, the Kings went 48-34 and earned the 3-seed in the Western Conference. It was Mike Brown’s first season with the team, and he orchestrated a complete turnaround, eventually winning the Coach of the Year award. Brown installed a lethal offensive gameplan which propelled the Knicks to the best scoring offense in the league.
Domantas Sabonis was acquired around the trade deadline the season prior, and he and De’Aaron Fox, who was now developing into the dangerous guard that he projected to be coming out of Kentucky, formed a formidable partnership. There was talent around these two stars as well. Malik Monk was a flamethrower off the bench, Kevin Huerter topped 40% from beyond the arc, and Harrison Barnes brought a veteran, championship-pedigree to the team. The forever dysfunctional and incompetent Sacramento front office had finally built a team that could compete.
An important aspect of the 2023 Kings season to mention is that there was complete and total fan buy in. Just look at the crowd pop to this Huerter game-winner.
This was a fanbase that needed this. They’d suffered through so much losing for so long. After wins, the Kings would “Light the Beam,” a tradition where Kings players would smack a button and illuminate a massive purple beacon outside the arena.
They faced off against the Golden State Warriors in round one. The Warriors were coming off a championship the year before—Brown’s previous stop as an associate head coach. There was legitimate buzz that the Kings could shake off their history and win the series. The series went to Game 7, which was played in Sacramento, but the Kings were on the wrong end of a Steph Curry masterclass. Curry finished with 50 points and sent Sacramento packing.
You’d think that this was just a minor setback for the Kings, but it was the beginning of the end. They missed the playoffs the next year and after starting 13-18 in the 2024-2025 season, Brown was fired. He’d been the Coach of the Year just two seasons before.
It was here where the Kings’ cracks started showing. The trade to acquire Sabonis required them to give up Tyrese Haliburton, who turned into a singular star for the Indiana Pacers and led them to the Eastern Conference Finals, then the NBA Finals.
The development of young players like Keegan Murray began to slow. Fox was traded during the last trade deadline to the San Antonio Spurs. The Kings have made a flurry of confounding moves. They acquired both Demar DeRozan and Zach Lavine from the Chicago Bulls in separate trades. Neither deal made much sense in the moment, and makes even less sense now.
The current roster is a mishmash of players and skillsets. And now Kings fans must watch an NBA Finals where one team features Barnes and Fox, and the other is coached by Brown. It probably doesn’t help that Fox hit a clutch jumper to seal Game 3 for San Antonio either.
The Kings have the seventh overall pick in this year’s draft. They missed out on the excellent top 4, but with how loaded this draft is, there is plenty of talent left in the lottery. The issue will be whether Sacramento chooses wisely.
