After one season as a promising team on the rise, the Sacramento Kings are struggling to recapture the same joy that animated them last year and the future no longer seems quite as bright.
The NBA’s regular season can sometimes seem like a bit of a slog. It is several months long, the list of contenders is often short, and the proverbial wheat often separates from the proverbial chaff quite quickly. After that happens, it’s just a long wait until the playoffs and games of real consequence start up. There’s something nice about surprise and novelty in general, but in the midst of a six-month regular season, it brings on an extra joy, and that’s why the Sacramento Kings were such an unexpected delight last season.
Very few analysts expected the Kings to be a fun team to watch, let alone one that would be in contention for a playoff spot until the tail end of the season. Even looking back, it still kind of feels surprising, almost like they built a young and exciting team by accident, getting the desired result despite doing so much wrong in the process.
But the development of De’Aaron Fox and Buddy Hield, alongside a solid rookie season by Marvin Bagley III and consistently solid years from Bogdan Bogdanovic, Yogi Ferrell, Willie Cauley-Stein, and Justin Jackson, made them a team that many, myself included, sought out on League Pass night after night. Looking at this season, there are many reasons to wonder if expecting the Kings to be similarly successful and delightful is misguided.
It’s not that the Kings got much worse this offseason — though the loss of Willie Cauley-Stein and Justin Jackson will hurt them — but that they failed to keep pace with the arms race happening around them. This offseason, the LA Clippers, Los Angeles Lakers and Utah Jazz all took big steps to improve their teams while other teams at the margins such as the Dallas Mavericks and New Orleans Pelicans are also looking to make substantial progress over last season. With nearly every game in the stacked West likely to be a dogfight, it would not be shocking for the Kings to finish significantly lower in the standings even if they are just as good as last year.
The problem with something new happening is that novelty quickly becomes the norm, and fans begin anticipating the next surprising team or player to be awed by. For the Kings to merely be fun and fight for a playoff spot again will be seen as a disappointment even though, honestly, that’s exactly what should be expected and hoped for. There’s already been a lot of upheaval from last season that, combined with higher expectations, may disrupt the carefree atmosphere that made them so charming last year.
As soon as the season ended, the team parted ways with head coach Dave Joerger, despite the Kings’ progress, in order to hire Luke Walton, who was quickly accused of sexual assault by a former broadcasting colleague. While the allegations were dismissed as not having a “sufficient basis to support” them, it still felt like the whole thing was glossed over perfunctorily, as if the league and team just wanted the whole thing to go away as quickly as possible (which I’m sure they did). Regardless, these allegations will make celebrating any potential success by the Kings feel much grosser than it would have otherwise as they indict not only Walton himself, but the team and the league as a whole for not taking such allegations as seriously as they demand.
Also, apart from any off-court issues, Luke Walton just may not be that good of a coach. While it’s too soon to draw any definite conclusions, the fact that Brandon Ingram and Lonzo Ball look revitalized in New Orleans calls Walton’s player development skills into question. It’s worth noting that his only actual success as a head coach so far occurred as an interim coach taking over the 2015-16 Golden State Warriors, who were pretty much the definition of a well-oiled machine. Perhaps Walton is not the man a team should be looking to in the hopes of building a winner, and early returns seem to indicate the Kings may have set themselves back quite a bit by hiring him.
There was also the jockeying for a new contract by Buddy Hield, who recently signed a four-year extension after calling the team’s first offer “insulting.” While locking up Hield for what should be his prime is a definite win for the franchise, the struggle to do so smoothly reveals the inherent difficulties that come with not only keeping a promising young core together, but content.
More worrisome financially is the equally pricey extension they offered to the less valuable Harrison Barnes this offseason, which reduces the team’s flexibility and will make building around Fox and Hield, the team’s most obvious building blocks and potential stars, all the more difficult. That’s the problem with the feeling that the Kings lucked their way into being a fun and potential-filled team: It’s much harder to find sustained success by accident.
If Sacramento does take another leap this season, it will be due to the continued progress of Fox, Hield and Bagley, who are the team’s three most promising players, the ones with true star potential. They clearly have youth on their side; the question is whether the Kings will be patient enough to wait enough for these players to more fully come into their own.
Entering the season, Fox is just 21 while Bagley is only 20. Meanwhile, the two players they have the most money committed to moving forward are Harrison Barnes and Hield, who are 27 and 26, respectively. Will the Kings be content to wait out the rest of the Western Conference powers who expect to be contenders this year while they develop their young players, or will they hand out more questionable contracts as they did for Barnes in the hopes of making immediate improvements and finally ending their extended playoff drought?
While desperation from management to return to the postseason is completely understandable, it may be the more prudent choice to be patient and content with the fact that, in a few years, Fox and Hield could be one of the best duos in the league (even though placing such expectations upon them to be so now would be foolhardy). Of course, if the Kings do opt for patience and the avoidance of attempted easy fixes, it would be bucking a very long pattern.
As the new season begins, the surprising enjoyability of the young Kings is already old news. The Pelicans, Mavericks and Atlanta Hawks have supplanted them as the presumptive League Pass darlings and teams of the future, leaving Sacramento once again as a bit of a footnote to the rest of the league’s happenings. The Kings were not able to have a long honeymoon savoring their development and relative success — instead of a nice Hawaiian getaway, it was more like a rushed weekend at Niagara Falls — and now have to fight for the hearts and eyes of NBA viewers again.
The new season has begun about as poorly as possible for Sacramento, which has lost its first four games by a combined 78 points. The Kings also have the second-worst offense and 27th-ranked defense in the league one week in, and to add injury to insult, Bagley will be out for the next several weeks as he recovers from a fractured thumb. Though the Kings have 78 games to turn things around, reasons for optimism seem to already be evaporating. It will be a long and uphill battle for this long-suffering franchise, and while having good young players like De’Aaron Fox and Buddy Hield certainly helps, it may still not be enough.