Rebuild Retrospective: Sacramento Kings
Is there more? Maybe. If not? That's okay, too
“Is this really all there is?”
“What else ought there be?”
-The Green Knight (2021)
Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, the Sacramento Kings defied all convention in the worst ways possible.
An NBA rebuild usually takes about six years. If the rebuilding franchise still isn’t competing at a high level after those years, the rebuild probably needs a reset. But even if things do crash and burn, the franchise should at least, by this point, have some draft capital stored up or maybe a few promising young players on its roster to build around— or trade to jumpstart the next rebuild.
You’ll quickly learn that the Sacramento Kings are not like other teams. Somehow, for about 15 years, the Kings just… never… got…. better…. at all. The franchise screwed up approximately 90% of its draft picks for over a decade, almost betrayed one of the league’s most loyal fanbases by leaving town, never made any tangible progress in building its roster, never operated with clear intent, won the fewest games in the NBA during the 2010s, and was once (aptly) nicknamed basketball hell by a former player.
Miraculously, if we fast forward to current day, the Kings are pretty good! What the hell!
They may have gotten here by accident, but fuck it, Kings fans deserve a happy accident or three at this point. Let’s talk about how we got here (I’m still figuring that out) and what’s coming next (I have no idea.)
What I am sure of, though, is this will be the strangest Rebuild Retrospective yet. Strap in.
I. Enjoy the Good Times
For most of these pieces, I don’t have to reach too far back in the history books when I’m marking the beginning of a franchise’s rebuild. But like I said, the Kings refuse to conform to societal norms, so for this RR, we must reluctantly rewind to George W. Bush’s America in the year of our lord 2002.
It’s game six of the 2002 Western Conference Finals. I won’t regale you with specifics about this series between the Kings and in-state rival (and defending NBA champions) Los Angeles Lakers, but when the referees have a highlight reel… something went awry. For lack of a better term, the Kings got hosed in this series. They lost 4-3 in seven games, but maybe they never had a chance.
I’m not of the mind that the NBA is rigged, bro but if you want to sell me on the league having a vested interest in who advances in a playoff series… this is probably the series to use as an example.
Sorry, I said I wouldn’t get into it. (But it was bad.)
This series hurts even more knowing the 2001-2002 Kings were great. They won 61 games, finished first in the West, had the league’s best Net Rating, and produced two All-Stars in Chris Webber and Peja Stojakovic. So they weren’t just happy to be in the WCF, they rightfully thought they could win it all.
That obviously didn’t happen, though there was reason for optimism; the Kings would return most of their core and run it back for years to come. And those following years were good. They included numerous heartbreaks, but were good nonetheless. Sacramento topped the Western Conference again in 2002-2003, finishing 59-24… only to suffer a devastating second-round loss to the Mavericks in the playoffs. Then another devastating second-round loss the next season. Then first-round exits in 2005 and 2006. The playoff losses piled up, but in the end, the early 2000s were a success in Sacramento. To this day, these Kings are remembered fondly.
After the 2005-2006 season, head coach Rick Adelman’s contract expired and the Kings elected to let him walk. Adelman led the Kings to the postseason each season of his eight-year tenure but at the time, this move made sense; things fizzled out and Sacramento was heading in a new direction.
Turns out that direction was down to the fucking dregs. For a long, long time.
II. Save the Kings
In a minute, we’ll talk about the Kings basketball product after Adelman’s departure. First, we’re going to leap forward a few years to a multi-year era when an entire city held its breath.
While the on-court product was abysmal, the off-court news surrounding the Kings in these years was even worse, because it involved whether the Sacramento Kings would continue to exist. Anaheim, Virginia Beach, and Seattle were a few of the cities thought of as leaders to steal the Kings from Sacramento, with Seattle getting the closest. Of course Seattle deserves an NBA team after its own franchise, the Sonics, were stolen and moved to Oklahoma City, but… not like this.
I’ve made my opinion on owners and ownership groups moving teams pretty clear, and though what almost happened to the Kings in the early 2010s is a little different than other relocation efforts, it still boils down to super-rich ghouls all trying to prove that they’re richer than each other and snatch power wherever there’s power to have.
Almost, Woj.
Notable sweaty freak Steve Ballmer and hedge fund jerkoff Chris Hansen (no relation to Man of the People and To Catch a Predator Chris Hansen) were in charge of trying to fuck Sacramento out of an NBA team, and they almost succeeded— they actually got close enough to where the Kings broadcasters were crying on TV at the prospect of the team moving.
But, of course, relocation efforts fell (just) short, and the “good” rich guys won in the end. Some dude named Ron Burlke, along with the founder of 24 Hour Fitness and software billionaire Vivek Ranadive (remember this name) were the three major investors in the team, backing an effort to build a new stadium in Sacramento. They did enough— along with then-Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson— to keep the Kings in Sac Town.
III. The Dark Ages
Okay, so the Kings are staying in Sacramento. That is objectively good news!
What’s not good news is that, after Rick Adelman’s departure, on the court, the Kings u hhhhh sucked.
Eric Musselman was the coach for one season after Adelman left. It was not memorable. Unless you’re Vitaly Potapenko, who played the final three games of his NBA career that season. If you’re him, it was probably memorable.
Then Reggie Theus took over and things got worse. Then Kenny Natt, Paul Westphal, and Keith Smart got tries. Not good. From 2006 to 2013, the Kings went 187-371. Nasty stuff. Marcus Thornton and Tyreke Evans led these Kings teams, which (with all due respect to those players, who ironically didn’t get nearly enough respect during their careers) is not a formula for great success.
There was a single bright spot during these brutal years: the emergence of Kings 2010 first-round draft pick DeMarcus Cousins. He started as a powerful but raw and sometimes out of control center, and over the years developed into one of the most graceful, dominant, well-rounded forces in the NBA. There were multiple times throughout the 2010s when DeMarcus Cousins was at least a top three center in the NBA.
Cousins was treated pretty unfairly by the media and was never given formidable talent around him in Sacramento, causing him to largely be remembered as a talented player who never won anything. Misunderstood as a player and a person, Cousins got a pretty raw deal throughout his NBA career. He is in the Kings all-time top 10 for points, rebounds, and blocks.
The reason that Cousins never had a talented supporting cast? Well, the Kings had five top 10 draft picks from 2011 to 2016, and those picks were used on Jimmer Fredette, Thomas Robinson, Ben Mclemore, Nik Stauskas, and Willie Cauley-Stein. Welcome To Hell.
Say what you will about Hobo Johnson, but this is a pretty concise summary of it all…
We’re not that bad, we’re just different. We took Robinson instead of Lillard, FUCK!
Building an NBA team is hard. Drafting good players is hard. I don’t expect teams to get every pick right, because the draft, even with all the data we have available to us, is still mostly a crapshoot.
But holy shit, the ineptitude that Sacramento’s front office showed during draft process after draft process in the 2010s needs to be studied by the world’s greatest scientists because it transcends normal poor team-building. In a perverse way, getting this many picks wrong is more impressive than getting most of them right. Other NBA franchises should have looked at the Kings draft board every year, flipped it upside down, and selected whoever was at the top. That probably would have procured a Finals-caliber team.
The Kings, of course, struggled to improve as a team during these years, winning 24, 22, 28, 28, 29, 33, 32, and 27 games from 2010 to 2016. The coaching carousel continued to turn while the Kings kept unloading AK-47 clips into their own feet. There was no progress being made toward being a contender, and no signs from the front office that a full tear-down was coming soon— even though it felt like things were pretty much torn down already.
Every time things going good or having a laugh
Have to remember God's a hater-billy woods
At the start of this piece, I said that a normal NBA rebuild takes five to six years. Let’s check in on this Kings rebuild.
It’s now 2016, and we’re ten years removed from Rick Adelman leaving the Kings head coaching position. A full decade! In that decade, the Kings have made the playoffs zero times (which is borderline unthinkable in a league where over 50% of teams make the playoffs every year) gone through eight head coaches, signed zero marquee free agents, and have passed on drafting players like Damian Lillard, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Devin Booker for guys who will yield a total of zero All-Star appearances in their careers (and the biggest draft mistake hasn’t even happened yet.) I’m not blaming these players! They didn’t live up to expectations, but they also got drafted by the Kings. They might have been doomed from the start.
Remember Vivek Ranadive? The “good rich guy” from earlier? Well, he’s making a lot of the decisions for the Kings now, and fucking up more than anyone else would be allowed to fuck up at their job, but that’s a perk of having more money than most countries, I suppose.
I’ve said it before, but maybe rich people who buy basketball teams should let the people who know things about basketball make the basketball decisions. I dunno. Maybe the Kings are an exception to this rule too, because as of 2015, the general manager was Vlade Divac (who knows basketball) and he fucked up almost as much as Vivek did.
To make things worse, Sacramento’s trajectory is definitely not headed upward. DeMarcus Cousins, the team’s lone high-level player of the 2010s, is now a New Orleans Pelican. The team’s draft history doesn’t inspire hope that the team will find a star that way, and the lack of success for ten years makes Sacramento an impossible sell for free agents. This is rock bottom, and it’s where Sacramento is (somehow) going to stay for many more years still. It’s a roller coaster that keeps going down, defying all laws of physics and chance and statistics.
One young man, currently in the state of Kentucky, is coming to save everything. It won’t be obvious at first, but trust me.
IV: Even a Broken Clock…
…gets a draft pick right every once in a while.
But hey, if you’re only gonna get one right, you might as well get it really right. In 2017, Sacramento selected De’Aaron Fox from the University of Kentucky with the fifth pick in the NBA Draft.
Maybe things literally couldn’t have gotten worse, so they had to get better for the Kings. Maybe the Basketball Gods have an ounce of empathy left. Maybe this was a sick joke by those Gods for what is to come in the next draft. Maybe California was hit with an earthquake when Sacramento’s front office threw a dart at pictures of draft prospects so it accidentally hit one with real potential. Who knows why the franchise got this pick right, but it did.
Pretty quickly, Fox showed he was an NBA player. He became the fastest player in the NBA instantly, and while there were pretty vital areas of his game that would need overhauling if he wanted to put himself on star track, the talent translated immediately.
So, yeah, Sacramento is still floating in a shapeless void at this point. But with De’Aaron Fox, there’s at least a teaspoon of hope on the far, far horizon.
And in May of 2018, the Kings got… lucky?
Yes! The Kings got lucky! They won the second overall pick in the 2018 NBA Draft, an incredible asset in a draft ripe with franchise-changing talent.
Sacramento is in a dream position here, with a chance to pair its young budding star with another franchise cornerstone. What will GM Vlade Divac and Vivek Ranadive do?
V: No, NO, NO!!!!!!
Yeah…
Gatling gun directly into their own kneecaps.
VI: Screw It, All In
By normal NBA standards, the 2018-19 season wasn’t great for the Kings, who went 39-43. But as we know, the Kings don’t operate by normal NBA standards. So almost 40 wins… that’s prettttty good! The team’s best season in over a decade, actually. A sad statistic perhaps, but success is seldom linear. De’Aaron Fox finished third in Most Improved Player voting, and by now Kings fans were pretty sure they had a star.
Then 2019-20 was a step back as the Kings went 31-41. They posted the same record the next season.
Oh lord, here we go again. Here we go with the Kings stumbling into exactly one massively talented player, then being wholly unable to surround him with other good players year after year until he inevitably leaves.
Oh shit… okay maybe this time is different.
There’s something poetic (ironic?) about Sacramento sandwiching the worst draft pick in franchise history with possibly the two best draft picks in franchise history. In 2020, three years after selecting De’Aaron Fox, the Kings selected Tyrese Haliburton, a point guard from Iowa State, with the 12th overall pick.
Right off the bat, two things were obvious; 1) Tyrese Haliburton will be very good for a very long time and 2) He and De’Aaron Fox are probably never going to work as a backcourt.
What’s more Kings-like than finally hitting on two picks… only to realize they don’t play particularly well together?
I have to give the Kings front office some credit here (and only here) because it realized, like the rest of us, that Haliburton and Fox was a bit clunky as a backcourt. This was obvious to us common folk, but plenty of things seemed obvious that still went over the heads of the Kings top brass, so I won’t take this for granted.
And once the franchise realized that each part of its backcourt duo needed their own team to break through into stardom, it went star hunting.
Found one! Just maybe not where you think. Because when a player spends their career in a small market, their perception in NBA circles becomes skewed because— and I don’t want to frighten anyone here— most people aren’t watching Pacers games. But Sacramento zeroed in on a star from Indiana nonetheless.
Anytime the Kings make a big move, the public is quick to nitpick just how senseless the move is, so as soon as the Kings traded Tyrese Haliburton for Pacers power forward Domantas Sabonis, the basketball world started writing Sacramento’s obituaries for this trade.
“They traded the, I guess, the future for the present, but it just doesn’t really make that much sense.” -The Ringer
I should say here that, on its face, trading Tyrese Haliburton— who seemed to enjoy playing in Sacramento— is a little nuts, and at the time surely felt like a move that we’d look back on a decade later and say well, yeah that was dumb all along. I get that aspect of it all, especially if the front office didn’t tell him that he could realistically get traded, and it seems like they didn’t. That’s fucked up.
Still, acting like Sacramento was receiving some geriatric power forward on the last legs of his career was always a weird way to view this trade. Here’s who Sacramento got in Sabonis: a 25 year-old, two-time All Star who had become one of the most well-rounded players in the NBA and was still developing into the second-best passing center in the modern NBA. You could do worse! A lot worse!
This trade happened mid-season and the Kings didn’t immediately turn into a contender in the 15 games that Sabonis played with them in 2021-22, which didn’t help the public perception of this trade at all. Rational? No! But NBA fans never claimed to be that.
The real test would happen the next year, in 2022-23, after the Kings have a summer to build a roster around Fox and their newest acquisition.
VII: Holy Shit It’s Working / Beam Team
The Kings summer 2022 was busy. Sacramento hired veteran coach Mike Brown to lead the team, then signed shooting guard Malik Monk who was coming off the best season of his career in Los Angeles. It also traded for Atlanta sharpshooter Kevin Huerter and drafted Iowa State’s Keegan Murray fourth overall in the 2022 draft. Suddenly, a middling (at best) roster had been thoroughly revamped and appeared more talented than any other Kings roster from the previous decade-plus. Unfamiliar feelings of hope began to spread like spring lupines over the Kings typically downtrodden fan base.
Then they started the season 0-4.
But then the Kings beat Miami at home for their first win of the season, traded a few wins and losses, then rattled off seven wins in a row, and before anyone knew it, the Kings were 10-6. The offense through 1/5 of the season was transcendent; Kevin Huerter looked like a brand-new player, shooting threes at an all-time clip. Rookie Keegan Murray was already making an impact, Malik Monk was bringing energy and playmaking off the bench, and Fox + Sabonis clicked hard. Mike Brown’s team was cool. The Sacramento Kings: COOL. What a world.
The Kings posted some record-setting early-season offensive numbers. This happens often as every team in the league is trying to solidify an identity, and those numbers usually come back to Earth throughout the season. But the Kings offensive numbers never really came back down to Earth. The 2022-23 Kings had the best offensive rating in the NBA. They beat teams with a constant barrage of smart, tactical offense. A dizzying mix of Fox’s speed, Sabonis’ smarts and everyone’s shooting helped this team sprint past opponents. If one moment from the 2022-23 season encapsulates everything this team was about, this might be the moment:
Don’t get your eyes checked. The Kings beat the Clippers 176-175 in 2OT, the second-highest scoring game in NBA history. Sacramento was down 145-131 (lol) with 4:25 left in the fourth quarter, but a Fox & Sabonis blitz in the final minutes forced OT, then double OT, until the Kings finally, mercifully, came out on top. I was rooting for a third OT, but this is fine too.
Sacramento finished the season 48-34, the best Kings season since 2002. And… PLAYOFFS!
I don’t think I’ve emphasized enough just how shocking a 16-year playoff drought is in the NBA. There are 30 teams in the league and 16 of them make the postseason each year. It’s not uncommon to see teams make the playoffs by accident during years they were trying to be bad. Sacramento’s playoff drought being old enough to get a US driver’s license is appalling.
But now it’s over, and it officially ended when the Kings beat the Blazers by 40 in Portland as a chorus of “Light the Beam” floated through Moda Center.
Oh right, the damn beam.
Being a 48-win team one season and a 46-win team the next season (which the Kings were in 2023-24) isn’t enough achievement for a team to be remembered in the crowded annals of NBA history. Having a giant laser that shoots out of the top of its stadium into the night sky after every win is absolutely enough, however. And the Kings have that.
A team having '“thing” is pretty rare in the NBA, a league that— for some reason— strives to be as corporate as possible, so the Kings having something this cool and harmless and widely loved is damn awesome. The Beam started during the 2022-23 season, continued last season, and (hopefully) continues for as long as the Sacramento Kings exist. Kings fans, who are immensely loyal, take over opposing stadiums in the final minutes of games the Kings are winning with “Light The Beam” chants and it’s beautiful every time. When the Kings play at home, the chant is loud enough to cave in the ceiling at Golden 1 Center.
There’s no controversy surrounding the beam. It’s not polarizing. It doesn’t divide the people of Sacramento. The Beam unites. I can’t say that about much else.
Oh, also, the Kings lost to the Warriors in the first round of the playoffs that year. Whatever.
VIII: Reinforcements
There comes a point in a team’s rebuild where good isn’t satisfying anymore. The Kings have been good for the past two seasons. A third year of “good” wouldn’t bring the same catharsis as the first two. This isn’t greed— I will never call Kings fans greedy. Rather, it’s the natural progression of team building in the NBA. When a team evolves from bad to good, fans become hungry for that next evolution— the hardest evolution— to great.
“Good is the enemy of great”
-Kings head coach Mike Brown
That evolution usually comes via free agency or a trade, two things the Kings have been unable to pull off successfully until about two years ago. Free agents haven’t wanted to sign with Sacramento because of… well, everything you just read… and trades have been tough to come by because — outside of Tyrese Haliburton — the Kings haven’t had many players that other teams covet.
But times are changing, old man! The Kings are a destination now, enough so that they just lured in a six-time All-Star.
I don’t know if the Kings just became great. The fit is a little wonky, and more scoring might not be exactly what Sacramento needs. Regardless, I can’t fault the effort (and I love the trade, fit be damned.) Everyone say hi to DeMar DeRozan, Sacramento King.
IX: And Then What?
Last season, the Sacramento Kings vanquished the Golden State Warriors in the Play-In Tournament, and, with the news breaking of Klay Thompson signing in Dallas, effectively ended the Warriors dynasty. I don’t think this single game (plus the exhilarating seven-game series the Kings and Warriors played the year before) will be the peak of these Sacramento Kings. DeRozan raises Sacramento’s floor considerably, giving the team a real third scoring option and another player who is pure nails in the fourth quarter. DeRozan + De’Aaron in the fourth quarter will be so much fun. Plus, the team was (somewhat surprisingly) able to bring back Malik Monk on a four-year deal, and Keegan Murray, who is 23 years old, should continue to improve as he grows into his prime.
The front office, meanwhile, is as stable as it has been in at least my entire life. Monte McNair has been the GM since 2020, and though he hasn’t been perfect, he’s built a balanced, talented, competitive team in Sacramento. McNair won Executive of the Year in 2022-23 because of the work he’s done, which also includes the hiring of Mike Brown, the first-ever unanimous winner of NBA Coach of the Year. Seeing how the Kings operated before McNair was hired versus how they operate with him at the helm is like looking at two completely different franchises. The Kings aren’t a joke anymore; the days of Sacramento being a punching bag on the court and a laughingstock off of it are long gone.
I’m confident the Kings will win a playoff series in the next two seasons. If they don’t? If we’ve already seen the peak of this Kings team? Maybe that’s okay, too. It’ll hurt, to be sure, if we don’t see these Kings soar any higher after how thrilling they’ve been the past two years. But Domantas Sabonis, De’Aaron Fox, Malik Monk, Mike Brown, and everyone else who makes up these Kings— the Light the Beam Kings— have already slayed enough of Sacramento’s demons to call this era a success just like the early 2000s Kings were. And these demons had some fight. These demons spanned nearly two decades, lots of head coaches, a lot of head-scratching decisions and a lot of losing.
I don’t know what comes next. Maybe it’s another decade and a half of pain. God’s a hater, after all. But the sense of dread that has accompanied cheering for the Sacramento Kings in every season post-2004 has, at least temporarily, disappeared. Breathe easy, Kings fans. You’re in the good times again.
Thanks for reading the newest installment of Rebuild Retrospective. If you enjoyed, I have great news: I’ve done the same thing for other teams! You can read those below. If you didn’t enjoy, then we must have a joust. I’ll meet you at City Hall in Philadelphia tomorrow at high noon. Bring your own lance.
What I’m Listening To: Ezra Feinberg
Very nice, very serene.
Hobo Johnson huh