The Sacramento Kings are stuck in the past in more ways than one

We’ve all spent the past eight months or so joking about how the Sacramento Kings have turned into the Chicago Bulls of the early 2020s. DeMar DeRozan. Zach LaVine. Domantas Sabonis in the Nikola Vučević slot. The ambition that seemingly didn’t extend beyond the Play-In Tournament. It was an easy joke. Wednesday dispelled it, and not in a good way.

The still-undefeated Bulls hosted the Kings on Wednesday and handed them a 126-113 defeat. It was Chicago’s fourth win of the season and Sacramento’s fourth loss, and it demonstrated a pretty sobering truth for the moribund Kings: even the lowly Bulls have left them in the dust. 

The Bulls, long mocked as the NBA‘s most stagnant franchise, has managed to grow, to evolve into a reasonably competitive team with a distinct, modern identity. They rank third in the NBA in passes per game and seventh in pace. Their 3-point volume is down, but it’s reasonable to assume it will rise back up after they ranked fifth in 3-point attempt rate last season. Vučević is the last of the old guard still standing. The team has otherwise been passed down to the next generation. Literally every other player who has stepped on the floor for them this season has been 27 or younger.

But the Kings? The Kings look like a team an 11-year-old built in NBA 2K18 without realizing that newer editions have been published in each subsequent season. On Wednesday, Sacramento started Sabonis, three former All-Star guards that are all in their 30s (Zach LaVine, DeMar DeRozan and Russell Westbrook) and a fourth guard in his 30s, Dennis Schröder, whom they signed to a three-year deal this offseason because they didn’t feel they had enough at point guard. You’ll be shocked to hear that The Expandables here are playing a brand of basketball not seen since the oldest of these big names were in their heyday.

Sacramento’s shot-selection is abhorrent. The Kings rank 22nd in restricted-area field goal attempts per game, 27th in 3-point attempt rate and 29th in free-throw attempt rate as of Thursday. The good news is that they lead the league in mid-range attempts with 15.6 of them per game. No team has attempted that many mid-range shots per game since … the 2022-23 Chicago Bulls. They make the sixth-fewest passes in the NBA and play at a below-average pace. Put all of this together, and, unsurprisingly, the Kings have the NBA’s fifth-worst offense so far this season.

For the time being, there doesn’t seem to be much hope in fixing this through a trade. They spent the offseason trying to move Malik Monk in order to create more minutes for a Westbrook signing. They couldn’t find a deal, shrugged, and signed Westbrook anyway. Less than a year after making him the focal point in their return in the De’Aaron Fox trade, the Kings are seemingly seeing a nonexistent market for Zach LaVine. “I can’t tell you one team, with any certainty, that’s actively monitoring Zach LaVine with even the remote possibility of saying, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’ Maybe that team exists — I’m just not aware of it,” The Athletic’s Sam Amick said on The Carmichael Dave Show.

The eventual return of Keegan Murray will help. He’s the only young player this organization seems to fully trust. Like Monk, the Kings spent the summer seemingly shopping 2024 first-round pick Devin Carter, who has played just 24 minutes thus far this season. Promising 2025 pick Nique Clifford has played only 24. Keon Ellis is the best defender on the roster and one of the few non-ball-dominant offensive players they have. You’d think the role player with a career 42.7% 3-point percentage would be a great fit on this roster full of legacy ball-handlers, but he’s played fewer minutes and started fewer games than Westbrook, whom they signed two weeks ago.

Who exactly this roster construction was meant to satisfy is unclear. Perhaps you could call it a subtle tank. The implication of taking LaVine back in the Fox deal rather than maximizing the return in terms of picks and youth is that ownership wanted to remain competitive. The front office has since turned over, with Scott Perry now at the helm. The charitable explanation here is that this is a roster that is meant to look competitive — we have all of these former All-Stars! — without actually being that competitive. If you can’t tank properly by trading the older players and committing to the younger ones, maybe this is the next best approach.

That’s a bit too galaxy-brained for what’s happening here. Why commit a three-year contract to Schröder in that case when you simply could have signed Westbrook for the minimum in July? The Jonathan Kuminga rumors likely dispel this idea as well. You don’t offer first-round picks in trades, even protected ones, when any part of you wants to be bad. Being tankably bad around Sabonis and DeRozan, two of the NBA’s best floor-raisers just given their durability and the stable ways in which they tend to score, is too difficult to go out and add long-term core pieces in the process. The Kings may wind up with a high draft pick. They’re the Kings, they do so frequently. But that doesn’t seem to have been the intent.

Here’s the sadder, and the likelier, explanation. A few years ago, the Kings had what the Bulls have. An even better version of it, in fact. Remember the Beam Team? That just happened! The 2022-23 Kings had what was, to that point, the most efficient offense in NBA history. It was exactly as fun to watch as you remember. They ranked fourth in passes per game, fifth in 3-point attempt rate, ninth in free throw attempt rate and 12th in pace. The ball flew around. Nobody could stay in front of Fox. Had he not hurt his finger in the playoffs, Sacramento might have beaten the Warriors and made a real playoff run.

That’s not what happened. They lost to Golden State. A year later, they slipped by a paltry two wins, but in a tighter Western Conference, that cost them six seeds in a drop from No. 3 to No. 9. Within a year, the coach was gone and that team had fallen apart. The scattered pieces of it are thriving elsewhere. Kevin Huerter plays for the Bulls, one of the league’s last remaining unbeaten teams, and Fox and Harrison Barnes separately made their way to San Antonio, another of those four teams that still haven’t lost. Davion Mitchell is the starting point guard for Miami’s No. 7 ranked offense. Mike Brown is implementing a lot of what made those Kings so successful in New York for a Knicks team that badly needed the refresh. Thus far under his watch, the Knicks have jumped from 28th to fourth in 3-point attempt rate and 18th to fifth in passes per game. Meanwhile, the last remaining pillar of that team has been marginalized. Sabonis is averaging 68.3 touches, 11.5 shots and 3.3 assists per game thus far this season. All three are lows for him since joining the Kings.

The Kings were so bad for so long that the moment they tasted a shred of success, they grew terrified of losing it. When they had cap space in 2023 that they could have used to improve, they spent it prematurely renegotiating and extending Sabonis in order to keep a core player happy. When they slipped from No. 3 to No. 9, ownership panicked, had tense negotiations with a unanimous Coach of the Year before ultimately firing him months later. He was replaced by Doug Christie, an inexperienced former Kings player. The last inexperienced former Kings player they hired into a key role was Vlade Divac as their top basketball executive. He never reached the playoffs as a general manager, and Sacramento only ended its playoff drought when replacing him with a more traditional hire in Monte McNair. As this happened, the team engineered the acquisition of DeRozan, a big name whose on-ball skill set and limitations as a shooter and defender made his poor fit with the existing roster somewhat obvious. 

All of this contributed to Fox’s eventual departure. The Kings were an unstable organization that prioritized the wrong sorts of players and hires. He found an organization with a better track record. That organization put itself in the position it’s now in partially by accepting the need to tank for a few years and reset. But the Kings, with that 2023 success still so fresh in their mind and the years of futility that preceded it looming over their entire organization, refused to willingly take a step back even when Fox’s trade request made one necessary.

That’s the easiest explanation for how we got here. The Kings finally got good. They didn’t know how to remain good and they didn’t want to stop being good, so they added a bunch of big names that were available largely because the good teams knew better than to build around them. There’s a reason DeRozan has landed on two perpetually disappointing teams in a row in Sacramento and Chicago. The Bulls pawned LaVine off on the first team that would take his contract. Think of how many winners got a look at Westbrook in recent years and decided not to keep him. Schröder played on seven teams in the past four seasons. To the Kings, these were big, exciting names. To the rest of the league, they were varying degrees of overpaid or washed. That doesn’t mean they’re all bad players. Any one of them could theoretically still help the right sort of team. Schröder and Westbrook played major roles for playoff teams last season.

Together, they’re representative of a rudderless organization, one so desperate to cling to its only recent triumph that it has torn down everything that team stood for in favor of this bizarro team of bygone All-Stars. Their playing style thus far is even more dated than the players themselves. A team that looked like it was on the cutting edge as recently as three years ago is suddenly so far behind that they’re getting lapped by the very team they’ve been mockingly compared to. It feels like the mid-2010s again in Sacramento in pretty much way every way imaginable.