The Sacramento Kings didn’t make the NBA playoffs. While that’s a sentence that would’ve had people saying “Thanks, captain obvious” in previous years, it now is a statement that deserves a huge asterisk. The Kings are actually competitive for the first time in a while, will probably end in the 9th seed with them missing out on the playoffs by just a few games and they have a very bright future ahead of them, and here’s why.
The Kings have had an excellent season by all means, and it defied quite a few expectations. They started off the season with one of the youngest squads in the entire league, had passed on Luka Doncic while taking Marvin Bagley III with the second pick in the draft and they didn’t have their own 2019 first round pick as it was traded and eventually ended up in the hands of the Celtics. People even went as far as saying that the Celtics could land a top 3 pick because the Kings were projected to be horribly bad.
But can you blame them? The Kings had looked like an incredibly dysfunctional franchise in recent years. Since drafting all-NBA center Demarcus Cousins (who they traded away) with the 5th pick in 2010, the Kings have had terrible luck with their first-round picks. Jimmer Fredette (10th, 2011) is currently playing for the Phoenix Suns after 3 years in China; Thomas Robinson (5th, 2012) and Malachi Richardson (22nd, 2016) are both trying to get their careers back on the rails in the G-league; Ben McLemore (7th, 2013) doesn’t have a team currently while Nik Stauskas (8th, 2014), Skal Labissiere (28th, 2016) and Justin Jackson (15th, 2017) have all been traded in the meanwhile. The only picks that have (sort of) panned out for the Kings and are still on the team are Willie Cauley-Stein (6th, 2015), De’Aaron Fox (5th, 2017), Harry Giles (20th, 2017) and Marvin Bagley III (2nd, 2018).
So the skepticism about Bagley and what the Kings would be able to do wasn’t totally unwarranted. If you don’t include Bagley, 7 of their last 10 first-round picks didn’t pan out the way they expected them to. That’s a whole lot of misfires. But they seemed to have turned it around: Fox and Bagley look like a dynamic 1-2 punch that could be great for years to come, Cauley-Stein is starting to look like a lottery pick, even if it did take him some time, and the return they got for a disgruntled Demarcus Cousins turned out to be Buddy Hield, who has established himself as one of the association’s deadliest shooters. Add a well-improved Bogdan Bogdanovic to that mix off the bench and all of a sudden you have a team that can surpass the 30-win mark.
And that’s exactly what they were planning on doing. They had no reason to tank because their pick belonged to Boston and nobody expected them to be a playoff team, making them a very dangerous team that many would underestimate. They turned heads when they went on a 5-game win-streak early in the season, forcing a lot of people to stop seeing the Kings as the laughing stock of the NBA.
Come all-star break the Kings had traded for Harrison Barnes, making it very clear that they were pursuing a playoff spot, and they held the 9th best record in the west, only 2 games in the win column behind the 8-seed Clippers. But after the break it went downhill. They suffered a couple of heartbreaking losses against the league’s 2 best teams, the Warriors and the Bucks, by one possession and Bagley injured himself in the latter, causing the team to go 2-5 in the time he missed.
But this doesn’t mean the season has failed for Sacramento. They are sitting on 2 superstars-to-be in Fox and Bagley, who they have surrounded with great shooters. A trade for Harrison Barnes is definitely a route the Kings will explore, as his fit with the team is questionable to say the least and is owed $25+ million for the 2019-2020 season, if he exercises his player option, which he probably will, given the high supply of top-tier free agents in 2019.
A great fit for the Kings would be Gonzaga-junior Rui Hachimura. The small forward, who will be the first ever Japanese-born player to be drafted, would fit seamlessly with this young Sacramento team. The Kings should be interested in trading Barnes for Hachimura, that’s if he isn’t picked too high. He’s projected to go as a top-5 pick on some boards, barely a lottery pick on others. If the Kings are lucky and Hachimura slides towards the end of the lottery, they might just be able to bring him to the Golden One Center in exchange for Harrison Barnes.
But the Kings will be a team to be reckoned with in the future, regardless of trading for Hachimura. Exciting times are awaiting in Sacramento, and it’s a relief to say that after years of having a grim outlook.
Courtside 