The Sacramento Kings played and lost what threatens to be the last meaningful basketball game of their season on Thursday night. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that it may also have been the last meaningful basketball game they play in the years to come.
As franchise-breaking losses go, this one was at least a bang, not a whimper. The Kings hosted a hot Pistons team in the midst of an undefeated West Coast road trip, and despite their lone functional big man Domantas Sabonis missing the game with an illness, they built a double-digit lead early in the second quarter and steadily managed it for two quarters. This is what theoretically superior teams do at home against theoretically inferior ones, a dynamic which De'Aaron Fox's poor first half underscored. Down 10 with 3:36 left, Detroit began to mount a fierce resistance, which was enough for the Kings to totally clam up and stop playing anything resembling team basketball.
Detroit had to make all their shots, which they did, while Sacramento's win condition down the stretch was simply to keep their heads, which they failed to do. If you are up by three with 10 seconds left after being up by 10 a few minutes earlier, that is embarrassing, but only fatally so in one specific circumstance. Unfortunately, Fox got caught in no-man's land when Malik Beasley swung it to Jaden Ivey in the corner, and rather than cleanly contest, or, better yet, doing nothing, Fox gleefully leapt into him. Ivey hit both the shot and the game-winning free throw (that play can be found at 5:39 here).
The loss rounded out a five-game Kings homestand in which they lost all five games under increasingly heinous and embarrassing circumstances. While the NBA regular season is interminable, there are stretches, runs of games that define seasons, that mean more. This five-game losing streak is one of those, beginning and ending with horrifying late collapses to the Nuggets and Pistons, each of which was sandwiched around a blowout loss to the Lakers and Pacers. The centerpiece of the streak was a close loss to the Lakers, in which they lost because they failed to grab a free-throw rebound. They only scored more than 22 points in one of five fourth quarters, being squarely outplayed in the parts of the games that mattered. They are now 13-18, which is 12th in the Western Conference. They are three games out of the 10 seed. They have lost 12 games at home, the most in the NBA. By Tankathon's rough metrics, they have the third-hardest remaining schedule in the league. Their season sure looks over.
I was in the arena last night for the loss, and it's hard to overstate the bitter resentment of the fanbase. As the Pistons began their comeback, you could feel the collective stomach of the building tighten up. The Ivey shot was a fitting coda, though everyone in attendance knew in their hearts that the Kings had fucked it when Malik Beasley hit a three to make it a two-point game with 1:28 left. At that moment, anyone could sense that the Pistons had the momentum and that the Kings would not muster the energy to arrest that momentum. When Ivey hit the shot, people did not boo or grouse or even protest; they sat there mute. Why bother? The team was just as over it as they were. "It doesn’t really matter," said Fox when asked for his thoughts on the final play. "It’s not going to make anybody feel better."
He's right, and that nihilistic logic can be extended to the team's short- and medium-term futures. There's nothing that can make anyone feel better. The first 11 teams in the Western Conference and the last three all know the direction in which they are headed, while the Kings are the lone piece of flotsam adrift between the two currents. They will probably try to keep winning; it will not work. Their schematic irrelevance is not solvable with the roster in its current state, which is exacerbated by Mike Brown's erratic rotations and DeMar DeRozan's twinned inability and unwillingness to play modern basketball. The Kings are a basketball team without an identity; they are not really good at anything, and while they have a faintly positive point differential and their record is stuffed with close losses, I'd argue that they have performed as well as they should have.
Every time Kirk Goldsberry releases a new efficiency matrix, there the Kings are in the good quadrant. The math here understates the shoddiness of the team, and I think getting tight, playing zombified offensive sets at the ends of games, and generally underperforming in the final six or so minutes of games is actually more indicative of this team's brokenness. There is one functional big on the roster, the open looks that they earned in 2022-23 have been schematically erased by modern defense, and their stylistic contradictions look increasingly outmoded in a hyper-competitive West where each team has spent the last two seasons getting better while the Kings have desperately clung to good bit of luck.
At stake is De'Aaron Fox's future. Fox, who is represented by Rich Paul, is in the penultimate year of his team-friendly contract, and he didn't sign an extension this past offseason. The team eschewed the chance to upgrade their roster after their playoff run two seasons ago to extend Domantas Sabonis, right in time for him to start becoming irrelevant as a franchise-level player, and Keegan Murray's once-mythic trade value has to be degrading game by game as he shoots brick after brick. DeRozan is capable of playing DeMar DeRozan possessions at a decently high level still; the problem is that's all he can do. Kevin Huerter and Trey Lyles have been on the Keegan Murray trajectory for two years now. That leaves Fox, the coolest and best player to sign a second contract with the Kings in decades, looking around and wondering what the plan is.
He and his agent are publicly laying the rhetorical groundwork for a trade, making the correct case that the Kings are drawing dead. You can read Rich Paul putting the word out through The Athletic that Fox is concerned with the direction of the team as pressure for the Kings to make a big move to add talent, though I read it as a soft trade demand. Five years after the disastrous Anthony Davis trade PR campaign, Paul has learned that it's better not to let things get to that point. Instead, by making the case that Fox cannot win in Sacramento, he puts the onus on the Kings; he has not failed them, they have failed him.
The thing is, whether or not my paranoiac theorizing is correct, the result will be the same. The Kings team that desperately trades for Kyle Kuzma or Jerami Grant or any of the other available, quasi-starter level wings on the market is going to win the same number of playoff games in the next two years as the version of the Kings that does nothing, or jettisons Fox and welcomes the pain of another rebuild. The structural flaws in the team, especially considering their marginal position in the West, do not have easy fixes. The only difference, and the reason why I am sort of an accelerationist here, is how quickly they accept this state of affairs and start making meaningful changes.
I do not want to have to watch my favorite player get traded, but I also don't want to watch him waste his prime losing. Mostly, I resent the owners for stiffarming the players union into an anti-competitive CBA that makes trading Fox the only available eject button and makes this twisted logic somewhat rational. I do not want it to be Sacramentover, but I don't think there is another conclusion you can come to.
