SACRAMENTO, Calif. — During the break between the first and second quarters, the Sacramento Kings interrupted one anti-competitive spectacle with another. Six babies lined up to race, only to hear the starting gun and refuse to crawl, wriggle, or even squirm, opting instead to stage a tiny work stoppage. The crowd beckoned, yet the babies stayed put. It was a potent metaphor for the Kings basketball looming on either side of the break, comfortably the most useless, anachronistic hoops being played anywhere in the NBA.
Three short years after pioneering a new style and securing the West's third playoff seed, the Kings have made a remarkable speedrun directly into the toilet. Like the babies, the Kings do not seem to know what they're supposed to be doing. The specific nature of their bustedness is interesting, though slightly hazardous to pay close attention to, as the operative question of their doomed season is not Will they win games? but Are the people in charge capable of recognizing reality?
Consider the rotation coach Doug Christie played against the Minnesota Timberwolves on Sunday. Someone who has not paid close attention to the NBA for a few years might see big names like DeMar DeRozan, Russell Westbrook, Zach LaVine, and Domantas Sabonis and feel optimistic about such a team's chances of winning basketball games. So many All-Star appearances, so many bucket-getters. Surely the talent level of such a group would ensure a minimum viable level of competitiveness, right?
Wrong. This is a stupid person's idea of a good NBA team. Not only are each of the supposed stars becoming increasingly obsolete as the game evolves, but they could only function effectively in specific contexts with their considerable flaws accounted for by careful feats of roster construction. Instead, they have been tossed in alongside each other on a roster otherwise populated by players who can neither shoot, defend, nor pass. Anyone who has watched 15 minutes of playoff basketball could tell you those are mission-critical skills. That means the Kings' washed stars' skills are redundant to one another while their flaws are multiplicative. Nobody can defend, which makes each player's bad defense all the more glaring. Everyone needs the ball to score, a task made impossible by the presence of several other players who all need the ball clogging up the spacing and preventing anyone from scoring with the ball.
In practice, what that looks like is DeRozan using his incredible ability to operate in tight spaces exclusively for taking contested 18-footers, or Sabonis or LaVine occasionally getting into the lane only to be swallowed up by four defenders, because nobody needs to worry about a kick-out pass since the team lacks both the shooters and passers required to pull off the basic drive-and-kick foundation of modern NBA offense. Russell Westbrook has maybe been the team's best player, because he's the only guy who tries hard and runs around and does stuff, but Russell Westbrook being your team's best player in 2025 is like being given a first-class seat upgrade on a flight actively nosediving toward the Pacific.
The defense is worse. In a league increasingly interested in ball pressure, the Kings simply stand there. They play between two and four shooting guards at all times, none of whom can move their feet sideways, leaving Sabonis, the worst rim protector in the NBA, to protect the rim. He is the one functional tall person on the roster; DeMar DeRozan is the nominal power forward. They just signed Precious Achiuwa and inserted him directly into the starting lineup.
Sometimes the Kings will play an amazing 2-3 zone that involves the five players standing perfectly still in their respective spots, hoping an offensive player will dribble the ball directly at them. Opponents will make one single pass and unzip them entirely. The Wolves would do simple stuff like send a cutter into the lane and instantly get a wide-open three-pointer for free, over and over again. Anthony Edwards didn't score until late in the second quarter, and his team still put up 144 points.
In the arena on Sunday, you could hear the crowd's anxiety mounting as the game progressed. The basketball on display was repulsive, and the crowd noise, such that it existed, was the sound of 10,000 people anxiously muttering through and after long possessions spent doing nothing. At several points, boos rained down on the court, and a large group of fans began chanting for Keon Ellis. The third-year guard is the one good defender on the roster and one of the few capable three-point shooters, and he has been totally buried by Christie to make room for, again, a bunch of old guys who can't do anything but take and occasionally make bad shots. Ellis's inexplicable marginalization is the key to understanding what makes this team so uniquely flawed, in that you can explain it through bad coaching and poor roster construction, but each of those factors are insufficient on their own and only hint at the real rot at the top of the franchise.
After firing former coach Mike Brown (stupidly), blaming De'Aaron Fox for it (also stupidly), then trading Fox (stupidly not for a bundle of draft picks and young players, but for a veteran who scores a lot in obviously empty ways that anyone who watches basketball could have told Kings management were empty), the team is built around its core of accomplished veterans. While the rest of the NBA is getting faster, younger, and taller, the Kings intentionally made themselves old and slow. Trying to win with yesterday's stars is already a bad idea; doing so while playing yesterday's hoops is a worse idea, and trying out a specific pairing of on-ball scorers—DeRozan and LaVine—who flamed out together a few years ago is completely irrational.
This raises some uncomfortable questions: Why are the Kings trying to win if the task is impossible? Did management and ownership earnestly believe this team could be something? Do they not watch the NBA?
Basketball fans have been conditioned to think critically about roster construction and coaching, though I think if pressed, most wised-up internet basketball observers would admit that, despite whatever flaws their teams exhibit, most front office people and coaches are probably more well-informed then them and have a finer understanding of the way the game actually works. It is hard to win in the NBA. The competitive framework requires both great vision and a tremendous appetite for risk. Plenty of big contracts that seem like overpays turn out to be tremendously valuable, and plenty of players everyone thinks will be good turn out to be Jordan Poole. You can't just decide to have Nikola Jokic, Luka Doncic, and Giannis Antetokounmpo on your team. That's not how it works.
However, every decision the Kings have made since the end of the 2023 playoff run has been bad in a totally foreseeable way. It's led them to the worst position an NBA team can be in: not good enough to win, not bad enough to gun for a top draft pick in yet another loaded draft. The Kings fan is then forced to grapple with the fact that the people in charge do not understand or cannot accept reality as it exists. Principal owner Vivek Ranadivé has been trying to get Zach LaVine on his team since 2018, committing to the idea like four full years after it was shown to be a bad one. His flawed understanding of the game is one thing; much more concerning is the fact that he has the organizational latitude to be involved in basketball decisions. It's been 12 years since Ranadivé bragged on camera that Nik Stauskas "has size like Klay [Thompson], shoots like Steph [Curry]," and here he is still running the organization in the same boneheaded way.
All reports indicate that he's still the one making the decisions, from firing Brown and pursuing the ex-Bulls to hiring Scott Perry as GM and Doug Christie as coach without interviewing anyone. Christie is a nice guy who does not know what he is doing, and is being paid well below market rate because Ranadivé, who is cash-poor compared to other owners, is still paying Brown after firing him last year.
The experience of watching the Kings this season is one of seeing the profound, unsquareable flaws of the team and waiting around for those steering the team to see it for what it is. The risk is that the roster's aforementioned real hoopers make enough bad shots to convince Ranadivé to adhere to his vision, or trade more future draft picks in order to win with a team incapable of doing so. Fans simply have to hope the team keeps losing and doing so in a way that forces even Ranadivé to accept what's in front of him; then they have to hope that this somehow convinces him to change and let people who know what they are doing oversee the necessary rebuild. There's no reason to think he'll be a better owner going forward, but at least there is the glimmer of possibility the Kings could, under those circumstances, fall ass-backward into a player so good, even they can't ruin him.
Last night, I noticed early in the fourth quarter that the arena was rapidly getting cold, because so much of the two-thirds-full crowd had left early. Not so long ago this building was one of the most raucous in the NBA, and now it's dead. The Kings lost, 144-117.
In retrospect, I take back what I said about the babies being a perfect metaphor. One of them lurched a few feet forward right at the end of the race to claim a victory. The Kings never even moved.
