Give the Sacramento Kings an incentive, and they will find a way to flee from it. The operators of basketball's least functional franchise spent the part of the season in which they were deluded enough to think they could win games instead getting humiliated, losing nightly by galling margins. Now that losing is exactly what they need to do, they have turned into an accidental juggernaut, proving in the process that the essence of incompetence in the NBA is not losing so much as it is a lack of cohesive vision. Amid all the anxiety about tanking, the Kings stand as a potent counterexample to the notion that the practice is simple and thoughtless. It is, as they demonstrate, something you can be bad at.
One aspect of the aforementioned anxiety about tanking that I find to be misplaced is the idea that fans of tanking teams are necessarily experiencing anguish because their teams are losing. This imagines the fan as a sort of noble savage, conceiving of poor Wizards or Jazz fans as confounded at the idea of trying to get the first overall pick in the draft. Fans aren't stupid, and while the experience of paying American dollars to go watch Micah Potter hoist 11 threes doesn't carry the same thrill as getting to watch a good team, not only do ticket prices reflect the ugliness of the hoops on offer, I think fans of any team that's been rewarded for tanking (read: every team except Miami) would tell you that sacrificing a few months of faux-competitive basketball for an All-NBA talent is more than worth it. There is a marshmallow test here, and whether you find the incentive structure of tanking gross, there's no disputing that it works.
But I am a fan of a tanking team and I am experiencing anguish, because the Kings are winners of four of their last five games and six of their last 11. This is surprising for a number of reasons, foremost of which is that this hot streak began the moment the Kings sent their "good" players away for the season. Funny as it is that the theoretical core of the team was holding it back, the departures of Zach LaVine and Domantas Sabonis for season-ending surgeries cleared the way for DeMar DeRozan to dribble the basketball for 18 seconds before hoisting a contested midrange jumper and for Russell Westbrook to sprint around and run into people. That stuff does not help you win games that matter, but it's great for punishing bad opponents.
Both DeRozan and Westbrook are interesting aging cases: Neither player's game has fallen off as much as you might expect from such high-mileage and -usage guys, but the NBA has changed around them to make their largely intact skillsets obsolete. The thing about DeRozan's plodding midrange game is not so much that it doesn't work on its own terms, it's simply that it's theoretically stoppable. But against an opponent structurally incapable of making the simple decisions needed to stop it, he can still produce like an all-star in isolated cases.
This was what happened in the Kings' win over the Utah Jazz on Sunday and in their baffling win over the Los Angeles Clippers on Sunday. Probably the Clippers wouldn't have lost that one if Kawhi Leonard hadn't sprained his ankle, but he did, so they did. A few days earlier, the Kings narrowly avoided a disastrous victory against the Charlotte Hornets in which DeRozan scored 39 points. The Jazz were put in the uncomfortable position of having to deal with Cody Williams's heater threatening their own tanking efforts, though DeRozan stepped up for the road team and put in 41 on 21 shots, dooming the Kings to victory.
You can't plan around some of this stuff. One of the oblong joys of Mickey Mouse March is that the players on the floor for tanking teams will always try their hardest, leading to Brooklyn's Michael Porter Jr. lighting up the East-leading Detroit Pistons or the Kings' Devin Carter having the first good game of his career while keying a 20-point comeback against the Indiana Pacers. Tanking requires both a correctly built (awful) roster and alignment (on intentional failure) between coaching staff and front office. As to the former, the Kings are doomed by their own stupid preseason expectations. This roster is too loaded with proud veterans and too thin on young players to really be put in good position to lose. Sacramento's gutter-mates are not playing guys like DeRozan, Westbrook, and Precious Achiuwa because they didn't burn roster spots on bad veterans; instead they are letting guys like Taelon Peter (Indiana), Bez Mbeng (Utah), and John Poulakidas (Dallas Mavericks) explore the studio space.
Speaking of Bez Mbeng, one striking aspect of the 2026 Utah Jazz experience is that they are coached by Will Hardy, who appears to be a very good NBA coach and nonetheless has exclusively overseen tanking projects. He's done all this because he works for a competent owner who can offer Hardy the job security required to oversee a project with such long, uncertain horizons. The Kings, by contrast, have Doug Christie, who is probably a bad NBA coach but more importantly has been set up by Sacramento's league-worst owner to do nothing but eat shit. If one assumes players are always going to try reasonably hard, the closest point of contact for the tankjob's architects is the coach. Christie is on a below-market deal—because owner Vivek Ranadive needs to save money after stupidly firing Mike Brown last season—and has none of the institutional support or coaching chops to help management and ownership lose games at the expense of his reputation and future prospects, grim as they already are. And so he is boldly pushing forward, jeopardizing the Kings' one good chance to secure a generational talent before lottery reform and two forthcoming bad drafts make the job even more difficult.
Mere weeks ago, Sacramento nursed a multiple-game lead, so to speak, over Washington, Brooklyn, and Indiana. Now they are in back (which is to say, front) of that pack, with two "huge" "games" against Brooklyn looming. The only thing that matters this season is how the lottery goes. If Sacramento can secure a top pick, surely even they can't screw that part up!
