Three Things NBA Preview: Sacramento Kings
As I detailed a few weeks ago, I’m once again re-appropriating the Three Things I Noticed on League Pass format to preview the upcoming season. Instead of three things I noticed, it’ll be something more along the lines of three things I’m looking forward to, interested in, or want to see. Some of them might be narrative-based, some might be stats, and some might include video. But they'll all be focused on the 2025-26 campaign.
The schedule for those posts will be as follows (podcasts for each division with Mo Dakhil are in parentheses):
- Atlantic Division (BOS, BKN, NYK, PHI, TOR) (Podcast)
- Central Division (CHI, CLE, DET, IND, MIL)
- Southeast Division (ATL, CHA, MIA, ORL, WAS) (Podcast)
- Pacific Division (GSW, LAC, LAL, PHX, SAC) (Podcast)
- Sept. 29-Oct. 3: Northwest Division (DEN, MIN, OKC, POR, UTA)
- Oct. 6-10: Southwest Division (DAL, HOU, MEM, NOP, SAS)
So without further ado, let's get to the Sacramento Kings, who fired their coach and slumped to a ninth-place finish in the West before bowing out in the play-in tournament.
Where are we going?
I wrote about the Kings earlier this offseason. Here's an excerpt:
Remember the Beam Team? Remember even further back, when this team had both De'Aaron Fox and Tyrese Haliburton on it? Those were the days, weren't they?
These are Sacramento's significant moves since that initial Beam Team season:
- Salary-dumped Richaun Holmes to Dallas with No. 24 (O-Max Prosper)
- Traded No. 38 (Jordan Walsh) and a 2024 2nd for No. 34 (Colby Jones)
- Extended Harrison Barnes for 3 years, $54M
- Renegotiated and extended Domantas Sabonis for 4 years, $186M
- Traded 2028 and 2030 2nds for Chris Duarte
- Signed Keon Ellis to a two-way contract
- Signed Trey Lyles for 2 years, $16M
- Signed Sasha Vezenkov for 3 years, $19.9M
- Signed Jeremy Lamb to Exhibit-10 (I promise this mattered), then waived him
- Signed Ellis to a standard contract
- Extended Mike Brown for 3 years
- Drafted Devin Carter
- Traded Vezenkov, Davion Mitchell, and No. 45 (Jamal Shead) for Jalen McDaniels
- Re-signed Malik Monk for 4 years, $78M
- Sign-and-traded Duarte, Barnes, 2025 2nd, 2028 2nd, and 2031 1st for DeMar DeRozan (3 years, $73.9M)
- Fired Mike Brown
- Hired Doug Christie
- Traded Fox, Kevin Huerter, and Jordan McLaughlin for Zach LaVine, 2025 1st, 2025 2nd, 2027 1st, two 2028 2nds, and 2031 1st
- Traded Sidy Cissoko, 2028 2nd, and 2029 2nd for Jonas Valanciunas
- Traded Jones, Alex Len, and 2028 2nd for Jake LaRavia
- Traded 2027 1st (1-16 protected) for No. 24 (Nique Clifford)
- Drafted Maxime Reynaud
- Traded Valanciunas for Dario Saric
- Sign-and-traded for Dennis Schroder (3 years, $44.4M)
That is certainly a series of transactions! (We didn't even include the Haliburton for Sabonis trade, which in retrospect looks like a disaster, even if Sabonis remains a very good player.) And they've left the Kings with a team that seems to make very little sense on the floor.
As a practical matter, I'm not entirely sure how a team with Schroder, Monk, LaVine, DeRozan, and Sabonis is supposed to work. How are there enough basketballs for that group? Sure, they're mostly good positional passers and Sabonis is a great one — but they're all most dangerous with the ball in their hands and only Monk and LaVine have real gravity and ability to stretch the defense when it's not.
Maybe Keegan Murray is providing a spacing element, but since shooting 41.1% from deep as a rookie, he's tailed off and shot 35.8% and 34.3% over the last two years. Considering he had one great shooting season (39.8%) and one disastrous shooting season (29.6%) in college, it's really hard at this point to know whether he should be considered a shooter or not. In any case, he's probably not causing a five-alarm fire for defenses when he's outside the arc. And while I love Keon Ellis and he's shot the ball fantastically well during his 1.5 seasons in the rotation (42.7%), he's probably not throwing defenses into chaos, either.
Monk and LaVine can work the dribble hand-off stuff with Sabonis and fly off screens away from the ball, but I don't see how that stuff meshes with the DeRozan isolation game and Schroder's straight-line driving to form a coherent offense. Sacramento jumped back up to seventh in offense efficiency last season after falling to 14th the year before, but the Kings were only 12th post-All-Star break, when they built most of the current roster. I don't foresee the Schroder pickup nudging them back into the top-10, where they absolutely need to be because...
All of the concerns on offense (and there are a few, regardless of the talent level and fit of a few of the pieces) are entirely secondary to the question of how the hell this team is supposed to defend.
You can read the full post right here.
