Point Guards and Purgatory: On the Sacramento Kings
Photo Credit: Sergio Estrada/Imagn Images
“The worst place to be in the NBA is in the middle.”
It’s an adage you hear all the time if you pay any attention to the league, and there’s a reason for that. The goal of a basketball organization is to win championships, but the 30 teams in the NBA exist on a spectrum relative to that goal. Closest are the title contenders — teams like Boston, Cleveland, Oklahoma City and Denver — who have spent years developing their teams around the sort of high-end talent that can win you four playoff series in a row. Obviously, their actions fit firmly in line with that objective. Paradoxically, the actions of those farthest away, the blatant tankers, also match that goal quite well. Undergoing such a rebuild requires an acknowledgement that whatever version of the team that existed before was not good enough to win it all, and thus tearing it down to the strips and spending a few years at the top of the lottery represents their best odds at securing the kind of player that can push them over the top.
So that leaves the middle of the pack, teams that may be able to compete for a playoff spot but whose futures don’t appear to harbor much beyond that. They lack the top end talent to go all the way, but can’t easily acquire said talent through the draft. If the goal, as stated at the top, is to win championships, then that vision makes no sense. We’ve seen organizations within the past half-decade have the self-awareness to recognize when this is the case, pivot into hard rebuilds, and reap the rewards almost instantly. In 2022, the San Antonio Spurs parlayed the best season of Dejounte Murray’s career into three first round picks and the ability to tank it out for Victor Wembanyama. The Orlando Magic traded the entire veteran core of a playoff team on deadline day in 2021, cashing in on the most productive version of Nikola Vucevic we’d seen to that point (and have seen since) for a second lottery pick to go alongside their own; that pick became Franz Wagner, now on a maximum contract next to Paolo Banchero, the All-Star centerpiece they landed after one more year at the bottom.
In both of the cases I listed above, one team realized the shortcomings of their rosters and made a long play towards contention, at the expense of another team trying desperately to add talent. The thing is, desperation and foresight aren’t the best of friends. In the two seasons after acquiring Murray and Vucevic, the Atlanta Hawks and Chicago Bulls each made one playoff appearance (Atlanta as the 7th seed in 2023, Chicago as the 6th seed in 2022) before bowing out in the Play-In Tournament the next year. The Murray experiment is already over in Atlanta, and while Vucevic remains a Bull at this moment, nearly the entire roster around him from that playoff run is gone. It’s no coincidence that Chicago is widely considered the most directionless franchise in the league today; had Atlanta not lucked out and won the 2024 draft lottery, I wonder if we’d be saying the same — and that team could look drastically different again a year from now. Throwing in your chips to be middling just isn’t worth it.
That brings us to the Sacramento Kings. Homegrown star De’Aaron Fox — chosen fifth overall in the 2017 draft, the exact sort of player a team would hope to land in that spot — had apparently made his displeasure with the organization clear enough to the point that they sought to trade him before he ever even made a formal request. Sacramento granted Fox’s wish to play in San Antonio, the only team he had interest in joining. Even despite that reduced leverage, one would expect the Kings to hold out for a high-level package of draft picks and young assets, both of which the Spurs were flush in.
Instead, they went the other direction. The headliner coming back to Sactown was the Bulls’ Zach LaVine, an All-Star caliber scorer, sure, but not the sort of player you would replace De’Aaron Fox with and expect to be more competitive (as competitive?). And while the headlines read that they landed three first-round picks as well, the truth is far less exciting — one is a 2025 protected Charlotte pick that has zero chance of conveying, making it effectively two second rounders, while another is San Antonio’s own in 2027, when Fox and Wembanyama should be well underway wreaking havoc on the rest of the league. The only pick that has real upside is Minnesota’s 2031 unprotected, and a lot would have to go right for that to turn into a premiere asset.
Additionally, Sacramento traded three second round picks for Jonas Valanciunas, a quality backup center — the sort of move a rebuilding team simply doesn’t make. The Kings clearly decided to stay competitive this year even without Fox on the roster, and it’s not hard to understand why. Sacramento missed the playoffs for 16 consecutive seasons until 2022-23, when Fox and Domantas Sabonis led them to 48 wins and a top-three seed in the West. For a franchise and fanbase so starved for winning basketball, a return to the bottom would represent a pathetically sad fizzling out of the one sliver of joy that they’ve seen since Peja Stojakovic was in town.
But they were hardly a title contender before this move. Sacramento lost in the first round to the Golden State Warriors in 2023 before missing the playoffs entirely via the Play-In Tournament in 2024. This version of the team is by no means markedly better, and there are plenty of warning signs that it could go significantly worse. By trading for LaVine after signing DeMar DeRozan over the summer, the Kings now feature both leading scorers from the aforementioned hyper-rudderless Bulls of years past. There have always been questions about Sabonis, an All-NBA performer in the regular season, and his playoff viability. There is no true starting point guard on this team anymore, which might hurt the already-marginalized Keegan Murray, the Kings’ lone bright spot in terms of young assets, more than anyone. None of this to mention that Mike Brown, who coached that playoff team and won the first ever unanimous Coach of the Year in the process, was fired midseason, and that taking his place for the rest of the year would be first time head coach Doug Christie. As I write this, Sacramento is 33-31, good for ninth place in the Western Conference — in other words, smack dab in the middle.
We’ve now established how short-sighted it is to stay in the bottom of the lottery — NBA purgatory. We’ve also gone through exactly how the Sacramento Kings found their way into it, and the unique circumstances that played into why. By any conventional approach thinking about the league from a top-down standpoint, this team should be written off. They weren’t very good defensively before these moves, and the personnel they acquired certainly aren’t catalysts to change that. Meanwhile, it feels like they’ve been chasing the ghost of their league-best offense in 2023 to vault them back into relevance ever since, to little avail. The future is bleak, and the now isn’t nearly good enough to justify that.
And yet, somehow, I can’t stop watching this team play basketball. There’s just something about watching a flawed team with this much talent genuinely working to figure it out that has me fascinated. Besides, the players don’t give a damn about organizational direction! They want to win games. So I’m going to break down the last piece to this Sacramento puzzle — how this team fits together, the unique margins they have to work with, and just how they’re going to need to play if a top-eight seed is truly the goal. Life in purgatory may be fruitless, but nobody said it couldn’t be at least modestly entertaining. I hope you enjoy!
This article, as mine always do, will feature a heavy dose of game clips, but I decided to focus on offense with those due to how many more questions I have about the Kings on that end of the court. To that effect, I figured I’d address their defense up top. A strong argument could be made that the book has been out on this team ever since Sabonis arrived in 2022. Effective schemes built around a non-rim protecting center tend to involve a lot of activity from all five defenders on the court, often beginning with said center playing higher up on the floor to stop ball handlers from attacking the basket out of screens, with the rest of the team rotating behind the play to take away the shots that putting two defenders near the ball can open up. If it works, then offenses can be stalled out without generating a look they’re comfortable taking, but that comes at a cost — nearly any slippage from any one of those defenders can lead to a variety of quality shots, from rolling dunks to wide open corner threes. Indeed, while Sacramento allows the second fewest shots at the rim in the league (indicative of the priorities of their scheme), they surrender more corner threes than all but three teams, per the stat site Cleaning the Glass.
It’s is a style of defense that’s primarily built to mitigate the shortcomings of a center who can’t protect the rim at a high level at volume, but that compensation usually comes from strong defensive players across the rest of the positional spectrum (look to the Houston Rockets this year as a great example of this). Sacramento’s issue is that they’re sorely lacking in that department. Murray and Keon Ellis, disruptive as he may be, are the only two above average defenders you can point to in their rotation. That isn’t enough to consistently slow down good teams.
That lack of great defenders can also rear its head when the Kings toggle between different coverages throughout games, an inevitability in a league where showing the same look too many times results in ruthless exploitation. Guard-guard and guard-forward switches on the ball can be an adventure, often creating straight line drives to the rim; their attempts to run zone defense almost always end in disaster. This really matters for when their bread-and-butter style isn’t working — if your changeup is as ineffective as your fastball, you’re dead in the water.
According to Cleaning the Glass, which filters out garbage time possessions, the Kings currently rank 15th in defensive rating leaguewide (dead on average), but that number is misleading for multiple reasons. On a fundamental level, Sacramento’s defense doesn’t do much very well. They’re the best defensive rebounding team in the league, but they don’t force many turnovers, foul quite a bit, and surrender a high effective field goal percentage — all three of those numbers rank 19th or worse leaguewide, in the bottom third of the league. More damning, though, are their performances against top 10 offenses. Against the best scoring teams in the league, the Kings are 24th in defensive rating, despite moderate increases in each of the three stats I just mentioned; that league-best defensive rebounding rate falls to 10th.
Basically, capable opponents readily take Sacramento out of their comfort zone on the defensive side of the court, and I’m not sure how much they can do about it. With the second hardest remaining schedule in the league — and 10 of their final 18 games coming against top-eleven offenses — it’s highly unlikely that Sacramento’s defense will be winning them games down the stretch. That brings us back to the top of this segment, to Sacramento’s formula in the Sabonis era, and to why this isn’t the side of the ball that interests me. They’re not banking on greatness defensively; merely good enough for their offense to carry them if hits the heights they’re hoping it can.
Currently seventh in offensive rating and chock-full of wickedly talented offensive players, the Kings’ season is ultimately going to come down to how well they can put the ball in the basket, assuming they don’t turn into absolute sieves against the best of the best. In other words, their ceiling (which I’m more interested in) is determined by their offense, but their floor will be set by their defense. Despite their lack of studs on that end and the inherent advantages their schemes present, I think Sacramento can check enough boxes to open the door for their offense to give them a puncher’s chance. On that note, I think it’s finally time we dig into the Kings’ situation on the side of the ball that matters most to them — and where the questions really start to roll in.
Any conversation about the new-look Kings has to begin with their biggest acquisition. Zach LaVine has been one of the league’s better volume scorers for most of his career, and he was enjoying one of his most efficient seasons with the Bulls before the deadline. Since arriving in Sacramento, the two-time All-Star hasn’t skipped a beat: 23.4 points per game shooting 51% from the field, 41% from three-point range on over seven attempts per game, and 90% from the free throw line. That three-point shooting is particularly notable, giving the Kings’ starting lineup a whole new dimension as a shooter and shot creator from distance:
This element is particularly crucial for the Kings, who take more of their shots from the midrange than any other team. LaVine is also effective (and voluminous) in this range, both in isolation and off of pull-up jumpers. Overall, the Kings’ halfcourt offense has been a ridiculous 13.5 points per 100 possessions better with LaVine on the floor than without; small sample size aside, that underscores the impact of efficient three-level scoring.
The Kings have already found some ways to integrate his skillset into their schemes, too. They use their centers most often as hubs away from the paint, running players off of screens and handoffs at the top of the key. An underrated benefit of that alignment is that when teams overplay it, the paint is wide open for backdoor cuts — and for the explosive LaVine, the potential for serious highlights:
It isn’t just the halfcourt where LaVine’s ridiculous athleticism has been felt. The two-time dunk contest champion has long been one of the most threatening (and entertaining) transition players in the league, and he’s fully leveraged that since arriving in Sacramento. His ability and relentlessness pushing the pace has been a major boon for the Kings:
Notice how many of those possessions began off of a defensive rebound as opposed to a forced turnover. That isn’t an accident — per Cleaning the Glass, Sacramento gets these kinds of transition possessions 8% more of the time with LaVine on the floor versus when he sits, one of the best marks in the league and by far the best on the team (the leader used to be Fox, at 5.9%). The Kings are one of the most efficient fastbreak teams in the league, but they only rank 20th in transition frequency thanks in part to their low opponent turnover rate. The more often they’re able to run, the better, and LaVine helps them do just that.
There is a sample size grain of salt to take with all of these numbers, but it’s undoubtable that LaVine’s presence has been beneficial for the Kings. His scoring dynamism fits in well with the Kings' preferred style of play, as he can space the floor and work as a secondary attacker around Sabonis and DeRozan while assuming primary offensive pressure without them. And while he’s never been the defender that his athleticism might imply he could be (his attention to detail away from the ball can be an issue in a scheme built heavily on rotations), he isn’t actively harmful on that end; on this team, that’s about as good as you can hope for. Assuming the goal is to remain competitive in the wake of trading Fox, Sacramento could have done much worse with their return.
But for all the things LaVine is, he isn’t a point guard. After trading Fox and backup Jordan McLaughlin to San Antonio, the Kings were literally without one after the deadline; recent signee Markelle Fultz has averaged fewer than ten minutes per game in nine appearances. Without their primary table-setter, Sacramento has had to lean into a by-committee approach to create consistent offense. Considering the role that their bigs play in setting up their offense, it’s arguable that they’re more prepared than most teams would be, but there’s increased pressure on all of the Kings’ perimeter players to generate good looks for one another. While not nearly a passing savant, LaVine is capable of making simple reads when the defense presents them, be they pocket passes to rolling bigs or spray-outs to open shooters when defenses sell out on him:
It’s important to emphasize that LaVine isn’t a volume playmaker who manipulates defenses with his passing, nor has he ever been in his career. His optimal role has always been as a secondary playmaker, with his scoring and slashing ability serving as a complement to other advantage creators. For the Kings, the question has become just who’s creating those advantages most often. The answer could very well swing their season.
(A sidenote: In the summer of 2018, when LaVine was a restricted free agent on the Bulls, the Kings tried to sign him to a four-year, $80 million offer sheet. Chicago matched their offer, and LaVine stayed a Bull for seven more years — before being traded to the Kings! How fun.)
I’ve discussed the ways in which the Kings use Sabonis as a playmaker, and how integral their center play is to their overall offensive process. (To underscore that point, Jonas Valanciunas has started the last five games for an injured Sabonis, averaging 4.6 assists despite not being the same playmaking force.) With the big men serving as playmaking hubs around the perimeter, Sacramento often sets up possessions with simple screening actions to try and dislodge defenders and create easy looks early in the clock.
This style of play is effective at establishing a sort of offensive baseline, putting players in comfortable positions they’re used to being in over time. But it’s also schemable — for example, teams that commit to switching can snuff out any supposed advantages the Kings try and create. And while counters exist (like having the bigs establish low-post position against smaller players), it’s more important to have other ways to create the kinds of shots you’re looking for consistently than to concede playing a style your opponent is clearly okay with.
In the absence of Fox, the Kings need to lean into other players to find those answers, and the first name one might point to is DeRozan. His game has proven imperishable, averaging over 20 points for the eleventh consecutive season(!) across four different franchises. Over the past half decade, he has improved meaningfully as a playmaker and driver of offense, meshing his metronomic scoring ability and low turnover rate with an increasingly advanced floor game. It’s not an exaggeration to say that growth may have prolonged his prime long enough to get him into the Hall of Fame.
Though his overall burden has lessened compared to his days in San Antonio and Chicago, both his assist percentage and assist-to-usage ratio (how often he creates shots for his teammates versus himself) have spiked in the games since the trade. This shift makes sense given the Kings’ new offensive hierarchy, but it also has meaningful ramifications for the team’s offense. See, while DeRozan is a good passer, his best reps come when he’s able to leverage the threat of his scoring. Watch how quick he is to get off the ball the moment the defense bends his way — and how that happens when he hunts his patented midrange spots on the floor:
DeRozan is quite adept in these spots, and entertaining too — the plays where he goes up as if he’s shooting only to toss a dart to a teammate whose defender he just caught sleeping bring me a lot of joy. But DeRozan’s ability to control possessions like that goes away when he strays from his bread-and-butter style. In other words, if he isn’t looking to potentially score (or at least convince the defense he is), his ability to create good looks is mightily mitigated. There are times where DeRozan is clearly looking to get the offense going but his passivity leads to decreased defensive attention, and thus less to manipulate. Some of his assists straight up come with him as the trigger man, completely uninvolved in the action until the pass to the assist:
To be clear, these kinds of plays aren’t a bad thing in and of themselves, just another example of DeRozan’s relatively unorthodox playmaking style. Where all of this can breed issues for Sacramento’s offense is that since DeRozan tends to be more effective the more involved he is, they run the risk of devolving into “DeMar Ball,” bogging down possessions as games wind down to live or die by whatever DeRozan can create for himself or others. This is often what happened during his Bulls tenure, where the team’s offense consistently performed better in his minutes than without him, but the actual result wasn’t exceptional (the Bulls never finished above 14th in offensive rating in DeRozan’s three seasons, per CTG).
A very simple way to strike a balance between DeRozan’s usage and the Kings’ more egalitarian, screen-heavy attack is to have another playmaker capable of breaking down a defense, be it out of the pick-and-roll or otherwise. Having more options to throw at a defense over the course of a game — or even a possession — is always a good thing, and the Kings are not exempt from that. The thing is, Sacramento just lost its premiere ball screen operator in Fox, and we already established how the player they got back doesn’t answer these specific questions.
Enter Malik Monk. The 2017 lottery pick has completely revitalized his career since joining the Kings in the summer of 2022, finishing second in the closest Sixth Man of the Year race in history last season. He’s always played with a dynamism to his game as a scorer, but over the last two seasons he’s demonstrated a real knack for setting the table out of screens. For the second consecutive season, he’s averaging over five assists per game. It’s a critical development for Monk personally, as the ability to leverage one’s threat as a scorer to create good offense for their team is unilaterally valuable.
Monk is able to make a variety of reads depending on the defensive coverage. Either in traditional pick-and-rolls or out of dribble handoffs, he has an understanding of when to get the ball to his screener, both on the roll and in the pick-and-pop:
Notice the timing on these passes. Depending on how the big man is defending the action, Monk will change when he gets the ball to his big for the best possible shot. That poise and patience is incredibly promising — playing at one’s own pace is arguably the most important skill a guard can have in the NBA. Outside of the pick-and-roll, he’s also capable of making the right read in a variety of situations when he sees a bent defense, whether it’s a simple kick one pass away or a full weakside skip:
He also has real flair as a passer, liable to throw a ridiculous dart in transition at any point:
Overall, Monk’s growth as a playmaker since becoming a King is one of the more fun developmental stories over the last few seasons. But he first showed those flashes as a sixth man combo guard; in less than a year, he's been elevated to the starting lineup and given nominal point guard duties. That’s a major escalation in role and responsibility, one that assuredly comes with growing pains. Besides, for all the strides he’s made, Monk still isn’t a perfect playmaker. There are possessions where he’s hellbent on trying to score, missing open teammates for a contested look:
That aforementioned flair can come back to bite him, too:
Monk’s turnovers have trended upward since the Fox trade, while his assist rate has mostly stagnated. Meanwhile, the increased responsibility seems to have impacted his scoring efficiency (shooting 41% from the field and 29% from three in 12 games post-trade) as he toggles between hunting his own shot and creating for his teammates. There are stretches of games where Monk looks like a full-fledged point guard, controlling the game and getting open shots all around the floor. Other games look much rockier, where he appears better served in a secondary role playing off the likes of DeRozan and LaVine. All of this is pretty normal considering Monk is still growing into this role, actively figuring things out on the fly.
The thing is, the Kings might not be able to afford it. I’ve already emphasized the importance of having multiple creators for efficient and sustainable offense; outside of DeRozan and Sabonis, this team is lacking in those sorts of players. If Monk can assume a part of the playmaking burden alongside those two, it changes things for everybody else. In that world, LaVine has even more opportunities to do what he does best, while Sabonis and Monk could try and develop a two-man game somewhat like he had with Fox for years; if defenses key in on slowing that stuff down, then there’s always DeMar Ball as a fallback.
If Monk’s inconsistency remains the norm for the rest of the season, then DeMar Ball goes from a fallback to a primary option. LaVine’s offensive burden increases, which would likely impact his stellar efficiency. Keegan Murray, who with so many mouths to feed is already assuming less usage than when he was a rookie, would be the beneficiary of even fewer open looks, reducing the threat level of one of the team’s more important floor spacers. It’s not hard to see how this has a cascading effect on the rest of the roster.
It’s not like they’re going to find this sort of playmaking somewhere else on the roster. Keon Ellis’ usage is miniscule, serving almost entirely as a play-finisher behind the arc on offense. Fultz has hardly played, and his shooting concerns open up a whole different can of worms. Monk is their wild card, and the way he closes out the season could very well be the difference between a playoff berth and another fizzle-out in the Play-In Tournament.
It can be argued that almost none of the decisions the Kings have made in the last calendar year were the correct ones, assuming the goal is sustainable success. Firing Mike Brown felt hasty in the moment, and appears to have been a factor in Fox wanting out. Bringing in DeRozan and LaVine after watching them hit their ceiling for three years likely gives Bulls fans PTSD when they tune in. Bringing in more on-ball players and thus deprioritizing Murray, the most promising young player on the roster, could wind up short-sighted. Forcing Monk into a role he’s never played and expecting immediate results might not be the best scenario for both sides. Even some smaller moves (such as trading Davion Mitchell and a second-round pick to the Raptors to get off of Sasha Vezenkov’s money for Jalen McDaniels — the exact sort of wing defender this team sorely craves, at least theoretically — only to waive him almost instantly) remain puzzling. In the bigger-picture, there are those who believe building a roster around Sabonis without insulating him with strong defenders was a recipe for failure in the first place.
All of these criticisms are valid. The direction of this franchise feels up in the air, and not just from the outside — it’s been reported that Sabonis has questions about his future with the team. All of he, DeRozan, LaVine and Monk are under contract through at least next season. Who knows how DeRozan feels about staying on a team with Play-In aspirations as he approaches his 36th birthday? Does Monk like being thrust into this new role, given its middling success? Is the organization really okay with the way things have gone, and appear to be going? Will this roster look the same at all a year from now? There are serious questions that this franchise has to answer.
But between now and the start of free agency, none of them matter. For the rest of the season, this is who the Sacramento Kings are. They have no choice but to try and figure this out, so long as they’re all still around. If that sounds a little depressing, well, maybe it is. But that’s life in the middle in the NBA: pretty bleak and a little depressing. But just because that’s the case doesn’t mean it’s impossible to find some joy.
There are plenty of stories to keep tabs on. Sabonis is averaging 19.5 points, a league-leading 14.1 rebounds and 6.1 assists per game while shooting nearly 60% from the floor; there’s a chance he lands on an All-NBA team for the third consecutive season. LaVine will continue to acclimate to his new surroundings, while Monk will get plenty more reps at the point. DeRozan will keep treating all who tune in with his game, and the Kings’ Lithuanian center duo will guarantee 48 minutes of hard-nosed screens and rebounds. Even though they aren’t coming close to a championship this season, the Kings are going to keep their heads down and try to win every game they can. Maybe I’m just reaching for something positive, but given their firm place in basketball purgatory, I think there’s something kind of beautiful about that.