21–22 NBA Previews: The Sacramento Kings (#25)
If I may pull back the curtain a little: I’ve been writing these team previews, in order, starting with what I think is the worst regular season team in the league and proceeding until, eventually, I get to the best. For the first five teams, I found that my opinion was pretty much right in line with the Vegas win totals I looked up. This is the first time my opinion has differed.
It is easy to look at the Kings’ roster—specifically at De’Aaron Fox and Tyrese Haliburton—and paint the team as an up-and-coming group bound to get better this year. Unfortunately, I think that’s a misreading. Besides Fox and Haliburton, the key players here—Harrison Barnes, Buddy Hield, and Richaun Holmes—were already in the midst of their primes last season. Holmes and Barnes, in fact, were the top two players on the team last season in win shares.
If you are expecting meaningful improvement, you are expecting it from Fox and Haliburton, since the big additions here are Tristan Thompson, who sucks, and Davion Mitchell, who is a rookie. Haliburton is awesome. He had a tremendous rookie season, and impacts both sides of the ball in all kinds of incredibly smart ways. There’s also a reason he slipped to #12 in the 2020 draft. He’s a low-usage player, and if he’s the second most important player on your team, then he’s out-kicking his coverage a little, so to speak.
It all comes down, then, to Fox. Fox is the player here who either is or is not a superstar. On the plus side, he scored 25 points a night last season, turned into one of the best finishers in the league at the rim (76% within three feet!), and is still just 23 years old at the moment. On the downside, the Kings gave up 118 points per 100 possessions last season when Fox was on the floor, and it is beginning to be clear on the other end that he just isn’t going to ever make enough 3-pointers for defenses to care that he’s shooting them.
Not all budding superstars become actual superstars. For every LeBron James (20.9 points, 5.5 rebounds, 5.9 assists as a rookie) there is a Tyreke Evans (20.1 points, 5.3 rebounds, 5.8 assists as a rookie). Fox still has a ton of promise, but it’s getting difficult to imagine that he’s going to be good enough to carry a team anyplace it actually wants to go.
Meanwhile, the Kings have tradable contracts, and if it weren’t for the fact that they have seemed utterly desperate to make the playoffs for years now, they’d have all the incentive in the world to blow this thing to high heaven. If you miss enough chances, you just need a clean slate. The acquisition of Hield, the drafting of Marvin Bagley over Luka Dončić—this shit just adds up, and eventually you’ve got a situation where Richaun Holmes is leading your team in win shares, and that’s lovely for Richaun Holmes, but not really for your franchise.
Of course, it’s possible Fox comes out this season, plays killer defense at the point of attack (he’s capable!), makes, say, 38% of his 3s (not entirely beyond the scope of the imagination), forms some sort of mystical bond with Haliburton, and this team starts cooking. I just don’t see it, and I like the steady depth of the Spurs’ weird-ass roster and the fact that the Wizards still have an actual superstar in Bradley Beal over whatever this amalgam in Sacramento seems to be. For what it’s worth, I’d love to be wrong about Fox, but I just don’t think I am.