I know it might seem impossible to conceive of today, but there was a time before the rampant dysfunction of the modern NBA. Mat Ishbia hasn’t always owned the Phoenix Suns. The Philadelphia 76ers have, at some point, been healthy. The Dallas Mavericks employed Luka Dončić before they traded Luka Dončić. What’s happening right now isn’t the norm. Most of the time, there are far fewer poorly run teams in the NBA, and the standout for nearly the past two decades has been the Sacramento Kings.
Before the Nuggets fired Michael Malone three games before the end of the season, the Kings fired him 24 games into his second season back in 2014 because DeMarcus Cousins got viral meningitis. Before the Suns traded away their draft picks for ill-fitting stars, the Kings traded away their draft picks for cap space to use on players that didn’t want to sign with them. Before the Mavericks tried to sneak in the Dončić trade at midnight when fewer fans would be around to complain about it, the Kings traded Cousins during the All-Star Game in a move so poorly-received that the NBA moved the trade deadline ahead of the All-Star Game to make sure it never happened again.
Kings, general manager Monte McNair part ways shortly after blowout loss in Play-In Tournament, per report
Sam Quinn
The Mavericks are a notable point of comparison now because, after all, they played in a postseason game against the Kings. They won it handily. On Sacramento’s home floor, only a day after Nico Harrison hosted one of the strangest press conferences in NBA history, the Mavericks roasted the Kings, 120-106, to advance to the No. 8 vs. No. 9 play-in game against the Memphis Grizzlies. Roughly an hour after the end of the game, the Kings parted ways with general manager Monte McNair, the 2023 Executive of the Year, according to The Athletic’s Sam Amick.
Taken together, it served as a healthy reminder to the basketball world that even if the Mavericks have lapped the field in modern insanity, the Kings are just as messy as ever. That’s a reminder that we’ve needed because for the past few months, the Kings have successfully hidden behind teams like the Mavericks as they’ve sputtered into the end of yet another disappointing season.
Remember when they not only fired a unanimous Coach of the Year, but handled the fallout so poorly that it wound up being the last straw in De’Aaron Fox’s exit? It feels like it happened five years ago, but it hasn’t even been five months. “You fire the coach, and you don’t do an interview?” Fox told ESPN in March. “So, all the blame was on me. Did it weigh on me? No. I don’t give a f—. But the fact y’all are supposed to be protecting your player and y’all let that happen. … I felt at the time the organization didn’t have my back.”
How about when they looked at the Chicago Bulls of the past few years, a team that never won a playoff series, and decided to go out of their way to emulate them at the trade deadline by reuniting DeMar DeRozan and Zach LaVine? That was so recent we just watched the new-look Kings core get eliminated tonight. It wasn’t even the first play-in loss DeRozan and LaVine endured as teammates. Chicago got knocked out of the play-in stage in both 2023 and 2024, though LaVine was injured for the latter. It really shouldn’t have been a surprise to see a group built around the two of them hit their ceiling in mid-April. They’ve never made it much further.
That’s where the Kings are right now. Their 16-year playoff drought sat so poorly for them that even after they broke it, they panicked the moment things started to teeter. They won only two fewer games in 2024 than they did in 2023, but just got worse seeding luck. That bad break nearly cost Brown an extension. He got one, but after a sub-.500 start based mostly on bad clutch luck, he was fired. Now, fittingly, they’ve built an entire roster based on raising the regular season floor at the expense of any semblance of greater postseason ambition.
DeRozan and Domantas Sabonis basically never get hurt. LaVine does, but he’s under contract for longer than Fox and seemingly less concerned with hopping to a contender. Put those three on the floor together and they’ll combine to give you, a workmanlike 70 points or so combined. They won’t defend, their offense has never really translated to postseason success, and they take up the bulk of your cap flexibility, but hey, you can win 40 games with them. You can at least participate in a postseason game or two so long as you’re comfortable with not winning them.
For a few months, that was enough because the Mavericks showed the world how much worse it can be. All the Kings did was draft Marvin Bagley over Dončić. They didn’t give him away. Sure, the Kings have more draft capital left to work with than the Suns. They’ll probably be healthier than the 76ers. But once you start losing high-stakes games to the teams drawing attention away from your blunders, it gets harder and harder to hide from them.
This is a quietly critical offseason in Sacramento. It’s probably their last chance to prove that the 2023 season wasn’t entirely a fluke, that they aren’t the mess everyone’s thought them to be for so long. The Mavericks, Suns and 76ers have created a golden opportunity for them in that respect. Nobody’s paying attention right now. Make sure nobody ever needs to again by course-correcting in the shadows.
But if Doug Christie doesn’t get the full-time job, they’re about to hire their 14th coach since Rick Adelman left in 2006. It’s not quite clear who’s going to run the front office with McNair gone, or even who was doing it when he was there. Is Vlade Divac somehow regaining influence after putting the Kings through the darkest era in their franchise’s history? What do we make of the joke that one Kings staffer made to The Athletic’s Sam Amick that “we’re all going to be working for Jeremy Lamb soon enough?” Lamb, a former Kings player, had become more visible in Kings decision-making at one point due in part to his relationship with Anjali Ranadivè, daughter of owner Vivek.
These aren’t questions we’re asking of most NBA teams. It’s one we have to ask, unsurprisingly, of one of the few teams capable of making even the Mavericks look good, if only for a night, in the spring of 2025.