A new dusk in Sacramento
The thing about the Sacramento Kings' long playoff drought is that they still had stars during that time.
Mike Bibby, the prototype Jamal Murray "he's never been an All-Star" lead guard, was around for the first few years of the drought. In those early post-Adelman years, Ron Artest and Kevin Martin were putting up numbers, and two-time All-Star Brad Miller was at the center of lot. Tyreke Evans won fame and the Rookie of the Year award in 2008. DeMarcus Cousins didn't win Rookie of the Year, but he did end up making a couple of All-NBA teams as a King. Isaiah Thomas averaged 20 a game in Sacramento before being exiled and later becoming an All-NBA guard. Tyrese Haliburton was famously drafted by the Kings and traded before he entered All-Star and All-NBA conversations. De'Aaron Fox survived the drought and ended up getting individual honors the year Sacramento broke the non-playoff streak in 2022-23. Haliburton's prize Domantas Sabonis earned more individual honors in that same year as well as the season after.
You're not going to devote a Hall of Fame wing to the Kings of the late 2000s, 2010s and early 2020s, but there were some players.
There was never an on-court identity, not one bit, unless "garbage" and "sad" can be considered such. Just no cohesive blueprint for how this time with Reke and Martin and John Salmons would be good enough to win 45 games, or how that time with Boogie and I.T. and, I don't know, the second coming of John Salmons would put pressure on opponents consistently. There was a hint of some identity when the team was centered around Fox and Buddy Hield and Bogdan Bogdanovic, and they were playing fast, and we were making ourselves believe that Willie Cauley-Stein could be that defensive center we always desperately wanted to see, and that despite passing up the opportunity to draft Luka Doncic there was a path to success here. The team went 39-43 in that 2018-19 season and ... fired their head coach Dave Joerger, replacing him with Luke Walton, who had just finished a disastrous tour of duty with the Lakers. Whatever bud of identity was ready to blossom with Fox running a high-tempo offense disappeared. The Kings went backwards again for three seasons.
That's part of what made the 2022-23 season special: not merely the end of the playoff drought (as incredible as that was). The Kings were a team with a plan, not a collection of talent getting lucky here and there. It wasn't a great team, as evidenced by the lack of a playoff series win and the eventual fragility of the program. But Mike Brown had those Kings centered around Sabonis and Fox playing a certain way, freeing them to exploit what made them special as individual players and doing the same for guys like Malik Monk and even Kevin Huerter and Harrison Barnes. He trusted a young Keegan Murray not just to be a deadly shooter, the second coming of Peja. But he trusted him to take the harsh demands to defend at an All-League level.
A disappointing second season ruined by the team's inability to compete with the New Orleans Pelicans of all teams put Brown on thin ice. The core problem was that the front office struggled to make cogent moves around the edges, drafting similar players year after year but giving up on most of them, failing to get Sabonis reliable back-up support and generally being a toxic mix of too rash (Haliburton) and slow (Barnes) in making personnel decisions.
The front office, likely commanded by the ownership suite, brought in DeMar DeRozan last summer. DeRozan is a thrilling and still effective player. But the identity was now completely gone: he in no way fits with the Fox-and-Sabonis plan, and his offensive style really neutralized what makes Sabonis a plus player (his passing and abilities as a hub). All the tumult and disappointment behind the scenes culminated with Brown being fired and replaced by Doug Christie, but that was a false summit of foolishness, because the front office and/or ownership suite essentially refused to take the hit for firing Brown which left fans and media looking askance at Fox, who took such offense that he asked to be traded to the Spurs, which meant Zach LaVine coming back to Sacramento, which further degraded any identity the Kings could salvage and also left the team without a point guard. Christie, it turns out, did not have a genius plan about how to turn a modified version of the 2023 Chicago Bulls (40-42, eliminated in the play-in) into a 2025 Western Conference contender.
On Wednesday, the Kings were totally embarrassed by the medic tent Mavericks 120-106. It wasn't that close. Sacramento misses the playoffs for the second straight year (a new dusk), and after the game news broke that Monte McNair, the team's general manager who was essentially responsible for the magical 2022-23 season and everything since, was gone.
