Can the Sacramento Kings act like they've been there before?
It's the first playoff appearance since 2006 for the NBA's surprise team.
Desperate times call for desperate hopes. A battered NBA fanbase turns its lonely eyes to the Sacramento Kings, the least likely source for salvation in professional sports.
When the Kings open their first-round playoff series against Golden State Saturday, it will be their first postseason appearance since 2006. When Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and the rest run onto the Golden One Center floor, they’ll be the first active players to meet Sacramento in a playoff series. Yes.
Yet the Kings are the best story in this NBA season. Certainly they’ve gone through the long march with less turbulence than anyone else. They have virtually sewn up the Coach of the Year Award for Mike Brown, they managed to restore the allegiance of the least demanding fans in the game, and they wound up third in the Western Conference. They finished 48-34, and won three more road games than anyone else in the West.
The NBA is a favorite punching bag these days. It’s good to remember that the league played to 97 percent of capacity and sold out 31 more games than in any other season. That’s with no certainty that your favorite player is going to actually make it to the scorer’s table on any night, no matter how much the advance tickets cost. Absentia has become enough of a problem that the NBA and the NBA Players Association agreed that future MVPs and NBA All-Stars must clear a 65-game bar in games played. That still means you can miss nearly 21 percent of the games and be eligible.
But the game is too 3-point happy, it’s far too skewed toward offense to make all these 140-point games ring true, and not a lot of teams seem to be having fun. When Kyrie Irving isn’t dragging the Mavericks out of the playoffs with his unique brand of gravity, Ja Morant is accused of slugging a 17-year-old during a pickup game at Morant’s house near Memphis, then getting sued by the young man and then counter-suing him. Somewhere in there Morant posed with a gun in Instragram, later pleaded intoxication, and was rehabbing himself in Florida.
Zion Williamson, the only player who was picked ahead of Morant in the 2019 draft, puts on power-dunking displays during warmups and spends months in street clothes on the New Orleans bench. Minnesota’s Rudy Gobert starts a fight with teammate Kyle Anderson in a timeout huddle and gets suspended right before a play-in game. Kevin Durant, who should feel Twitterproof, spends lots of leisure time defending himself on his phone. And only two of the league’s top 12 scorers (Jayson Tatum and Trae Young) played 70 or more games.
Meanwhile, Sacramento was warm and sunny all winter. The Kings missed a total of 25 man-games to injury, easily the fewest in the league. Domantas Sabonis not only led the NBA in rebounding but led the Kings in assists. Once you get past the upper crust of Joel Embiid, Nikola Jokic and Giannis Antetokounmpo, he might be the MVP of the league.
To get him, general manager Monte McNair had to give up Tyrese Haliburton to the Pacers. Haliburton was the assist leader in the league. More to the point, he was an excellent first-round pick by Sacramento. There has been precious few of those.
In 1985, Sacramento took Joe Kleine with the fifth pick. Chris Mullin was No. 7, Karl Malone No. 13.
In 2012 Sacramento took Thomas Robinson with the fifth pick. Damian Lillard was No. 6.
In 2013 Sacramento took Ben McLemore with the seventh pick. C.J. McCollum was No. 10, Giannis No. 15.
In 2016 Sacramento took Marquese Criss with eight pick. Sabonis was No. 11, by Orlando, which traded him to Oklahoma City, which had him for one season and then dealt him to Indiana in the Paul George deal.
And, in one of the truly unfortunate draft shanks in recent memory, Sacramento took Marvin Bagley, a one-and-done from Duke, with the second pick in the 2018 draft. Luka Doncic was No 3, Young No. 5.
The Kings knew they were on the tightrope when they traded Haliburton to the Pacers for Sabonis, but what’s another plunge at this point? In doing so they ridded themselves of Buddy Hield, who’d had enough of the Capital City, and allowed De’Aaron Fox to commandeer the ball. Fox averaged 25 points a game this season, and McNeal also procured Kevin Huerter from Atlanta to shoot threes from all locales. With the floor spread, and with Harrison Barnes and Malik Monk also bombing away, the Kings were able to lead the NBA in two-point shooting. They rode the offensive wave to a league-high 120.7 points per game and shot 49.4 percent overall. Along the way they mixed in Keegan Murray, their first-rounder in 2022, and the Iowa rookie was the deadliest 3-point man on the team (41.1 percent).
It has been a redemptive year for Brown, one of many graduates of the Popovich School of Hoopology and Surrogate Parenting. Few young coaches were as renowned as Brown, who was running the show when LeBron James got Cleveland to the 2007 NBA Finals. Brown left when James did, and landed nearly on the Lakers’ bench, but the L.A. fans only knew one thing about him: He wasn’t Phil Jackson. Brown got through one season and lasted five games into the next one before he was fired. One more dismal season in charge of the Cavaliers seemed to end Brown’s head coaching hopes.
Instead Steve Kerr brought him to his side at Golden State, where he’s been through seven seasons of championships, injuries and lottery journeys. Brown was still only 52 when McNeal hired him last fall.
That 2006 team that made the playoffs was the final lunge for Chris Webber, Peja Stojakovic, Mike Bibby and the rest, including coach Rick Adelman, who was disinvited back. Brown is the ninth fulltime coach since then. And the Kings haven’t had a season on the right side of .500 in that frame. After the next year, the city loosened its embrace of its only major-league club, the one that moved from Kansas City in 1985, played in a renovated warehouse, and enjoyed 497 consecutive sellout crowds, without the faintest promise that actual good times, measured by a scoreboard, were on the way.
From 1986 through 2007, the Kings’ average attendance in Arco Arena was also its capacity: 17,517. Attendance faded when the team began to disintegrate, and owners Gavin and Joe Maloof made a head fake toward Anaheim’s Honda Center. The ploy worked, as Sacramento mayor and former NBA All-Star Kevin Johnson pushed for the new Golden One Center, which opened in midtown six seasons ago. It is shiny and imaginative, but it didn’t really lure the fans back until this season, when its average crowd of 17,451 was 99 percent of capacity.
Now Sacramento meets Golden State, and the hysteria meter is in the red zone. The average seat for Game 1 at Golden One will go for $668. Whether the Kings can proceed in a wide-open West will depend on whether Golden State continues to forget to pack its game. The Warriors were 11-30 on the road.
But there’s lots of muscle memory here, and lots of pedigree, and the Kings might pay for their lack of deterrence underneath their own bucket. Nevertheless, this series is welcome plasma for a league that seems a little tired and rundown. It’s what happens when you sit too long.