The Sacramento Kings fired Mike Brown on Friday after a 13-18 start to the 2024-25 season, falling to 12th in the West and three games back of the final Play-In spot already. They have been one of the league’s most disappointing teams given where expectations were coming into the year, and seem miles away from the team that won the 3-seed just two seasons ago.
While you can argue the decision to fire Brown is an example of this, how they got to this point isn’t a tale of organizational malpractice, but a reminder of how thin the margins are for building a contender in today’s NBA, especially as one of the league’s non-destination teams. There are a number of factors that have brought the Kings to this point, where they’ve fired their coach and are staring down an ever-shrinking window to appease De’Aaron Fox’s desire to compete for titles. For one, they are the latest in a long line of teams that you can argue are the victims of their own sudden success. That 2023 playoff appearance saw them earn the 3-seed, but that was as a 48-win team taking advantage of a down year in the West. While they failed to build on that the following year, Sacramento still won 46 games and finished in ninth — the same spot they would’ve been as a 48-win team, too.
Sacramento tried to do all the right things in building this team, and in a vacuum, each of their decisions makes sense. They paired Fox with Domantas Sabonis, creating a star duo that complements each other beautifully on the offensive end of the floor. They drafted a wing in Keegan Murray who, if all went well, would be an ideal fit between them on the wing. They made free agency and trade additions that, initially, looked like steals in Malik Monk and Kevin Huerter, and rewarded both with extensions after they proved they could help the team. After plateauing last season, they swapped out Harrison Barnes for DeMar DeRozan to alleviate some of the scoring burden on their stars and shift Murray back into a more comfortable role.
Unfortunately, even the best laid plans can go awry. They’ve seen their depth get thinner as they’ve handed out contract extensions (most notably a max for Sabonis) and the players they’ve placed bets on to pick up the slack in larger roles have regressed. Monk has been a league-average shooter since his arrival and remains one, but his microwave tendencies are much more impactful when he’s buoying a bench unit in bursts rather than needing to provide a constant lift. The reason they’ve needed more from Monk is because Huerter and Murray have never been able to regain the form of two years ago, with both falling off a cliff in terms of three-point efficiency (Murray: 44.1 percent to 29.5 percent; Huerter: 40.2 percent to 31.2 percent). That has been a gigantic reason for the Kings falling down to the 24th-best three-point shooting team in the league, which is how a team that was once an offensive juggernaut becomes a slightly above-average unit.
When you go back through the last two years of Kings roster decisions, there aren’t any that jump out as disastrous when they happened. The Huerter extension was thought to be a value deal for Sacramento at the time, but his regression has been rather staggering. Extending Monk was, likewise, a no-brainer at the time, and he’s at least maintained his level, even if they hoped in an ideal world for a leap of some kind. And then there’s the Sabonis extension. They had no real choice but to give him after how well he played that first season after he was acquired in a trade for Tyrese Haliburton (a thorny subject, but again, it made sense if you decided Fox was The Guy), because when you have an All-Star talent in today’s NBA, you basically have to give them a max.
The Kings especially aren’t a team that can play hardball with All-Star caliber players, because few are going to have Sacramento high on their list of preferred destinations. That is not necessarily unique to the Kings, as I’d venture a guess that this sentiment goes for a majority of teams in the NBA, but Sacramento not only lacks the location to attract stars, they also have had plenty of organizational dysfunction working against them as well.
And so, the Kings bet on that 2023 season being just the beginning of a great run, hoping they had finally put the right pieces together and could try out stability for a change. Instead, it appears that season was a mirage. Sabonis and Fox have continued to be excellent and maintained that level, but they occupy the tier below the ultra-elite that make a team a title contender by their mere presence. When you have that caliber of star, you can’t miss with your supporting cast. Unfortunately for Sacramento, rather than internal development, they’ve seen regression around their stars, and their attempt this offseason to salvage things by signing DeRozan has not brought about the turnaround they hoped for. Now, the Kings are rapidly approaching a crossroads.
Fox’s future looms over everything in Sacramento. They tried to build a contender around him and thought they were doing it the right way. Instead, they’re stuck with two options to try and salvage the Fox era or see him become the latest young star to push his way to greener pastures. One is to ask for patience. That tends to be in short supply for young NBA stars who don’t see a clear vision, but the Kings can try and sell Fox on this group just needing more time to coalesce and that they’re not that far off from a run if they can get Murray out of his slump. However, given they just fired their otherwise successful coach after a slow start (which, it should be said, is the first sign of possibly reverting back to the Kangz of old), I have a hard time imagining this is a real option.
The second option is to make one last desperation swing ahead of the trade deadline. Zach LaVine and Brandon Ingram remain out there and very available, and if the Kings were to include Murray, they could certainly make an intriguing offer to either the Bulls or Pelicans (or a push for a different star not currently on the radar). The concern, of course, is that won’t be enough, and they’ll give up their best assets for, potentially, a short-term rental only to see Fox ask to leave, anyway.
If they’re unsuccessful with either option, they’ll have to spend this summer fielding trade offers for Fox and figure out how to move forward as a franchise. It’s the unfortunate reality of life as a non-destination organization. They did so much good work to identify and acquire talent to build a promising young team, but you can’t afford any missteps along the way. They’re not the first team to get fooled by a playoff mirage and won’t be the last, but there’s a difference in how teams get punished for it.
Two of the best recent examples are in Miami and Portland, who both got caught in this position over the past decade. Portland could never fully recover from a string of failed wing investments around Damian Lillard (Allen Crabbe, Evan Turner, Moe Harkless), and while it took quite a while, eventually the star guard asked out. Now, they’re trying to start back over almost from scratch, hoping to find the next young star to build around. The Heat made some similarly poor bets (Tyler Johnson, Hassan Whiteside), but by virtue of being a destination city and franchise, they were able to quickly retool and moved back into the contender sphere in the East within a few years.
Unfortunately for the Kings, they fall into the Portland category and if Fox does indeed end up asking out, they’ll need to be savvy with how they proceed. Having Sabonis around should give them an avenue Portland didn’t have in terms of star talent remaining, but they’ll still have to thread the needle between adding draft assets and finding some current talent to bring back. The challenge for a team like the Kings is, while perhaps you need to be more cold in your self-evaluation as an organization after a big year, at the same time, your best bet for building a real contender is to identify talent early and lock those players in long-term.
There are no clear blueprints to follow. Instead, you just have to get it right when you aren’t a place that pops up on every star’s wishlist. This time around, the Kings didn’t, as has been the case with every iteration of team-building the franchise has tried over the last two decades. Now we wait to see what the full fallout will be from this well-intentioned build gone awry.