The Sacramento Kings must stop counting on luck and start planning for success
At the end of the Tuesday’s NBA Draft lottery, the Sacramento Kings wound up exactly where they started: picking ninth overall. With the ninth-best lottery odds, the Kings had a 50.72% chance of staying put. Although not as disappointing as moving back in the order, it’s still disappointing that the Kings did not move up.
We obviously know that moving up doesn’t immediately fix a team’s problems. The Kings moved up in 2018 to the second pick but selected Marvin Bagley over the likes of Luka Doncic, Trae Young, Jaren Jackson Jr. and even Mikal Bridges.
And we also know that drafting lower doesn’t preclude a team from selecting an impactful rookie. The Kings drafted 12th last season in what was considered a weak draft and landed Tyrese Haliburton. Haliburton was third in Rookie of the Year voting and was named to the NBA’s All-Rookie First Team.
But hoping for a lottery jump or counting on finding a gem at the end of the lottery is hoping to find success in spite of your circumstances. The Kings have regularly focused on short-term goals instead of a long-term plan. In that manner, the Kings reaped what they sowed this season.
The Kings organization chose to chase the play-in tournament instead of tanking at the end of the season. The Kings had an opportunity to trade veterans or shut down key players, practices that are common among NBA teams that don’t have a real shot at the playoffs by the trade deadline. Instead, they chose to chase the slightest chance of success.
Make no mistake, the Kings were not good enough to beat any of the other teams in the play-in tournament. They lacked the poise for the big moment, as shown by their collapse in a must-win game against the Spurs on May 7, a week from the season finale. But the Kings surely would have celebrated, and expected fans to celebrate, making the play-in as the 10th-best team in the Western Conference. Ignore the fact that the Kings fired coach Dave Joerger for finishing ninth in the West. The play-in didn’t exist back then, so that season was a disappointment. But making the 10th seed this year was somehow an accomplishment worth sacrificing the future for.
Consider the Toronto Raptors, a team with a roster far more talented than the Sacramento Kings. They sat key players down the stretch and did the bare minimum to conceal their tanking efforts. They were seventh in the lottery odds but moved up to fourth. This is a team two years removed from a championship, with core pieces already in place, and they get to add a top-four pick because they had the foresight to lose a couple extra games at the end of this season.
The Sacramento Kings face the pressure of their inherited failures. Owner Vivek Ranadivé inherited a team with a seven-year playoff drought, and he was eager to end that drought as quickly as possible. General manager Monte McNair inherited a team with a 14-year playoff drought (including seven years under Vivek’s ownership) and chased short-term success instead of taking the long view beyond simply making the play-in.
The problem is that hoping for lottery luck, or hoping you can find a good player that other teams miss, isn’t a plan. It’s hoping that your lack of planning doesn’t hurt you. The longer the Kings continue to hope for luck instead of planning for success, the longer the drought is likely to become, the more desperate the mistakes will be, and the harder it will be to end the cycle of failure in Sacramento.