For about as long as I can remember, the Sacramento Kings have been unwatchable. Every year, I go into the season thinking that they'll at least be a fun League Pass flip--they never seem like they'll be very good, but they have a lot of young dudes with high draft pedigree, including the inevitable new top-ten pick thanks to the previous year's crappiness--which in most corners of the NBA world usually leads to exciting basketball. Fun, if not necessarily super-productive.
But Sacramento always turned out somehow exempt from this. Thanks to poor front-office management, the roster they put on the floor was always far too messy to congeal into anything interesting or compelling, and though it was fun on the rare occasions they won, when they lost, they lost ugly. The last time I remember enjoying Sacramento basketball was the first few weeks of the Tyreke Evans era, and considering he's since played out his entire rookie contract there and moved onto hitting game-winning jumpers in New Orleans, that should give you a sense of how long ago that was.
Earlier this season, I sensed that things might be turning around in Sactown. They still lost a whole lot, but it wasn't quite as ugly when they did--the games tended to be mostly entertaining until they spun out of control, especially the home ones where the crowd, still relieved to still have any basketball team at all in their geographical vicinity, got really into it. But the roster was still a little too unseemly for my taste--they had about six forwards too many (all of whom seemed about equally mediocre), their point guard situation didn't make much sense, and the games where DeMarcus Cousins would get benched for entire quarters in favor of Hamady N'Diaye certainly weren't helping anyone. They were getting close, but they weren't quite there yet.
But as it turns out, they were just one mega-trade away from watchability. Now, you might think that dealing for Rudy Gay would be at best lateral move in terms of League Pass appeal, since watching Rudy dribbling his way into contested mid-range jumpers has really been no basketball fan's idea of a good time for some years now. But the really key part of the trade for Sacramento wasn't just the return they received, but the parts of their previously existing roster it allowed them to either jettison or shift around. And now, for the first time since maybe the Rick Adelman era, the Kings have a roster that actually makes sense.
Well, not 100%--there are still some redundancies to be had, which we'll touch on in a minute. But when you envision an ideal construction for a basketball roster (a starting five, at least), you generally picture a lineup with three focus, star-type players--preferably one in the backcourt, one on the wings and one down low--with a couple complementary role-type players slotted around them. And with their current starting five of Isaiah Thomas, Ben McLemore, Rudy Gay, Jason Thompson and DeMarcus Cousins, that's exactly what the Kings have now, and while it's not exactly the stuff that finals contention is made of, it's the start of something sane and logical and possibly even worth building around.
The most important part of the trade was arguably that it cleared room for the unquestioned starting point guard role that Isaiah Thomas probably should have had secured years ago. Despite starting 62 games last year and proving to be one of the team's most productive players, there was always the sense that--likely due to his undersized nature--he was just a stopgap, a placeholder until the team got its real point guard of the future. And there was some thought that that might have been Greivis Vasquez, acquired from New Orleans in the three-team deal that sent Tyreke to the Pellies, a year after Vasquez led the league in total assists. I'll admit that I thought Vasquez would quickly snatch the starting role from Thomas, and possibly even help turn the band around with his pass-first nature, not an instinct that has been in large supply in Sacramento in recent years.
Instead, though, Vasquez struggled to really find his groove starting in California's capital, while the Pizza Guy put up the best numbers of his career coming off the bench, posting a PER in the 20's and making his case that size be damned, he was the best point guard on the roster. Now that General Greivis is off backing up Kyle Lowry in Toronto, Thomas has proved that the numbers weren't a bench-competition-inflated fluke, and that he's a legitimate building block for the Kings, averaging 21 points and eight assists on 47% shooting (and 45% from deep) in the 12 games since taking over as a starter. If he was on a team with a better record, he'd be an All-Star candidate for sure, and in the meantime, the excitement provided by his yo-yoing handle and impossibly sweet stroke has made him one of the must-watch breakout stars of the season.
Meanwhile, next to Thomas, you get another glimpse into the Kings' future with sharp-shooting rookie two-guard Ben McLemore, now getting the start over the middling Marcus Thornton. Unlike Thomas, it's more potential than realization with McLemore at the moment--averaging just nine points, three boards and an assist on 38% FG and 35% from deep undoubtedly makes him one of the league's least-productive starting players. But it's worth watching the team just to get the glimpses of McLemore hitting a long catch-and-shoot jumper off a curl, or throwing down a ferocious dunk on the break, or putting up 20 points on the world-champion Heat even after getting assassinated by their best player, and imaging what the young'n--still just 20 years old--will be able to do in the league with a little seasoning, especially on a rebuilding team like Sacramento where they seem to finally have the patience to let him develop at his own pace.
But of course, the most exciting player on the Kings has been around for a while, and is only now starting to finally scrape his potential for total offensive dominance. DeMarcus Cousins has been an absolute monster this season, averaging 23 points, 11 boards and three assists--numbers that get even better when you take them per-36-minutes--while shooting nearly 50% from the field. New coach Mike Malone has clearly done a good job instilling in DeMarcus the importance of playing to his strengths, as his number of mid-range jumpers has gone down, and his shots at the basket have gone up, as has his efficiency in converting both types of shots.
Cousins has the league's highest usage percentage--over a third of the Kings' possessions--but he also earns the touches with a 26.8 PER, the league's sixth-highest. All of a sudden, he might be the league's most dangerous big man in the post, especially now that he's honed his passing skills to the point where he can make teams pay for doubling him almost automatically. Cousins' maturation and improvement has been one of the most under-reported stories of the NBA season, but watching him become the player he was meant to be--and (mostly) without all the stupid stuff that provided a distraction from his development his first four years in the league--is pretty damn rewarding for NBA fans who've longed argued for DMC's upside without getting a lot of on-court support from the man himself.
And then there's Rudy. Well, it's still a little game-to-game with everyone's favorite box-score-hater--when he's hanging 26 on LeBron, you can live with the incessant dribbling and pull-ups, but when he's going 1-6 against Charlotte, it's a little tougher to swallow. But at the very least, the trade for him clears out the clutter of the Kings' small-forward position by removing the minutes needed for the frustrating Patrick Patterson and the execrable John Salmons, both of whom Gay represents a clear upgrade over, at the least. And on a team where he's a clear second (and occasional even third) in the pecking order, there's less of a risk of him reverting into Unnecessary Takeover Mode when things start to go south for the Kings. It's a better situation than Rudy's had in a while, anyway, and it shows in his scoring, where he's not only putting up more points per game than he did in Toronto, but doing so on fewer shot attempts and more trips to the free-throw line.
It's not a perfect roster yet for Sacramento, by any means. The trade for Gay does kind of neuter the earlier upside play the team made by dealing competent defender Luc Richard Mbah a Moute for the allegedly higher-ceilinged tweener forward Derrick Williams, a deal which seemed to give Williams his best shot at finally getting the minutes and role he needed to properly find his game in the pros, before the acquisition of Rudy relegated him back to the bench. At least it hasn't hurt the team from a watchability standpoint--you can really play one of those guys at a time anyway, and getting them in succession means the Kings have at least one bailout mid-range guy on the floor at all times. It's not a deal-breaker, anyway.
The Kings will have more such roster-construction issues to deal with over the course of the season, especially once nonsensical off-season frontcourt acquisition Carl Landry makes his long-overdue debut and adds one more undersized four to the mix for Sacramento. But what the team is now is as close to a logical team--one with defined roles, a clear hierarchy and a starting five consisting of roughly complementary parts--as they've fielded at ARCO/Sleep Train Arena in quite some time. Hell, it feels like an actual team, not just a collection of moderately acquainted freelancers, and just being able to say that marks real progress for the Sacramento franchise.
Of course, it hasn't translated into a ton of wins yet. Since agreeing to the trade on Dec. 8th, the Kings have gone 5-7--an improvement on their prior 4-13 record, for sure, but not exactly enough to get them in the playoff conversation, especially in the crowded West. But that's fine--the Kings are probably still a core player away from making real waves, and they can easily add that player with a high pick in next year's loaded draft. How badass would a frontcourt of DeMarcus Cousins and Julius Randle be? How much of an improvement would Jabari Parker or Andrew Wiggins be over Rudy Gay? How perfectly would Marcus Smart complement Isaiah Thomas in the backcourt? This Kings team reminds me of the '10 Grizzlies or the '11 Clippers, both a year or two and a player or two away from actually getting good, but where you could see the pieces starting to fall into place a little, and you could watch some crazy fun basketball in the meantime.
And the Kings have been fun. They're exactly what you want from a losing basketball team--they stay in games until the end, at which point they always come up just a little bit short. They're not the league's toughest out among subpar teams--that would probably be the Charlotte Bobcats--but they're the most entertaining out, one that'll put up a lot of points and give you a couple real nice highlight plays per game before eventually rolling over. And every once in a while, they'll surprise you by actually pulling out a W--as they did last Friday in a surprise OT win over the Miami Heat or this week with a road upset of the Houston Rockets--which is incredibly exciting in its own right, and also makes the (more frequent) times they do lose not quite so depressingly predictable.
So just give it a try--next time you see the "at Sacramento Kings" in your League Pass flipping, give it a watch, regardless of who the other team is. (Unless it's the Nets or Cavaliers, gross.) We guarantee you won't be disappointed, and you might even find yourself one of the first jumpers onto a bandwagon that could be a lot more crowded a year or two from now.
