The Sacramento Kings have been one of this year’s media darlings, and deservedly so. They stand 10 games over .500 at 35-25, good for the 3rd seed in a hyper-competitive West, and have already cleared their (frankly disrespectful) pre-season Vegas line of 34.5 wins. It’s a classic feel-good NBA narrative — a historically maligned, dysfunctional franchise finally made a series of smart moves that have translated into a winning product and have ignited a passionate fan base ready to plaster the city with “Light the Beam!”.
But this year’s Kings have generated a unique buzz around a pocket of NBA blogboys beyond the “bad team becomes good” arc. Their brand of basketball is so damn entertaining. They comfortably lead the league in PPG at 120.7, good for a 2.4 margin from the second place Warriors (equal to the distance between the Warriors and the 9th place Memphis Grizzlies). They got there by taking and making the 7th most 3’s per game with Kevin Huerter, Malik Monk and rookie phenom Keegan Murray each jacking up more than five a game. First-time All-Star De’Aaron Fox is well on his way to a Most Improved Player nod as he’s leading the league in clutch points and clearing his career FG% by nearly 5 whole percentage points.
Their recent record-breaking double-OT thriller against the Clippers was an awe-inspiring game to watch– check the highlights if you missed it. The Kings’ play was sloppy and chaotic but they displayed an immense amount of grit. The Kings found themselves in a hole three separate times, down 14 with 4 minutes left in regulation, down 6 with 1:34 to go in the first OT and down 4 with less than a minute in the second OT before eeking out a 176-175 W. An immensely satisfying dub, and also good for the second highest scoring game ever. From the 5 minute-mark onward it felt like a playoff game. The Golden 1 Center gets extremely loud. Even in the highlights you can see that every fan is standing, gasping at every miss and screaming at every make. It’s the type of game you’d expect a young, inexperienced team to lose to a two-time finals MVP (Kawhi) and eight-time All-Star (PG), but this year’s Kings have demanded that we expect the unexpected.
The Kings are THE Nobody Believes in us Team
Despite the King’s impressive record and slew of good wins, there’s still not much enthusiasm for the Kings playoff chances. An energetic positivity about their potential playoff appearance inevitably turns into a patronizing “awww, aren’t they so adorable.” when weighing their playoff odds. Some chalk the Kings’ offensive rating up to them pouncing on teams coasting to the playoffs. This is mostly a fair criticism, given 12 of their 35 wins were +20 point blowouts.
But this argument also misinterprets the Kings offense as an erratic happenstance driven by a young roster as opposed to a tactical masterplan. In a recent interview with The Athletic’s Anthony Slater, Mike Brown candidly discussed his coaching philosophy that has led to the Kings surprising success:
“I’m a firm believer in our job as coaches being able to figure out what your team’s strengths are and then playing to your strength[s]. Right now, our strength is on the offensive side of the ball, as fast as Fox is and Domas’ ability to take the ball off the glass and go coast-to-coast and make the right play.”
Brown has leaned into a playstyle designed around De’Aaron “the fastest guy baseline to baseline” Fox, leading the Kings to the 8th most possessions per game. It’s worth noting here that out of the Kings’ most likely first-round opponents only the Warriors have a higher pace. Meanwhile, the Clippers, Mavs and Suns all find themselves comfortably in the bottom 10. Regardless of how those matchups would shake out (with overwhelming predictions fading Sacramento), there is a clash of offensive philosophies brewing in the Western Conference.
Although the common adage is that “the game slows down in the playoffs,” every NBA championship team since the Warriors dynasty except the Bubble Lakers has been amongst the top 3 in pace out of Conference semi-finalists. Not only that, the teams deliberately trying to “grind the game to a halt” have famously flamed out, be it the iso-heavy Luka-ball (bottom 4 in pace in the playoffs last two years) or the Clippers collapse versus the Nuggets in ‘20-’21 (2nd worst only in playoff pace behind the Mavs). Of course, this doesn’t mean the Kings are on a fast track to the title, and in fact the “fastest” team by pace in the last four seasons have all been unceremonious first round exits. But there are many aspects of this season’s Kings that demonstrate that their offensive philosophy has the potential to produce a compelling first-round upset.
The Kings of Continuity
The most common talking head dismissal of Sacramento has been something that amounts to, “I’m not sure they have the playoff experience necessary to compete this year.” It is far from a novel observation that the Sacramento Kings are in a playoff drought, but I’m still under the impression that people actually perform in the playoff games, not logos. I’m reminded of the Ship of Theseus when addressing this argument: if over centuries of repairs, a ship has all of its individual parts removed and replaced with newer wood, is it still the same ship, or has it transformed into a new object entirely?
Put differently, what if you replaced a windmill of uninspiring head coaches that generally only lasted a single season with Mike Brown, a four-time NBA champion and schematic pioneer of the Warriors all-time great offense? What if you replaced SG journeymen with a Red Baron that arguably ended Ben Simmons’ budding career? What if you replaced notorious bust Marvin Bagley III with an All-Star caliber center that took Lebron’s Championship Cavs to 7 games in round 1? Do you still have a sorry franchise with zero playoff experience? I suppose the answer to that question could still be a deflating “…yes?”, but I’ll contend that the upgraded Kings roster has more practical big-game experience than meets the eye.
While this combination of Kings players doesn’t have playoff experience yet, they have already played in a playoff-like atmosphere in a number of games. At home the Kings have thrived, and they’re comfortably headed into Round 1 with home-court advantage. They’ve won all four of their overtime games this year and their home ppg is sitting at an absurd 123.9 which is good for, oh I don’t know, the 5th best offense of all-time and the highest ppg in the last 40 years.
Although this Kings roster lacks a bit of year-to-year continuity that has generally been crucial to playoff success, their core rotation has played a ton minutes together, with Fox, Sabonis, Huerter, Murray, Barnes, Monk, and Mitchell all playing at least 55 out of their 60 games so far. Their starting 5 has played 1495 possessions together per Cleaning the Glass, by far the most in the league. The next most total possessions out of their likely first round opponents is the Warriors starting squad with less than half that amount, and it was a dizzying scroll downward to find a Clippers, Mavs or Suns lineup that didn’t include traded players. The next closest qualifying lineup was the Clippers starters with Terrance Mann over recently shipped Reggie Jackson clocking in at only 236 minutes, which is over six times less total floor time than Mike Brown’s starters.
That unmatched amount of floor time translates into visible chemistry, and this group is comfortable with their roles. Fox instinctively knows when he has trailers without looking, and his speed provides more spacing for slick assists. Sabonis has excellent touch and vision, stringing together give-and-go bounce passes in close quarters. Contrast this with the stars of their likely R1 matchups, who comprise the All-NBA team for “load management.” Kawhi’s at 36 games played, Curry’s at 38, Durant’s at 39, CP3 is at 41 and PG is at 46. Every single one of these guys has demanded elongated rests and an easier regular season in preparation for the playoffs, but it feels like every analyst has all of these guys playing every game of the playoffs with one day’s rest written in pen.
It feels even harder to believe that these rosters will stay at full strength with teams like the Kings pushing their limits on fastbreaks. The Kings score the 7th most fastbreak points per game, and while De’Aaron Fox is leading layup lines, their opponents will have barely put together their playoff rotation. Almost all Western Conference teams underwent massive overhauls at the deadline, leaving little time to build any chemistry at all as the Sacramento roster keeps on gelling. Not ignorant to the fact that playoff success is driven by superstar talent, jamming together injury-prone All-Star talent with little time to adjust to each other is far from a recipe for surefire success. Just ask the dozens of Brooklyn Nets fans.
Given the bottomless pit of despair the Kings have faced over the last two decades, their fanbase will still be on-balance ecstatic just to make the playoffs. Sure, the Kings aren’t primed to win the title this year, but I wouldn’t be clamoring to play them in the first round. The last few seasons, there’s been mainstream media discussion of teams “tanking” games down the stretch to get a favorable round 1 matchup, and the Kings will be the target of that discourse this year. There’s only one word of advice appropriate for those franchises phoning in their last few games… be careful what you wish for!
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The Reedbound 