The Sacramento Kings are awful. They finished with a bottom-four record in the NBA this year. Yet despite the dire situation, there is a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. 

I had no hope for the Kings at the start of the year. They were running the season back with a team that lost in the play-in the previous year, and had only gotten older since. However, I didn’t think they were going to be this unsuccessful. Ranking bottom in both offense and defense, they are truly awful at everything on the court. At this point, it really can’t get worse. 

The weird thing is, the Kings have had a couple of valuable players, but they continually screw up with how they decide to use them. Keon Ellis, their beloved guard who didn’t get much playing time, was traded for DeAndre Hunter, who played a whole 51 minutes for the Kings before being lost for the season due to a freak eye injury. This terrible trade didn’t even result in any draft picks for the Kings. The Kings have other good players, and yet they did not trade any of them. Rumors swirled around center Domantas Sabonis, and he ended up shut down for the year due to injury. Even though they are a bottom team in the league, they don’t have cap space. Only the Kings could create the worst team in the league and still be incredibly expensive. 

The Kings, though, will always be the Kings. When they need to win, they lose. When they need to lose, they win. That is exactly what the Kings did to end the year. They finished with an 8-12 record in their last 20 games, blowing their chance at the top odds for the first overall pick, dropping their chances from 14% to 10.5% chance. Even after this winning streak, they had a chance to secure the 4th-best draft odds, and instead of tanking and losing, the Kings blew it like they always do and won the game. 

The Kings do have a couple of young players to be excited about. Players like Maxime Raynaud and Nique Clifford have shown flashes of being potential starting players or rotational pieces on a good team. If they do not extend a player like guard Zach Lavine nor move Sabonis, they could have some cap room to use to build around these young players.

At the end of the year, the Kings finished 22-60 with the fifth-worst record in the league. And even then they did not get a top 4 pick. The Kings ended up with the 7th pick while they had top 5 odds to get a top 4 pick. The 60 loss season only resulted in the 7th pick! It’s looking like another year of bad basketball in Sacramento, and hopefully they will fully commit to the rebuild and eventually get good.