Same as it ever was – David Byrne/Talking Heads
Well, it’s Groundhog Day…again… – Phil Connors
It’s not the despair…I can stand the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand – John Cleese
Lather, rinse, repeat – Head & Shoulders
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results – Rita Mae Brown
We had a better deal two days ago – Vlade Divac
It’s not the itching, it’s the swelling – David Letterman
I come here not to pee in your Cheerios. I come here not to remind you that my old boss used to say, “If you have to eat a turd, don’t chew it on the way down.” I come here to commiserate, not to depress. To revel in your loyalty. To respect and admire your tolerance for pain. To celebrate your ability to find humor in what would otherwise be a stark and bottomless existence.
The grooming of a Kings fan has taken place over decades, but it seemingly begins the moment you jump on (“under” might be more appropriate) the bandwagon, except for the select few that cut their teeth on C-Webb, Vlade (v1.0), Peja, J-Will and Doug (v1.0). Whether it was geography or genetics or bad clams that brought you to this point, you made the 1 in 30 choice to root for the Sacramento Kings. That’s right. While there are very likely people close to you that root for teams with guys named Steph or LeBron, you have hitched your wagon to a team that never gets in the way of your April – June plans (except for lottery and draft days).
Show of hands: When you read any national article that ranks anything NBA, how do you search for how rank the Kings are? Power rankings? We start at the bottom and work our way up, right? Owner /front office rankings? Under 25 talent? Head coach? As a fan base, we search to find a reason to “could be worse” our lot in life (thank you, new Blazers ownership! Bless you, next team that hires Luke Walton as a head coach! Thanks for taking Scott Perry off our hands, Knicks!)
How did you feel going into the ping pong ball drop? Did you already have “Fi…” on your lips, just waiting to exhale the “xxxxxx!!!!!!”? Did you pause to think about how Spurs fans just expect the #1 pick, even when they are not in the lottery? And how on the few occasions that the Kings moved up in the draft, they still screwed it up (they moved up and then back down a little in ’17 due to the Philly trade, and Bagley’d the ’18 pick). With that as a backdrop, was your enthusiasm for moving up at least a little muted? Is that a tick burrowing into the back of your neck, or is it just the foreboding of the past becoming the present and making your future your past?
And yet, here we are, trying to laugh off the pain of Mike Brown winning an NBA championship in the wake of the Kings indicating he is the wrong fit for the supposed direction that has never existed. We are eagerly scouring the web for the latest mock draft rankings, big boards, and player profiles on at least TBD players. We’re all a bunch of sick, hopeful, hopeless souls. We are a social experiment gone horribly wrong. We are charted by very confused alien life forces.
Anyone surprised by having the 7th pick?
The Utah Jazz are $500k lighter in the wallet and selecting 2nd. Your Sacramento Kings took their version of the high road and will be selecting 7th. Think the Kings would pay $500k right now to swap picks with the Jazz?
The drop from five to seven is not especially egregious, if the first four picks play out per consensus (Dybantsa, Peterson, Boozer and Wilson, in whatever order you would like to place them). But if a Wagler or Acuff jumps into the top four, one of those guys would be available at five. This can be parsed in a lot of different ways, but at the end of the day the talent pool is at its deepest at the very beginning of the draft, and it will be six players shallower by the time the Kings pick…if they pick. The “play-in or bust” mentality of this organization could easily see the Kings shipping out the pick (with contract as needed) for the next sub-elite player that, in their eyes, will bring coveted short-term wins to 2026-27.
It is a fair statement to say that Steph Curry, Nikola Jokic, Paul George and Reggie Miller and others were had at 7 or later in their drafts. It would also be a fair statement to note that these guys are the rare exception. The percentages say that we will get a player, and history tells us that we will be disappointed in him if does become elite. There are those of us who are already voicing disappointment over Keegan Murray, and those of us who were not enamored of De’Aaron Fox. There are those of us that would like to see Domantas Sabonis moved to clear a path for Max Raynaud. That is how fleeting a player’s standing with his fan base can be, especially a fan base that has been treated so poorly by the team that it so desperately roots for.
Before this gets dark, I guess that we should look for a bright side. Progress has been made. For the longest time, ex-Kings players would leave Sacramento and wash out of the league. But as the playoffs and NBA Finals have reminded us, there are plenty of ex-Kings reaching higher levels in their new haunts (Fox may have disappointed there, but he got to the Finals), so we have gotten a little bit better at prospecting?
Retention, not so much, but yay for prospecting?
There is a segment of the fanbase that has been at this for a very long time. In some cases, more than 40 years (and those are charted in dog years, so it feels like 280). This is a group that not only does not buy green bananas, they have taken to eating the banana bread bananas right off the rack. This is a group that fondly remembers when the Derek Smith trade was the biggest mistake this organization ever made. And this is a group that legitimately wonders if they will ever, EVER, see the Sacramento Kings in an actual playoff game ever again.
There is another segment of the fanbase that has never seen the Kings advance to the 2nd round of the playoffs. Think about that. If you are under 25, you either weren’t alive or have little/no recollection of the Kings in the 2nd round of the playoffs. That is stunning.
And that is the fan base that is preparing to “welcome” the 7th pick of the 2026 NBA draft to Sacramento. I don’t know about you, but NIL money and another year of college life doesn’t look too shabby in comparison. I don’t think that any of the projected top 10 will pull out of the draft, but you can’t tell me that this is not at least a conversation piece between agents and their clients. “So, it looks like it could be Sacramento. Or you could go back to Arkansas / Houston / Illinois.” And before you know it, you are welcoming Yaxel Lendeborg to town.
The organization has become the multi-vehicle crash for which you cannot avert your eyes. The “golden age” of Kings basketball has become such a distant memory that there are fans who would rather ship the organization somewhere else and start over with an expansion team. Again, that is stunning. Give 30 fanbases that option, and how many do you think would take it? Well, I guess that would be another list that you would read from the bottom up.
Other fan bases receive ire and venom and envy from other fan bases. Kings fans receive pity. We are pitied for the team that we elect to root for. Pitied. We hold onto each other as a community, always waiting for that odds-defying miracle. And we’ll do it again, because we are Kings fans.
You sick, silly bastards. I love you, you knuckleheads. Just wait ‘til next Millenium.
Nice arena, though – section214
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