Serious question: are the Sacramento Kings a basketball franchise right now or postgraduate NBA talent pipeline? Have we realized that they at one point had and let go of Tyrese Haliburton (NBA Finals last year), De’Aaron Fox, Mike Brown, and Harrison Barnes (all in the NBA Finals this year)?
In Sactown, players arrive with potential and coaches arrive with ideas. Then they leave scorned with a chip on their shoulder to get their championship credentials with someone else’s logo on their chest.
This
isn’t a eulogy for Fox or Mike Brown. It isn’t even really about Tyrese Haliburton, though we’ll get there. This is about a franchise that keeps finding the right people at exactly the wrong time, in exactly the wrong environment, and then watching those people walk out the door and become who Sacramento always needed them to be.
The indictment isn’t that Sacramento drafted badly; no,they found the right ones. They just consistently created conditions that made leaving feel like the only logical next move.
Start with Haliburton. The Kings traded him to Indiana for Domantas Sabonis in February 2022, a deal that at the time made a certain kind of front-office sense. Sabonis came, helped Sacramento end a 16-year playoff drought, and delivered the franchise’s best season in nearly two decades. The Kings won 48 games in 2022-23, earned the Western Conference’s No. 3 seed, and for one genuinely beautiful moment looked like they were next.
Then they ran into the Warriors and lost in 7 games. At the time, it felt like a painful but necessary lesson. Young teams lose before they win. Michael Jordan went through Detroit. Stephen Curry went through L.A. and San Antonio. Sacramento looked like a team taking its first punch on the road to something bigger. It turns out that wasn’t the beginning unfortunately. The Kings spent the next two years proving that Golden State wasn’t the cause of the problem. The Warriors were just the messenger.
Because while Sacramento was losing to Golden State, Haliburton was quietly becoming one of the most clutch players in the league. He made four game-tying or go-ahead shots in the final five seconds of the fourth quarter or overtime in a single postseason. Every time the Kings lost three straight, Haliburton highlights started circulating like a seasonal allergy. Every fourth-quarter collapse came with a fresh round of “remember when they traded him?” discourse. Sacramento couldn’t escape him because Indiana kept winning and Haliburton kept looking like exactly the kind of star you spend a decade trying to find, only to trade him for the guy who was supposed to be the safer bet.
Then it got worse. Mike Brown was fired on December 27, 2024, after the Kings stumbled to a 13-18 start. Six weeks later, Fox was traded to the San Antonio Spurs in a three-team deal that returned Zach LaVine. That’s what Sacramento decided a 28-year-old All-Star point guard was worth after helping drag the franchise out of a 16-year drought.
One year later, in a cruel twist, Fox/Barnes and Brown are both going to the NBA Finals as opponents. Fox and Barnes in San Antonio, surrounded by Victor Wembanyama and a cast of young stars, having helped stun the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder in a Game 7 road environment that would have broken a less resilient group. Brown is in New York, coaching the Knicks to their first Finals appearance since 1999, eleven wins deep into a run that has looked remarkably composed for a team everyone counted out.
Somewhere over the next few weeks, someone from that ex-Kings group is going to stand on a stage holding the Larry O’Brien Trophy. Kings fans will see a former coach and a former franchise player and another June spent imagining alternate timelines. The cruelest part is that neither outcome will feel surprising.
Some franchises build champions, but good ol’ Sacramento just keeps writing recommendation letters.
