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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.
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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.
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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…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/fox-brown-prove-kings-keep-220700930.html
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Publish date : 2026-05-31 22:07:00
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