The Sacramento Kings are a team back in disarray right now, having suffered Play-In elimination at the hands of former Golden State Warriors guard Klay Thompson and the Dallas Mavericks at Golden 1 Center on Wednesday.
In the hours following the loss, the Kings swiftly parted ways with General Manager Monte McNair, replacing him with long-time executive Scott Perry. But that may not be the only change coming in Sacramento who are facing an increasingly disastrous situation with a host of different challenges.
Stephen Curry and the Warriors ended the Kings era before it even began
Yet it's not long ago that the Kings could have been regarded as one of the best young teams in the league. After 17-straight years of missing the playoffs, it looked like they had turned the corner when they surged up the Western Conference standings and finished as the third-seed in 2022-23.
They had a franchise point guard in De'Aaron Fox, an All-Star big in Domantas Sabonis, and finally looked to have a stable, long-term head coach in place with former Warrior assistant Mike Brown.
Then Stephen Curry happened.
Everything was going perfectly for the Kings when they jumped out to a 2-0 lead in their first-round series against the sixth-seed Warriors. Even after Golden State responded with a pair of wins back at Chase Center, the series was pushed to seven where Sacramento would have the opportunity to advance on their home floor.
Curry had other ideas, going for a memorable 50-point performance on the road to lift his team to victory. It was certainly disappointing for the Kings, but the future still appeared bright given six of their top seven players in that series were all 26-years-old or younger.
But Sacramento have since missed the playoffs in each of the past two seasons, and perhaps more importantly have returned to the sort of questionable and reckless decision-making that plagued the franchise for the near two decades prior.
During the offseason they thought DeMar DeRozan was the answer, despite the fact that the veteran hasn't won a playoff series himself since 2018. Much to the shock and displeasure of many externally, Brown was fired as head coach in late December. Just over a month later and the relationship between the franchise and Fox deteriorated to the point where he was traded in a three-team deal, with Zach LaVine brought back despite he and DeRozan having failed as a duo in Chicago.
Now they've replaced their GM and question marks surround almost their entire roster, including the core three of Sabonis, DeRozan and LaVine. Can they even get anything of value out of those three players to make a complete tear down worthwhile?
Does any of this even happen if Curry doesn't go off in Game 7 and had the Kings advanced out of that series? Maybe it does, but in an alternate universe that may have afforded Brown more time, and strengthened the long-term commitment between Fox and the franchise.
The Kings were on the precipice of building something special, but now in part to Curry's greatness during that 2023 series, they sit again as a laughing stock of the league and without much of a future.