The first half of the season was a rollercoaster ride for the Sacramento Kings. Not only did they fire their coach, trade away their franchise icon, and completely overhaul the rest of their roster, but they also largely underperformed relative to their preseason expectations.
After coming into the season hoping to make a deep playoff run in the Western Conference, the Kings are a pedestrian 28-27, and if the playoffs started today, they would need to battle it out in the play-in tournament as they are ninth in the standings.
To make matters worse, there is a good chance that the second half of the season could be a lot worse.
Sacramento has one of the toughest schedules in the NBA for the rest of the season
Now, before we continue, while many people will call this the second half of the season, the Kings have already played two-thirds (55 of 82) of their games. So, this stretch only makes up one-third of their record.
Anyway, the invaluable website Tankathon has a feature that ranks each team's remaining strength of schedule. Based on that, the Kings have the second-highest remaining SOS (strength of schedule), behind only the Phoenix Suns (another middling Western Conference team in a similar situation). For reference, the website says that "[a] high strength of schedule is good for tanking," which is the exact opposite of what the Kings want to be doing.
The Kings still have ten games against the top eight teams in each conference. Specifically, they have two games against the Cleveland Cavaliers, two against the Denver Nuggets, and one against the Boston Celtics, Memphis Grizzlies, New York Knicks, and Oklahoma City Thunder.
One could see this and say that the metric is biased against the Kings because they are a middle-of-the-pack team in a tougher conference. However, similar measures show that the Kings had a fairly easy schedule prior to the All-Star break.
Dunks & Threes has a version of SOS that looks at how good the teams they have already played are (based on the Estimated Plus-Minus of the players on the teams they have faced thus far). According to that, the Kings had the seventh-easiest schedule in the NBA.
Five of the six teams with easier schedules than the Kings are now in the top three in our conference. Meanwhile, the Kings wasted their opportunity to juice their record, and now, they face an uphill battle as they try to make it out of the play-in tournament.
As it stands, the Kings are 3.5 games back from the sixth-seeded Los Angeles Clippers, which is where they would need to get to in order to avoid playing in the play-in for the second straight year. And based on the caliber of opponents they have in front of them, accomplishing this feat seems highly unlikely.