After a horrible start and injuries to their key players, the Sacramento Kings looked primed to hang their heads in shame. Instead, they’re thriving. How have they been doing it?
We’ve seen it a million times before. The Sacramento Kings face some sort of misfortune or adversity and the body language shifts. The players get frustrated, the losses start piling up, and another season is lost. After an 0-5 start and quick freak injuries to De’Aaron Fox and Marvin Bagley, the 2019-20 season started looking like a preview for a movie we had all seen before.
Now, however, the Kings are knocking on the door of .500 basketball, an incredible turn-around from where they were a couple of weeks ago. The reason for the seemingly out-of-nowhere success? The team has kept its head up and bought in on both ends of the court. Now, the team appears to have a model in place for sustainable winning.
To get a glimpse as to the roller-coaster ride that has been this young season so far, let’s see where the season started, where we are now, and where the team might end up.
Where They Were
It’s nearly impossible to overstate how far the mood of the fanbase had plummeted the night of October 30th, when the Kings got booed at Golden 1 Center after blowing a game against the Charlotte Hornets and not looking particularly good while doing it. It takes a lot for Kings fans to boo their squad, but if there were ever a time to do it, it would have been then.
After getting embarrassed by the Phoenix Suns and the Utah Jazz within the first three games, the Kings were facing a rare October “must-win” against a bottom-of-the-barrel Charlotte squad. The response? A 118-111 loss that wasn’t as close as the score indicated. The vibe inside the building was bad. The vibe amongst the fanbase at large was even worse. It wasn’t exactly clear what was to blame, or what was to be done about it. There was a large clamor for Vlade to fire Luke Walton. Many others were publicly stating they were done watching altogether.
Most draining? The complete lack of effort. We knew these guys were talented, albeit coming off of a more-exhausting-than-we-thought preseason trip to India. So why did their on-the-court vibe feel like they didn’t care? It started feeling like Sacramento was going to wake up one morning to one of those ESPN exposes detailing “what went wrong”.
Things were grim, and got only grimmer when De’Aaron Fox went down with a Grade 3 ankle sprain suffered during practice, of all things. Marvin Bagley already went down in the season opener. With all this adversity, the playoffs appeared to be a pipe dream.
However…