5 Worst Moves In Sacramento Kings History

#4. 76ers Trade

Vlade Divac had been on the job as the general manager of the Kings for just about a month in 2015 when he orchestrated one of the most questionable trades in NBA history.

Divac and the Kings sent Nik Stauskas, Carl Landry, and Jason Thompson to the 76ers for essentially nothing in what was a salary dump, but it was the draft picks and swaps that were dealt that made the transaction so lopsided. Inexplicably (which happens to be a word that appears a lot in this article), Sacramento sent over the rights to swap draft picks in 2017 as well as a completely unprotected first round pick in 2019.

The 76ers exercised the pick swap and moved up from the fifth pick to the third in the 2017 Draft (and eventually the first), and the rights to the unprotected 2019 pick were sent to the Celtics in the Markelle Fultz trade. So in the long run, the 76ers didn’t end up with much other than Markelle Fultz, who was not around for much of a long run at all.

What did the Kings do with the cap room that they now had? Signed Rajon Rondo, Marco Bellineli, and Kosta Koufos.

But there was a huge potential for this trade to backfire in the Kings’ face. They got lucky when De’Aaron Fox fell all the way to that fifth pick that the 76ers swapped, and they had an unpredictable improvement during the 2018-’19 season which made their 2019 pick the last one of the lottery. In pretty much any other year, the Kings would have been forced to give up a top-10 selection.