3 Players the Sacramento Kings held on to for too long

2. Ben McLemore

During their 16-season-long playoff drought, the Kings did not draft particularly well. In 2017, they selected Ben McLemore with the seventh pick in a draft that still had CJ McCollum, Steven Adams, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Rudy Gobert available. All of those players are still impact players in the NBA while McLemore is out of the league and playing overseas. 

Drafting him was a swing and a miss, but it took the Kings a while to realize that. He got off to a solid start, winning Western Conference Rookie of the Month in November 2013, but after that, not much followed. 

As a sophomore, he averaged a career-high 12.1 points per game and started all 82 games. After that, as he failed to make any jumps, his minutes decreased steadily. By his fourth season in Sacramento, he didn’t even start half the games he played and averaged barely 8 points per game. 

He then signed a multi-year contract with the Memphis Grizzlies, but that didn’t mean his time as a Sacramento King was over. In a surprising move, the Kings traded Garrett Temple to Memphis and brought McLemore back in the summer of 2018. 

He played another 19 games as a King, barely making an impact before the Kings finally let him go. In February 2019, he was waived.