With All-Star Weekend in the rear-view mirror, the Sacramento Kings sit at seventh place in the Western Conference with a record of 33-24. At the start of this NBA season, The Plank anonymously polled 47 random student fans from Jesuit High School Sacramento, asking them what their Playoff expectations are for the Kings this year. Their confidence was clear: 52.1% said that this season’s team can make it past the second round, something the franchise hasn’t accomplished since 2002. Let’s see how those expectations stack up after 57 games.

With about two thirds of the season gone by, the West has stratified into three distinct tiers of teams: the four best teams are the Minnesota Timberwolves, Oklahoma City Thunder, Los Angeles Clippers, and Denver Nuggets; the five teams with sub 0.500 records, and then everyone else in between. The eye-test seems to say that the Kings belong in the upper-echelon of Western teams: Domantas Sabonis is outperforming his All-NBA season from last year and leads the league in triple-doubles, Keegan Murray has taken a leap forward, and Harrison Barnes seems to have discovered the fountain of youth, producing his most efficient season to date. De’Aaron Fox, while inconsistent at times, is averaging the 10th most points per game in the league this year, and he and Sabonis are backed up by a deeper bench this season. 

While this team may look better than last year, the numbers say that short of a historic postseason run, the Kings will fail to reach our student’s lofty expectations and make it past the second round.

A team’s net-rating is a measure of how many points they score minus how many points they give up. At the All-Star break, the Kings had a net-rating of 0.5, the 17th-best in the league. Of the 80 teams to make it to the Conference Finals in the last 20 years, only two had lower net-ratings than this year’s Kings. Both of those teams came from last year’s Playoffs; the fairy-tale Miami Heat, who against all odds made it to the NBA Finals, and the Los Angeles Lakers, who overhauled their roster at the trade deadline only to lose in four games to the eventual champion Nuggets. These teams succeeded in part because they had great defenses. The post-trade deadline Lakers were the best defense in the league and the Miami Heat allowed the second-fewest points per game. 19 of the last 20 champions have had a top 10 defense, with the one exception being the 2018 Warriors who ranked 11th in defensive rating that year. To make a deep Playoff run, a team needs to play defense. The Kings may have a slightly higher net rating than those Heat and Lakers teams, but their defense pales in comparison, at 19th best in the league. As we saw in the Kings’s first round-exit last year, even a historically great offense doesn’t matter if you can’t get stops on the other end.

Defense is so important in a Playoff setting because offense can be unreliable. 44% of the shots that the Kings took this year were three-pointers, a respectable rate for a team gifted with so many great shooters; however, this is not sustainable. Throughout the league’s history, only three teams have ever made it past the second round shooting more threes than the Kings. Last year’s Celtics did so, almost completing a 3-0 comeback against the eighth seeded Miami Heat. They lost Game Seven at home in blowout fashion, shooting nine of 42 from three-point territory. The 2018 Houston Rockets almost defeated the Kevin Durant-led Golden State Warriors, but then missed 27 threes in a row in Game seven to choke the series. The only team to make it past the Conference Finals launching more than 44% of their shots from beyond the arc is the 2021-22 Warriors, armed with two of the greatest shooters the game has ever seen. In 77 years of NBA history, only three teams have reached the third round shooting as many long balls as the Kings do, and the Kings don’t have a Steph Curry.

Coming out of the All-Star break, the Kings were the eighth seed. Looking back 20 years in time, only two eighth seeds or lower at this point in the season have advanced to the Conference Finals: the 2023 Lakers and the 2021 Atlanta Hawks. While it’s not impossible, it is unlikely. Both of these teams went on to drastically improve in the standings after the break, but the Kings do not have such an easy road to earning a higher seed; their remaining schedule strength is the 8th most difficult in the league. The 5th through 10th seeds in the West, save for the Phoenix Suns, all have easier schedules going forward, with the Dallas Mavericks and Warriors having much easier ones, ranked at 20th and 25th respectively. The Kings are unlikely to improve much in the standings as other Western Conference teams look to take advantage of their lighter schedules and escape the Play-in Tournament. 

That’s not to say the season is hopeless, though. The Kings still play great in the clutch, and if a game comes down to the wire, the Kings are more likely than not to pull away. The Kings are tied with the seventh highest win percentage through 27 clutch games this season – in those crucial minutes, despite shooting below 75% from the free-throw line, the Kings have the third highest effective field goal percentage. The bottom line is that when it matters, the Kings can make shots and win games. To save their In-Season Tournament bid, the Kings came back from a 24-point deficit against the Warriors earlier this year. In the Playoffs, teams more than ever need to be able to close out games, and the Kings have proven themselves more than capable.  

Overall, though, this season seems bound to disappoint. History is against the Kings this year and when all is said and done, they will have most likely added another year to that 22-year long Conference Finals drought, coming up short of what fans at Jesuit believed they could accomplish this season. While it’s unlikely the Kings make a deep Playoff-run, advancing to the second round would be a great achievement in its own right. If the Kings can win a first round series, it means progress for the team; it means that last season was not a fluke, and that the Sacramento Kings are here to stay. That in its own right can be counted as a tremendous success.