Light the beam (on fire and watch it burn)

The Sacramento Kings have to be ready to completely turn the page from their most recent rare successes.

Good morning. It's July 24 and LeBron James is still a free agent. We are on Day 324 of the Aspiration investigation. Let's basketball.

The Kings came up in the context of the Jalen Duren restricted free agency discussion on Thursday, and were mentioned in Wednesday's assessment of the Zone of Shame contenders, but otherwise have been quite under the radar since ... well, since the wheels fell off early in the 2025-26 season. It's worth taking in a full assessment of what's gone on and what's gone wrong since the collapse of the Beam Team.

Why are the Kings, who won 48 games and the No. 3 seed in 2022-23 and 46 games and a play-in spot in 2023-24, both seasons following a 16-season playoff drought, suddenly right back at the bottom of the standings?

The De'Aaron Fox trade was a disaster.
The Kings had slipped from their high by the time Fox requested a trade in January 2025. They'd traded for DeMar DeRozan after the playoff season, and while he was extremely DeMar DeRozan, the fit wasn't ever great. The play-in flameout in 2023-24 wasn't good, and the team was off to a frustrating start in 2024-25, leading to Mike Brown's shocking (but not that shocking) ouster in December. Fox took the fall due to the previous Kings' regime's unwillingness to engage in accountability, and asked to be traded to the Spurs. The Kings got Zach LaVine back along with two firsts and some seconds. LaVine continued to shoot the hell out of the ball when arriving in Sacramento, but the Kings were left with no viable starting point guard in Fox's wake. Famously, the team went from having both De'Aaron Fox and Tyrese Haliburton to neither in, like, three years' time. (Haliburton and Fox were the starting point guards for the last two NBA championship runners-ups.) By the end of that 2024-25 season, the Kings were simply barely playing any point guards – Devin Carter was getting bench minutes, but Domantas Sabonis was effectively the starting point guard alongside Keegan Murray, DeRozan, Keon Ellis and LaVine. It's no wonder the post-Luka Mavericks blew them off the court in the play-in.

The Kings' point guard solution after a full offseason without Fox? Dennis Schroder and Russell Westbrook. When Schroder got traded at the deadline, Carter (again) and good ol' Killian Hayes picked up the leftovers. This is all to say that the Kings had no plan to replace Fox's position, skills or contributions. They just assumed they could run the team without a point guard (despite a large body of evidence suggesting that's not viable in the modern NBA) and then with a set of journeymen point guards. Nope. Absolutely not. Now they've drafted Darius Acuff Jr. to hopefully hold down that position for a while.