Sacramento was the biggest surprise of the past season as they won 18 more games than they had won the previous season. Mike Brown rightfully became the first-ever unanimous NBA Coach of the Year. Sacramento had the best offense in the league but one of the worst defenses at the same time, defending even worse than the Suns’ teams led by Mike D’Antoni in the mid 00s. The Kings’ fast paced transition based offense managed to crush their opponents with a great inside out combo of Sabonis and Fox. Defensively, the team was decent to good in 3 key areas: TO/rate, defensive rebounding and opponent FT/rate, however they were outright awful in opponent shooting as they ranked #26 at both defending the rim and 3pts shooting. In the playoffs, if it wasn’t for Fox’s injury, they would have probably beaten the Warriors in a series where they surprisingly showed that they can be decent on defense at times.
2023/24 OUTLOOK:
Sacramento will practically have the same players on the roster that they had last season, so continuity will be one of their key aspects this year. They added more shooting depth by adding Chris Duarte from Indiana and the reigning EuroLeague MVP Sasha Vezenkov from Olympiacos. We can expect the Kings to be once again an elite offensive team, so their main challenge will be to improve their defense. However, they made no effort in the offseason to add more defensive talent to their roster. Could this poor defense be just a question of effort?
The Kings had a relatively injury-free season in 2022-23 as only Sabonis among their key players was a bit limited during the second half of the season. This is unlikely to happen two years in a row. Last year’s rookie Keegan Murray might be the player whose impact might increase this year. He had an irregular season last year, something normal for a rookie, but his shooting ability is legit and he might have a bigger role on offense this season, which might give the team a competitive boost.
Sacramento is in one of the most competitive divisions in the league this season. So, if they manage to win their division again, that would already be a huge achievement on its own.