“The Kings had a bad offseason actually” is such a weird hill to die on that I honestly respect the commitment.
Not for nothing but the Kings and Pacers rosters aren’t that far apart in average age, with the only “old” King getting huge roster minute being Harrison Barnes, who is 30 years old. Meanwhile a lot of the Pacers surprise success this season has come on the backs of the two guys they’ve been trying to showcase to the Lakers all year. Ideally they’d be able to pawn those guys off for more assets and really kick their rebuild off but most of the contenders around the league at this point have fully exhausted their resources or are smart enough to not give up a bunch of picks for a three month rental of Myles Turner and two more years of Buddy’s contract.
While the Pacers have three picks in the upcoming draft, none of those picks are gonna wind up being very good unless the Pacers start playing tank games sooner rather than later (They have the Celtics and Cavs picks this season but both of those could wind up being in the mid-late 20s range).
I really liked Benn going into the draft but his defense has honestly been worse than advertised and I’m pretty sure the 10 free throws a night he’s been getting in Indiana would have been two or three a night on the Kings because the refs hate us. Also us drafting him would probably mean no Huerter and/or Monk and also an even bigger hole at the wing (while Benn is as big as a lot of wings, he’s pretty much exclusively been a guard in the NBA).
Meanwhile, Pacers fans are stuck in the same holding pattern we were with Buddy Hield where we would try to convince ourselves that he’s actually secretly very good while we wait for the Lakers to get desperate enough to trade for him because no other team in their right mind would trade for a 30-year-old volume shooting two guard who is bad at defense and making decisions.
Of course the huge pivot point for the Pacers is Myles’s impending free agency. The guy’s had a good enough year that he’s probably gonna demand a huge deal this summer and, while he’s young enough that he could still fit their timeline, hamstringing your rebuild by offering your 4th option role player a massive contract one year into a full reconstruction doesn’t really seem like the smartest way to do things (see: Vlade giving Buddy a nine figure extension pretty much the first chance he could resulting in the Kings having no cap room to work with for the next couple of seasons).
Tyrese is also eligible for a max extension this summer which is, as we all know, when the real fun begins (I.e. random dudes on the internet start ripping him to shreds for not being good at defense or not leaving an imprint or whatever).
It’s also yet to be seen how this hot start to the season has affected their notoriously anti-tanking owner’s rubber stamping of a couple of rebuilding seasons. How many more games do they have to win this season before their owner gets greedy and asks Kevin Pritchard to trade picks and some of their lesser prospects for guys to help them win now?
For all the talk about the Kings hamstringing their future to make the play-in, they only have one outgoing pick that’ll probably (knock on wood) convey in 2024 at somewhere around the 15-25 range and have a surplus of second round picks to tool with/sell to the Rockets so they can draft KJ Martin. Also the guy they traded that pick for turned out to be better than anticipated to the point he’s getting MIP talk and is still under contract for the next for years on incredibly affordable money, which I guess counts as treadmilling if the treadmill in question is a Scrooge MacDuck style dive into a pool of found money.
Nothing about what this Kings team is doing seems fluky or unsustainable. If anything, there’s ample room for improvement but also clear ways for that improvement to be achieved. After 16 years of waffling and desperate grabs for assets that would rarely pan out (I’m looking at you, Derrick Williams signing), we’ve finally advanced past the asset accumulation stage of team building and are at the spending assets to get even better stage. This isn’t to say that the Kings need to go out there and trade all our picks and pick swaps for the first disgruntled star that wants a move but to say that the Kings have finally moved beyond “Hopefully this young guy pans out so we can someday eventually be good again”.
You may not have liked the plan or think that it’s not the right way to go about things but thus far it’s been working and probably working better than a full blow it up rebuild would have given the circumstances of this franchise in regards to its standing in the NBA hierarchy.
I’m not trying to say everything is all sunshine and rainbows. We’re still only 20 games into the season. But if you’re going to go through the motions of the facade of being a Kings fan, at least try to act even a teeny little bit excited by what has been the best stretch of basketball by this franchise in 18 years.