On the poll:
For me to consider a pick to be bad, we need two criteria: The player needs to stink, and there had to be an obvious should-have-known better choice, and the more of those, the worse it looks.
Some of the players on the list just are not competitive for "worst" top-ten Sacramento pick:
Hurley is out of consideration - there is no "should have known he would get in a near-fatal car wreck and ruin his career".
Cauley-Stein just wasn't that bad. Should have been better, would have been better if he appropriately prioritzed basketball relative to weed. But the guys immediately after Cauley-Stein stunk a lot worse. There's no real buyer's remorse here.
Hawes has a similar argument to WCS, minus the weed (as far as I know). As a #10 pick there wasn't a lot on the board. Sure, Thaddeus Young had a pretty good career, but nobody's looking back over that and crying over it.
McLemore was pretty bad, but that draft was pretty slim pickings. Yes, there was Giannis, and yes, Petrie gave him a nod on his way out, but Giannis was such a wildcard that he didn't go for another 8 picks. Not enough "shoulda known" to win this prize.
Stauskas was very bad, and seems to have been a Vivek Special - everybody remembers that video from the draft room where the entire draft staff looked to be deferring to Vivek. But there was really *nothing* on the board there. The only player you can really even consider is LaVine, and he didn't break out until his 7th season, it's not like he would have broken out with us anyway.
That leaves four guys really in consideration.
Pervis gets a pretty name as our only ever #1 overall pick...but man, 1989 was a dud of a draft. I guess Glen Rice would have been nice, but Pervis doesn't quite make the cut.
Joe Kleine was actually pretty bad, and he had Mullin, Schrempf, and Oakley coming right in a row after him. Yuck. But on the other hand, he managed to scrape out a 15-year career and gave the Kings almost four years of backup production, so he's safe.
Marvin Bagley will be the board's pick, I'm quite sure. He has been bad (though clearly not the worst player on this list overall), and there was the super-obvious pick of Luka on the board, as well as JJJ and Trae Young. He did give the Kings almost four years before being shown the door, and that's something.
Bagley's only real competition is Thomas Robinson. Robinson was the "What if the Maloofs won't pay for a PF?" pick where Petrie took him instead of his actual target Lillard. Oops. So there's an obvious "shoulda" there. And Robinson gave the Kings nothing. Really, less than nothing, as he was traded during his rookie year while being worth negative Win Shares. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any Kings FRPs that got traded away during their rookie seasons, and certainly nobody that was picked at 5 with Lillard on the board.
This is really close to a tie for me. So which team was hurt more by not getting their guy, the Fox-Buddy-Barnes-Bogdan team, or the Tyreke-Cousins-IT-Salmons team? Coulda had Fox-Luka, or coulda had Cousins-Lillard. I think I have to go with the latter for fit. Thomas Robinson, you are the weakest link!
