Sacramento Kings: Finding A Place For Langston Galloway

Acquired as an ancillary piece in the DeMarcus Cousins trade, Langston Galloway is still waiting on his opportunity to prove himself with the Sacramento Kings.

With a little less than a month left in the regular season, the Sacramento Kings have started to take a different approach.

Head coach Dave Joerger has recently turned to resting veteran players over the last couple of games as the Kings hit the final stretch of the year. As a result, the more inexperienced or seldom-used players on the Kings roster have been given a newfound opportunity for playing time on a given night.

Although players like Skal Labissiere and Georgios Papagiannis quickly come to mind, it also applies to one of the team’s newest additions, Langston Galloway.

Making his move over to Sacramento as part of the DeMarcus Cousins trade, Galloway has been mostly waiting in the wings while both Buddy Hield and Tyreke Evans have quickly been integrated into the team’s rotation since their arrival nearly a month ago.

It’s been the latest turn into his young and interesting career, one that started with him going undrafted in the 2014 NBA Draft.

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However, Galloway quickly rose through the ranks after finding a spot with the New York Knicks in the middle of the 2014-15 season, and rounded out as a solid rotation player for them at the end of last season.

Surprisingly, though, Galloway’s tenure with the Knicks came to an abrupt end last offseason after they didn’t extend him a qualifying offer, thus making him an unrestricted free agent.

That’s where the New Orleans Pelicans swooped in and signed Galloway to a two-year, $10 million deal (with a player option for next season) to improve their guard depth.

In his 55 games with the Pelicans this year, Galloway averaged 8.6 points per game on an effective field goal percentage of 48.9 percent as well as 37.7 percent shooting from three, all in 20.4 minutes per game.

While Galloway’s production has taken a huge hit since his move to Sacramento, that’s slowly starting to change, due to Joerger’s tweaks to the team’s rotation. Yes, it’s just only the last two games, but Galloway has gotten his biggest shine on the court since coming to the Kings, playing nearly 48 minutes in total.

Considering the team’s state at this point in the season, it seems imperative for the Kings to see what they have in Galloway over the team’s final 14 games in the year.

Since both Darren Collison and Ty Lawson are set to become free agents this summer, Galloway could prove to be useful as the Kings possibly have a literal changing of the guard. With his sharpshooting ability and capable defending, Galloway could fill a role and help boost the team’s guard depth for next year.

On top of that, there is Galloway’s player option that has an earlier deadline date before the normal cut off date as Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders points out.

Whether those factors will affect Galloway’s role over the next month obviously remains to be seen. Plus, as Sports Illustrated’s Michael McCann wrote about late last week, Lawson’s looming legal troubles may play an effect on Galloway’s minutes if Lawson’s availability is affected at any point left in the season.

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Testing the waters with Galloway seems like a necessary move for the Kings. At this point, what else do they have to lose?

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