Some teams build through the draft. Some live in the lottery for more than a decade and are spinning their wheels. How did the Sacramento Kings get here?
The last time I looked back at the last 10 first-round draft picks for a team was looking down the lens of a team that often used draft picks and young players as a way to make moves and bring in star players. The Sacramento Kings are quite different. While most teams have to go back to 2010 at least to fill out these lists, the Kings have 10 first-round draft picks in the last six years.
The Kings have been in a perpetual state of tanking and restarting around young cores, the fear of any team committing to a rebuild. Sacramento has not hosted a playoff game since the 2005-2006 season and have not made it past the first round since 2004.
Given the perpetual purgatory the purple and black have been in, this will be more than just ranking the past picks. We will also be analyzing who they passed on and possibly why they did so to understand just how we got to the longest current playoff drought in the sport.
Every team makes mistakes drafting. Not being able to fall back into a franchise-changing star since possibly DeMarcus Cousins if not Peja Stojakovic. Looking back at how the franchise screwed up the Cousins era is a way to figure out how to not screw up the next potential era.