What are the Sacramento Kings doing in free agency?
The Kings have done it again! Just when we had started to hope that they had gotten out of their cycle of poor, impulsive decision making…they seem to have pulled themselves right back into it. On Wednesday afternoon, Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN reported that the Kings had inked George Hill and Zach Randolph to multi-year deals. Hill signed on for three-years at a total of $57 million, with only a partial guarantee in the third year, while Randolph is now under contract for $24 million over two years. On Thursday, it was reported that the Kings also added Vince Carter at $8 million for a single season.
Hill, Randolph and Carter are good players and their signing prices are reasonable in the abstract. But for the Kings, especially given their history, there is a chance that this turns out to be a short-sighted move with unintended negative consequences. Sacramento got a nice haul in this year’s NBA Draft, adding to a roster with numerous promising young players. The Kings were in solid position to start a legit rebuild. They have their own pick in 2018 and a horde of young guys that are essentially unknown commodities at this point.
Letting the young ones play and bottom out this year to get a high lottery pick would have been an easy, prudent path to follow. The Kings could find out the capabilities, limitations and potential of their youth movement, while still securing a high pick in the draft. The Kings 2019 first round pick may end up conveying to the Celtics, so the 2018 Draft could have represented one last surefire chance at a star prospect.
Although they have solid youngsters like De’Aaron Fox, Skal Labissiere and Buddy Hield, the Kings do not currently have an absolute franchise-changing player like Karl-Anthony Towns or Joel Embiid on the roster. So getting another shot at a top pick is critical for this franchise. A high pick doesn’t guarantee a generational talent, of course, but their latest signings will hurt its odds of drafting a franchise cornerstone at the worst time.
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Hill, Randolph and Carter are probably just good enough to help the Kings win enough games to screw up their lottery odds but won’t get them anywhere near the playoffs. In other words, they might be getting the worst of both worlds — they won’t get meaningful playoff experience for their young core, but won’t get the added benefit of a top five pick. The Kings seem to be approaching their current situation as though they have gotten enough young talent and are ready to accelerate their rebuild. This is a risky move that could come back to bite the franchise since they seem to have chosen a path forward that will yield the least return in the long run.
Worse still is that these signings might turn out to be examples of poor financial resource allocation. The Hill, Randolph and Carter contracts certainly don’t cap out the Kings this year or in the immediate future. They do, however, put limits on some of the options the Kings could have used to obtain more assets. With the cap plateauing and falling way short of the league’s projections, cap space will be extra valuable moving forward. The Kings entered the new league year with more space than any other team in the NBA, which is an asset that teams can cleverly use for more purposes than just signing players. They could have absorbed bad salary for assets with potential, sort of like what the Nets did in the D’Angelo Russell trade.
Next summer, when many teams will face potential luxury tax hell due to the wave of terrible contracts signed in 2016, free cap room could reach its peak value. By committing to two multi-year deals, the Kings hindered their potential to become a significant player in 2018 free agency. They probably couldn’t sign a star level player, but when the overwhelming majority of the league is approaching the tax, any teams that have substantial space will have a great opportunity to sign bargain free agent deals. Even though most of Kings’ team is on rookie scale deals with extensions a few years down the line, spending over $30 million per year across multiple seasons on two players over 30 is not a good use of cap space for a rebuilding team.
The thinking behind the deals is reasonable: add veterans that can help the youngsters grow and keep the team competitive. That logic is reasonable. Young teams need guiding voices in the locker room that will instill a sense of professionalism into the team. However, Sacramento’s execution may be flawed here. The issue is not that the Kings signed three grizzled veterans, it is more with the potential financial and on court detriments that could result from the signings.
In terms of the cap, they could have easily found cheaper veterans and kept their books cleaner for the summer of 2018. As for on court impact, the signings are redundant and have created rotational logjams. The Kings now have full platoons at the big and guard spots but nobody on the wing. They aren’t going to find minutes for all the guys that they should be trying to develop.
The Kings now have Willie Cauley-Stein, Skal Labissiere, Randolph, Georgios Papagiannis and Kosta Koufos all fighting for minutes at the four and five spots. We saw what happened to Jusuf Nurkic when he got buried in Denver’s crowded big rotation. He languished and never got a real chance to showcase his skills until he went to Portland via trade. Why add Randolph when he will presumably take up significant minutes in the rotation?
Ditto in the case of Hill. He’s a guy that thinks highly of himself and has good reason to because he’s a very good player — he turned down a potential three-year, $88 million extension with the Jazz last season expecting to get more money on the open market. He will want to start and play big minutes as long as he’s in Sacramento.
Although Hill is a great theoretical fit on so many teams because he can play effectively off of the ball, letting him toggle between the one and two spots will put De’Aaron Fox, Hield, Bogdan Bogdanovic and Garrett Temple in rotational limbo. Fox, Hield and Bogdanovic need to get as many reps as possible. This is especially true for Fox, as young point guards tend to take four or five years to develop into rock solid starters. Burying young players on the bench before getting a feel their capabilities could be a huge mistake.
We can find a few silver linings here that don’t make these signings outright disasters. The Z-Bo deal is short and Hill’s third year is partially guaranteed. Carter could be gone at the end of next year. The Kings didn’t go full Lakers on us and sign guys to four-year albatrosses. They don’t need to run The Process in Sacramento, but a little patience could have gone a long way for the Kings.
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We’ve seen bad judgement rewarded before. Perhaps the Kings will still be bad enough and get a high draft pick, but this is an upsetting move regardless. Sacramento entered the summer in great position after dealing DeMarcus Cousins in a trade that had initially seemed one-sided. But the questionable decision making that has become a staple for a once proud franchise seems to be creeping into the picture once again because George Hill, Zach Randolph and Vince Carter were not the players that this team needed at this point.