The Sacramento Kings are a playoff team again. After a 16-year wait, the Kings will make the postseason in 2022-23 after mathematically securing a playoff spot in the Western Conference with a 120-80 win over the Portland Trail Blazers on Wednesday.
Sacramento improved to a 46-30 record with the Blazers’ win, meaning they can’t finish worse than the sixth seed in the West. This marks the end of the longest playoff drought in the history of the NBA. Also, there was no franchise in the NFL, MLB, and NHL that had been kept longer out of the postseason than the Kings.
All-Star guard De’Aaron Fox scored 18 points and added six assists against the Blazers, with shooting guard Malik Monk contributing 19 points off the bench.
“I guess this would be like relief. People can’t keep saying it. It’s over and done with,” Fox said after the game. “We want to do bigger things. But [16] years, it’s a long time. It feels great to get it off of us.”
The Kings made several moves in the past two years that set them up for success in 2022-23. They swapped talented guard Tyrese Haliburton for All-Star center Domantas Sabonis last season and followed that up by hiring former Golden State Warriors assistant Mike Brown as their new head coach. Both moves paid off, as Sabonis has been playing on an All-NBA level while Brown built one of the league’s best offenses.
But the Kings don’t want to be content with just making the playoffs. They want to prove they belong there and continue building on this successful run.
“We know what our goal is. It’s not just to make the playoffs. It’s to make noise there,” Monk told reporters.
