The Kings are in the worst position possible: they’re really bad with no incentive to lose

No one envies the Brooklyn Nets given what that team has been through for the past several years, since dreams of title contention fell apart. The Nets mortgaged their future in a futile attempt to win a championship. Brooklyn never really got particularly close to that goal, and the bill came due, resulting in a years-long rebuild without the benefit of high draft picks.

The Nets finally have the rights to their own first-round draft pick in 2018-19, though all things held even, Brooklyn would rather fight for the No. 8 seed in the East than the No. 1 pick.

But filling the Nets-shaped hole in our hearts this season will be the Sacramento Kings.

The Kings pulled a Brooklyn gambit with much weirder stakes. In 2015, Sacramento — working on a decade-long playoff drought, and trying desperately to build a winner around all-star center DeMarcus Cousins — pulled a Netsian deal with the Sixers to free up cap space. The Nets had been chasing rings, the Kings just wanted to get enough cap space to get enough players to get above .500.

They still didn’t get there. The Kings ended up signing Rajon Rondo, Kosta Koufos, and Marco Belinelli with their cap space. That helped increase their win total by four, which means they only missed the playoffs by ... eight games.

The Nets fell well short of their title ambitions, yes. And they paid dearly for it. The Kings had a much lower aim, also fell well short, and are now paying dearly.

It’s really remarkable to recall just how botched the Kings’ gambit had been. Remember, they’d fired Michael Malone (who got along well with Cousins) as the center recovered from illness during the 2014-15 season. They hired George Karl, who almost immediately began a power struggle with Cousins. It was in this setting the Kings’ braintrust decided to trade future draft picks for immediate cap space. It all blew up spectacularly, of course.

Within a couple years, Karl had been fired and Cousins had been traded. Next June, the final bill for the Hinkie Heist will come due: the Celtics or Sixers will get the Kings’ first-round draft pick, no matter where it lands.

The Kings, by the way, are projected as one of the worst teams in the NBA. They won 27 games last season, and that seems like a reasonable estimate for this season.

Here’s the craziest part: the executive who made the absolutely wild decision to bet on cap space in 2015 at the cost of pick swaps and the 2019 unprotected pick — Vlade Divac — is still in charge of the Kings’ front office!

On what planet does this make any sense?

The power of the NBA Draft is one of the saving graces of losing in the league. Losing that benefit is what has made the Nets’ last few seasons so hard to watch. Brooklyn was completely awful last season, and owed their pick to the Cavaliers. It’s so hard for fans to keep hope alive when the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t months away, but years. So it goes with the Kings and the Kings fandom.

Trading unprotected draft picks is a nasty business to be in. Why do you think Miami is so focused on landing Jimmy Butler? The Heat traded some unprotected picks for Goran Dragic, and because of that can’t afford to be bad in the early 2020s. It would be too painful to watch those picks disappear while in the lottery. The Kings were betting that a pick swap in 2017 with the Sixers wouldn’t be a big deal (it cost Sacramento the No. 3 pick, which Philly used to get Markelle Fultz at No. 1 — No. 3 ended up being Jayson Tatum, while the Kings got De’Aaron Fox at No. 5) and bet that Sacramento would be good enough with Cousins and company by 2019 that the forfeited pick wouldn’t be too high.

Whoops.

Billy King, the general manager who built the Nets’ old house of cards around aging Kevin Garnett, aging Paul Pierce, Joe Johnson, and Deron Williams, did so at the behest of ownership, but still paid the price of his job once things fell apart. That Divac has not done the same is miraculous. You would certainly understand if his continued presence added a sense of dread to the proceedings of 2018-19 for the fandom.

So what is there to root for now? Player development. Just as Nets fans have heaped attention and praise on Spencer Dinwiddie, Caris LeVert, and Jarrett Allen, so too will Kings fans on Fox, Marvin Bagley, Harry Giles, and Buddy Hield. If the Kings become a decent team again in the short term, it will be because of these young players the team has collected in those years when it’s kept a high draft pick.

It’s just a shame that another likely awful season won’t bear any fruit. It makes for a little more misery in an already tough situation.