The NBA regular season wrapped up with a Kings victory over the top-seeded Houston Rockets on Wednesday night, but hotly-contested debates for award picks are only beginning to percolate.
While Sacramento’s intriguing collection of young players showed tremendous promise, De’Aaron Fox, Buddy Hield, Bogdan Bogdanovic and company will likely need to wait at least a year to find their names scribbled on individual-award ballots tabulated by Ernst & Young. This season, the only certainty is that Nos. 5 and 8 will garner votes for the two All-Rookie Teams among a strong class of first-year peers.
However, we don’t have to wait until the official announcements on June 25 to determine which Kings standouts deserve to take home team-only hardware in the major categories.