The Kings’ decision to let Luke Walton go after 161 tumultuous games that yielded the league’s eighth-worst winning percentage since he was hired in 2019 should surprise nobody. A 6–11 start to this season in a wide-open conference—and coming off a particularly dispiriting stretch that featured blowout losses against the Spurs, Timberwolves and Raptors—prompted Tristan Thompson to blast his new team in a brutally honest postgame press conference. But the writing has been on the wall for quite some time.
Sacramento, a hapless franchise if the NBA has ever seen one, is trending in the wrong direction once again despite having several young bright spots on the roster.