Sacramento Kings head coach Doug Christie is remaining optimistic about the long-term future of his team despite having one of the worst records in the NBA 35 games into the season.
His reasoning: Some teams currently at the top of the standings and betting odds to reach the NBA Finals are not far removed from seasons like the Kings are currently having.
“These are frustrating moments of the process of getting there,” Christie said following the Kings’ 129-102 loss to the Phoenix Suns, pushing their losing streak to four games by an average of 28 points.
Christie said there remains alignment between him, general manager Scott Perry and owner Vivek Ranadivé despite Sacramento’s 8-27 record, which is the second worst in the Western Conference and third worst in the NBA ahead of only the New Orleans Pelicans (8-28) and Indiana Pacers (6-29). They’re on pace to win 24 games.
It comes despite offseason expectations of competing for a playoff spot after the Kings were eliminated in the play-in last season for the second consecutive year. The Kings named Christie their permanent head coach in the spring after he went 27-24 in 2024-25 when he replaced Mike Brown as interim coach after Brown was fired in December 2024.
“(The alignment) is the ability to put a product on the floor that the Sacramento Kings fans can be proud of — and hopefully a champion,” Christie said.
“My head’s bald, but I don’t have a crystal ball. There’s luck in a lot of things,” he continued. “Twenty-four months ago, the Detroit Pistons were about as bad as you get. And, last time I checked, they’re really good. Three years ago, OKC got beat by, I believe, 50 points a couple of times, and they look pretty good. I can even speak to the San Antonio Spurs and what they’ve done.
“So you can’t really put anything on it, but what you can do is you can say, ‘this is the standard of Sacramento Kings basketball,’ and you continue to play to that standard until you get a locker room full of guys that play the right way.”
To Christie’s point, the Pistons won 17 and 14 games in 2022-23 and 2023-24. They made a dramatic leap last season to go 44-38, good for 6th in the Eastern Conference. They lost to the New York Knicks in a competitive six-game series in the first round of the playoffs. At 25-9, this year they have the best record in the East.
The Thunder (30-5) are the defending champions who won 22 games in 2020-21 and 24 in 2021-22. They remain heavy favorites to return to the Finals behind reigning MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who is enjoying the most efficient season of his career.
The Spurs, who acquired De’Aaron Fox from the Kings, are built around generational talent Victor Wembanyama and seem poised to compete with the Thunder for Western Conference supremacy for the foreseeable future. They won 22 games three and four seasons ago, but are currently No. 2 in the West.
Christie isn’t wrong in pointing out those other teams’ down seasons during their long-term rebuilding projects. Unlike the Pistons, Thunder and Spurs, however, the Kings have not recently drafted or acquired young players widely projected as future all-stars.
The Kings made Keegan Murray part of their long-term future by extending him on a five-year, $140 million contract in October. He’s dealt with several injuries since and is shooting a career-worst 43% from the floor and 28% from 3-point range. He’s averaging 14.7 points, 6.3 rebounds, 1.6 blocks and 1.3 steals per game while being Sacramento’s most reliable defender.
“At some point, every organization goes through it,” Murray said when asked about long-term rebuilding. “Obviously, unfortunately, Sacramento’s gone through it a lot. But for this team, there’s building blocks for sure. It’s obviously tough to have a season like this, especially where we were at my rookie year. So I think the rest of the season we just gotta be able to grind through it and find some kind of spark to get through the season.”
It took the teams Christie mentioned years to build those rosters. The Thunder went three seasons missing the playoffs while developing their current group. The Spurs are likely to make the playoffs this spring, which would end a seven-year playoff drought. Detroit missed the playoffs five consecutive years before ending their spell last season.
Which means Christie is saying the quiet part out loud. If the Kings are going to construct a roster at the level of those teams, it’s going to a long time to get there. The Kings, of course, have made the postseason just once since 2006.
And given Ranadivé’s proclivity for firing coaches and executives — he’s had eight head coaches and five general managers since buying the team in 2013 — there’s no guarantee the Kings will be given the time for a long-term rebuild, no matter what vision Christie outlines.