Tucked in the smallest corners of the NBA trade deadline or, as it has come to be known, Giannis Interruptus, there are the Sacramento Kings, quietly making a deadline of their own. And when we say quietly, what we mean is they're not being as brazen in their quest for glory through failure as, say, the Utah Jazz. To wit:
Add this to the tanking files. The Jazz led the Magic 94-87 going into the fourth quarter tonight. Lauri Markkanen and Jaren Jackson Jr. had already combined for 49 points, but they were held out for the entire fourth. Utah lost the game 120-117.
— Josh Robbins (@JoshuaBRobbins) February 8, 2026
Nobody expects the Jazz to be subtle in their pursuit of Darryn Peterson, the putative top pick in the upcoming draft, but they could save the airfare and just forfeit the season from here and affect nothing of consequence. Peterson, the Kansas shooting guard elegantly described by the website NBA Draft Room as "Kobe with less bounce," is the almost undisputed top prize, and there are teams like Indiana—who lose their pick to the Clippers if it falls outside the top three spots—who are equally motivated to not-quite win every game from here on out. The Wizards also are trying to create magic through the mundane, trading for their own degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon link to the disastrous Luka Doncic trade, the often incorporeal Anthony Davis, all while Brooklyn and New Orleans are their own well-tended messes.
But only the Jazz have been this shameless this often. The Kings, with nobody to trade, nobody to trade for, and nobody who could make those chimerical trades happen, have to do it the hard way: By steadily grinding out losses night after night, never being deterred from the greater prize of getting a potentially great player who, in three years, will beg for a trade because of the indisputable truth of Kangz. Saturday night's 132-126 loss to Cleveland—in which they tried and (feign surprise here) failed to hold a late lead (they were outscored 18-5 in the last three and a half minutes, a true commitment to the bit)—was their 12th in succession, and proof that their earlier forays into brazen tanking had finally taken hold.
The Kings didn't have a lot to show for this season even before it began, and they showed a level of seriousness to their unseriousness by losing 25 of 30 games to get through the holidays unscathed by the onus of accomplishment. They had an eight-game and a seven-game losing streak to their credit (debit?), and they swiftly established themselves as a contender for Peterson.
But they weren't the worst team in the league even then. The Pacers were worse, part of the hellish hangover of watching Tyrese Haliburton's Achilles tendon roll halfway up his back during Game 7 of the NBA Finals last year, and they gave no sense that they were going to be anything but bad.
It was at this point that the season hung in the balance, and they were either going to have to lower their game even more or give in to the mean-regression nature of professional sports. And they nearly screwed that up—absurdly averting three sure losses by beating Houston, the Lakers, and New York to start a seven-game home stand, and then stealing a fourth from the perpetually woebegone Wizards. The No. 2 pick had become No. 4, and nobody in Sacramento is going to spark up for Kingston Flemings when the prize could be Cam Boozer. That is, if you believe either of them could make the Kings stop being the Kings.
At this point, an organizational meeting was held, or should have been anyway, and someone said or surely must have done, "What are we doing? And why is it this?" In that moment, the Kings realized it would take a superhuman lack of effort to make their dreams come true while being artistically true to the notion that you should at least look like you're trying to win. The Wiz had blown a bunch of draft capital for professional lost causes Davis and Trae Young, the Nets were relentlessly uninteresting, and the Jazz were maintaining their devotion to being the worst defensive team in league history; they are still four points behind the all-time leader Denver in 1991, but creative substitution patterns like last night's in the final 28 games of the season could change that.
And the Kings met that call for failure with newfound purpose and concentration, not to mention a willingness to obscure the goal through close losses. Their current losing streak contains a 23-point loss at Detroit and a 19-point loss at Boston, both forgivable results given the nature of the foe, but they have also lost by two, three, four, four, five, six, and seven points, meaning that they are not insulting anyone's intelligence in pursuit of excrescence. They now have a two-game space between themselves and the Pelicans and Pacers, with enormous games Monday in New Orleans and Wednesday in Salt Lake City before the entirely irrelevant (for them) All-Star Break.
All this work for the franchise's best chance for its first No. 1 pick since Pervis Ellison in 1989. Indeed, gone are the days when they had four No. 1s in five years: In reverse order, Oscar Robertson (1960), Bob Boozer (1959), Hot Rod Hundley (1957) and Sihugo Green (1956), to this date the only Sihugo in any professional sport in any country at any time in human history. This might help explain why this is the 75th anniversary of their last title, five franchise moves ago. Also, it might not. Some things transcend even time and distance.
But it is good to know that the Kings are losing for the right reason in the right way, by looking like they actually mean to win while never letting on that they actually could. That they are willing to run such a risk is frankly to their credit, because a team like the Kings should know at the molecular as well as the industrial level how to lose in all ways big and small. There's something indefinably wonderful happening here in a delightfully unpleasant way, which is how bulk losing should be. If they can't meet your Super Bowl hangover needs tomorrow night, well, more's the pity for you.
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