The Sacramento Kings Can’t Even Lose On Purpose

Give the Sacramento Kings an incentive, and they will find a way to flee from it. The operators of basketball's least functional franchise spent the part of the season in which they were deluded enough to think they could win games instead getting humiliated, losing nightly by galling margins. Now that losing is exactly what they need to do, they have turned into an accidental juggernaut, proving in the process that the essence of incompetence in the NBA is not losing so much as it is a lack of cohesive vision. Amid all the anxiety about tanking, the Kings stand as a potent counterexample to the notion that the practice is simple and thoughtless. It is, as they demonstrate, something you can be bad at.

One aspect of the aforementioned anxiety about tanking that I find to be misplaced is the idea that fans of tanking teams are necessarily experiencing anguish because their teams are losing. This imagines the fan as a sort of noble savage, conceiving of poor Wizards or Jazz fans as confounded at the idea of trying to get the first overall pick in the draft. Fans aren't stupid, and while the experience of paying American dollars to go watch Micah Potter hoist 11 threes doesn't carry the same thrill as getting to watch a good team, not only do ticket prices reflect the ugliness of the hoops on offer, I think fans of any team that's been rewarded for tanking (read: every team except Miami) would tell you that sacrificing a few months of faux-competitive basketball for an All-NBA talent is more than worth it. There is a marshmallow test here, and whether you find the incentive structure of tanking gross, there's no disputing that it works.

But I am a fan of a tanking team and I am experiencing anguish, because the Kings are winners of four of their last five games and six of their last 11. This is surprising for a number of reasons, foremost of which is that this hot streak began the moment the Kings sent their "good" players away for the season. Funny as it is that the theoretical core of the team was holding it back, the departures of Zach LaVine and Domantas Sabonis for season-ending surgeries cleared the way for DeMar DeRozan to dribble the basketball for 18 seconds before hoisting a contested midrange jumper, and for Russell Westbrook to sprint around and run into people. That stuff does not help you win games that matter, but it's great for punishing bad opponents.