Sacramento's two best players were both in the lineup and played heavy minutes. Zach LaVine scored 28 points on 19 shots. Domantas Sabonis had 18 rebounds and 14 points. The Kings still lost by 25 at the Intuit Dome. This is who the Kings are right now.
The excuse going around is that Sacramento was shorthanded, and that part's true. Malik Monk was out with ankle soreness, Ben Simmons is sidelined for a while after tearing his Achilles in practice, and the Kings were missing two centers to injury. That's a real list of absences. But it doesn't explain a loss this lopsided: the Clippers were banged up too, missing Bradley Beal, Max Strus, Brandon Ingram and others. A shorthanded Clippers team blew out a shorthanded Kings team by 25. The gap came down to who was on the floor and couldn't produce.
Keegan Murray went 1-for-8 for two points. Rookie point guard Darius Acuff Jr. shot 5-of-24 in his debut, meaning the kid Sacramento is trusting to run the offense was far less efficient than the score-first guard he's supposed to be setting up. The bench got outscored by nearly 20 points. The problem is the supporting cast. Even with Sabonis and LaVine doing exactly what they're paid to do, it isn't good enough to keep a game competitive against a team playing without five rotation players of its own.
Rating
RatingAcuff struggled in summer league too, and smaller rookie point guards often need time to find their footing. Growing pains are real, and nobody should bury a rookie over one bad shooting night. But that doesn't survive contact with the rest of the box score. LaVine and Sabonis combined to do almost everything right, and Sacramento still got run off the floor by a quarter after one period.
Doug Christie sounded almost serene about it afterward, saying it felt good to be back doing the job and that he wished the group could have carried its start into the third quarter. Christie sounds honest about a flat finish to what was briefly a competitive game. He doesn't sound alarmed that his roster has almost no proven depth behind two stars who aren't exactly injury-proof themselves. Somebody should be. The Kings finished at the bottom of the conference a year ago, and the front office responded by building around the same two name-brand stars and hoping a rookie point guard and a thin bench would cover the rest. One game is one game. But this is exactly the kind of loss a 22-win roster was always going to produce the moment its stars weren't quite enough on their own, and on opening night, with both of them playing, they weren't. That falls on the front office. LaVine and Sabonis showed up and did their jobs.
