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No. 12: Sacramento Kings
Last Season: 29-53
13th place in West; missed playoffs
Internally, the Sacramento Kings' edict for this season seems clear: Don't only compete for a playoff berth, but secure one. It would mark the Kings' first trip to the postseason since the Rick Adelman era, when Metta World Peace was known as Ron Artest. It would snap the league's second-longest active playoff drought.
Their franchise player is 25 years old, arguably the best big man in the game and coming off his first All-Star and All-NBA appearances last season. They've invested money into bringing in more talent, and their head coach is one of the winningest in NBA history. So why does optimism about the Kings stop at Sacramento's city limits? Amid all of those pieces are also many combustible parts, and there are ample questions about whether they'll work together.
The Kings started last season as one of the feel-good stories of the year. Then-head coach Michael Malone had begun the third year of his tenure and had finally coaxed tangible progress out of a team that had long languished at the bottom with a 9-6 start, a positive net rating and, most impressively, a defensive rating that was in the top half of the league.
Above all, DeMarcus Cousins seemed to finally be buying in and maturing -- no small feat. On Nov. 27, Cousins began what would eventually be a 10-game absence due to illness. By the ninth game of that stretch, the Kings had gone 2-7, and Malone was out of a job, the victim of majority owner Vivek Ranadive's fickle fancy.
Then things got worse.
Malone's replacement, Ty Corbin, got Cousins back in body, but not in spirit, as the Kings spiraled to a 7-21 record, during which Sacramento was bottom-10 in offense and bottom-three in defense. Despite early assurances he would hold the interim job until season's end, Corbin also was replaced, this time with George Karl, a Hall of Fame-caliber coach with more than 1,000 victories on his resume (one of just nine coaches in NBA history to do so). Under Karl, the Kings closed out the season 11-19, with the offense rising to its highest rating (103.9 per 100 possessions, good for 13th in the league), but the team still languished defensively and generally was not equipped to play his up-tempo style.