The Athletic has live coverage of Knicks vs. Spurs in Game 1 of the 2026 NBA Finals.
There’s a not-so-exclusive club in the NBA. It includes those who have worked for the Sacramento Kings since Vivek Ranadivé’s ownership group bought the team and kept it from relocating to Seattle in 2013.
Club members could be former coaches, players, executives or other support staff. They all share a similar tale: Just when you think things can’t get any weirder with the Kings, they will.
Colleagues who didn’t get along in Sacramento can agree after their departure that the weirdness makes for some zany situations. I covered the team for more than a decade as a beat writer for The Sacramento Bee and The Athletic, so I’m sometimes included in some of the chats among those no longer tied to the team on a daily basis.
Which makes the NBA Finals matchup between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs such a “Kangz” situation. (“Kangz” is a popular way among fans to refer to the team when highlighting their recent history of bad luck and mismanagement.)
Former Kings have played prominent roles in helping both the Knicks and the Spurs reach the NBA Finals. De’Aaron Fox was positioned to be Sacramento’s franchise player after being drafted fifth in 2017 — so much so that the Kings, who had the No. 2 pick in the 2018 draft, didn’t select Luka Dončić. Fox was traded to the Spurs last year. Also, Harrison Barnes, acquired via a trade with the Dallas Mavericks in February 2019, was a reliable veteran presence in Sacramento until he was traded to the Spurs in 2024.
On the other side, the Knicks are coached by Mike Brown, the last coach to lead the Kings to the playoffs in 2023.
It’s become too common lately in Sacramento to see a former King (or, as with Dončić, someone who could have been a King) flourish in the postseason. The Kings are the reality-show contestants looking for love, only to keep picking the wrong partners, then logging on to social media and seeing the contestants they shunned living happy, fulfilling lives with new partners.
At this point, that Sacramento show is a rerun. Or a reboot.
Michael Malone was the head coach for only 106 Kings games from 2013-14. He won a championship with the Denver Nuggets in 2023.
Tyrese Haliburton, the Kings’ first-round pick in 2020, was traded in 2022 and was a Game 7 away from winning the title last year with the Indiana Pacers.
Now in 2026, Fox, Barnes and Brown are four wins away from an NBA championship. Brown can lead New York to its first title since 1973. Fox and Barnes can help San Antonio earn its sixth title and first since 2014, the last title of the Tim Duncan/Tony Parker/Manu Ginóbili era.
2025: Former Kings Guard Tyrese Haliburton makes his first Finals
2026: Former Kings Guard De’Aaron Fox makes his first Finals pic.twitter.com/TUZcNDZG3H
— Underdog (@Underdog) May 31, 2026
The Kings fired Brown in December 2024, a year after he was the unanimous NBA Coach of the Year and one of two Kings coaches in the Sacramento-based era with a winning record, the other being Hall of Famer Rick Adelman, who died on Monday. Brown led the Kings’ “Beam Team” to a third-place finish in the Western Conference standings during the 2022-23 season before losing a first-round playoff series to the Golden State Warriors in seven games.
But the Kings traded Barnes to San Antonio in July 2024 (and agreed to an unprotected pick swap in 2031) to make it possible to add DeMar DeRozan in a three-team deal. In the fallout of firing Brown, Fox was no longer comfortable sticking with such an unstable franchise. Fox was traded Feb. 5, 2025, to the Spurs in a three-team deal with the Chicago Bulls. The Kings acquired draft picks, as well as Zach LaVine, a player Ranadivé had wanted years earlier when he was a restricted free agent.
The Beam Team of 2023 was no more. The Kings were a weird reconstruction of the LaVine-DeRozan Bulls of the early 2020s.
The 2023 Sacramento Kings, featuring Harrison Barnes (40) and De’Aaron Fox, were the third seed in the Western Conference playoffs. Now, Barnes and Fox are San Antonio Spurs teammates preparing to play in the NBA Finals. (Melissa Tamez / Icon Sportswire via Associated Press)
Sacramento lost in the Play-In Tournament in 2024. The Kings, however, still signed Brown to a contract extension. The commitment to Brown didn’t last, as he was fired two days after Christmas following a 13-18 start.
Brown landed with the Knicks last May — and look at him now.
One former Kings employee texted me that the moves were “f—–g stupid,” and that’s saying a lot, given the Kings’ history of blunders in the draft, free agency and coaching hires over the last 20 years.
We can’t forget that one of the Spurs’ assistant coaches is Corliss Williamson, a former Kings player and assistant coach who the team considered making the interim head coach in 2016 amid the chaos of the George Karl tenure. That team checked out on Karl — and Karl was flabbergasted by the organization’s ways — but had a chance to finish in the top eight in the West and might have rallied under Williamson’s leadership.
The Kings, instead, kept Karl in charge — and that team missed the playoffs.
Additionally, Brown’s associate head coach in New York is Chris Jent, a former assistant on Malone’s staff for less than a season and a half. Malone was hired on June 3, 2013, and Jent joined the staff a week later. But the Kings finished 28-54 record that 2013-14 season, and after an 11-13 start the following season, Malone and his staff were let go.
Chris Jent leads the pregame huddle pic.twitter.com/9Xai2d6hTA
— New York Basketball (@NBA_NewYork) May 6, 2026
Local radio personality and longtime Kings fan Carmichael Dave jokingly posted on X last July that the Knicks would play the Spurs in the finals this year. Was it a premonition? Perhaps. But anyone who has been around the Kings long enough knows to expect the basketball gods to play a cruel joke on the franchise.
To Sacramento fans, of course this is how it would turn out.
Either the coach who loved being in Sacramento will win a championship and turn the streets of New York into a celebrating frenzy unlike any we’ve seen, or the presence of the franchise point guard and steady veteran will help Victor Wembanyama establish a new reign of dominance in San Antonio.
As for the Kings, they’re in the lottery where the luck of the Kangz struck again. They lost a coin flip with Utah in a tiebreaker and fell from fifth to seventh in the draft order after the lottery.
Their salary-cap situation is bleak as it stands with approximately $225 million committed to 2026-27 before making any moves this offseason. General manager Scott Perry — formerly of the Knicks who returned to the Kings last year — has a lot to do to get the team back on the Beam Team’s trajectory.
And all those old Kings employees? They’ll continue to collectively shake their heads and await the next big run of Kangz luck that will befall the franchise as they watch from afar.
