When the 2026 NBA Finals tip off on June 3, the Sacramento Kings will not be on the floor. They will be watching their old roster play for a title. De’Aaron Fox and Harrison Barnes reached the championship round with the San Antonio Spurs. Mike Brown, the coach Sacramento fired 17 months ago, sits on the New York Knicks bench across from them.
A year earlier, Tyrese Haliburton carried the Indiana Pacers to within one game of a ring before his Achilles gave out. Four people the Kings once employed have reached the last two Finals. Sacramento, over that same stretch, lost 60 games in a single season.
The Sabonis Trade That Set the Pattern
Start with the deal that started everything. In February 2022, Sacramento sent Tyrese Haliburton, then a second-year guard, to Indiana for Domantas Sabonis, a two-time All-Star big man who looked like the steadier piece. At the time the logic held up. Haliburton was promising but unproven, and the Kings needed a known commodity to break the longest active playoff drought in the National Basketball Association (NBA).
Sabonis did his job. He helped the Kings end a 16-year postseason absence and anchored the best Sacramento team in nearly two decades. For one season, the trade looked like a front office getting it right.
Then Haliburton turned into one of the most clutch guards in the sport. He dragged the Pacers to the 2025 Finals and was playing well in the decisive game before the torn Achilles that ended Indiana’s title bid. Every Sacramento slump since the trade has come with a fresh round of highlights of the player they gave away.
A 48-Win Season That Read Like a Beginning
The 2022-23 season was supposed to be the floor, not the ceiling. Sacramento won 48 games, grabbed the Western Conference’s No. 3 seed, and looked like a young team about to grow into something larger. The arena was loud again. The light tower came on after wins.
Then the Kings ran into the Golden State Warriors in the first round and lost in seven games. At the time it played as a rite of passage. Young teams take a punch before they land one. Michael Jordan needed years to get past Detroit. The reading around the league was that Sacramento had simply met a more experienced opponent on the way up.
It was not the way up. The Warriors were not the obstacle; they were the high-water mark. Over the next two seasons the Kings drifted, and the front office grew restless with a core that had just delivered its best year in a generation.
That restlessness is where the trouble started. A team a few breaks from a deep run decided the answer was to break it apart.
Sacramento Cleared the Building in Six Weeks
The dismantling happened fast. Mike Brown, the coach who won Coach of the Year guiding that 48-win team, was fired on December 27, 2024, after a 13-18 start. Six weeks later the franchise moved its All-Star point guard.
In early February 2025, the three-team trade that sent Fox to San Antonio brought back Zach LaVine, guard Sidy Cissoko, and a stack of draft picks. Fox was 28, an All-Star, and the player who had just helped end the drought. Sacramento decided that was his trade value.
Lined up in order, the exits read less like separate decisions and more like a policy:
- February 2022: Haliburton traded to Indiana for Domantas Sabonis.
- July 2024: Harrison Barnes traded to San Antonio in the deal that brought DeMar DeRozan to Sacramento.
- December 2024: Mike Brown fired after a 13-18 start.
- February 2025: De’Aaron Fox traded to San Antonio for Zach LaVine.
The Finals Cast Sacramento Assembled Elsewhere
By June 2026, the people who left were not just employed elsewhere. They were two wins from a parade. Here is where the departed roster landed.
| Name | Left Sacramento | Now With | June 2026 status |
|---|---|---|---|
| De’Aaron Fox | Feb 2025 | San Antonio Spurs | NBA Finals |
| Harrison Barnes | Jul 2024 | San Antonio Spurs | NBA Finals |
| Mike Brown | Dec 2024 | New York Knicks | NBA Finals (head coach) |
| Tyrese Haliburton | Feb 2022 | Indiana Pacers | 2025 Finals (now injured) |
Fox and Barnes in San Antonio
The Spurs stunned the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder, winning 111-103 on the road in Game 7 on May 30. Victor Wembanyama, San Antonio’s franchise center, scored 22, guard Julian Champagnie buried 18 of his 20 points from three, and Fox chipped in 15 in the clincher. It was San Antonio’s first Finals trip since 2014.
Barnes had arrived in 2024 in a separate three-team swap, and he made clear the move suited him. The Spurs’ acquisition of Harrison Barnes went through only because he waived his trade kicker to make the math work.
For the ability to be able to come to San Antonio, it was a pretty easy decision for me.
That was Barnes, the veteran forward, on leaving Sacramento for a team that has since reached the Finals.
Brown’s Knicks Reset
New York hired Brown last summer, and the move looked like a stopgap. It was not. The Knicks won 11 straight games to reach their first Finals since 1999, sweeping the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference finals along the way. Jalen Brunson’s Eastern Conference finals MVP run, 25.5 points and 7.8 assists a night against Cleveland, headlined a team Brown rebuilt into a contender. The coach Sacramento let go had not reached a Finals since 2007.
What the Kings Kept: A 22-60 Collapse
The other side of the ledger is bleak. The roster Sacramento chose to keep, with LaVine as the headline return, produced the franchise’s worst season in years.
- 22-60 final record, the team’s first 60-loss season since 2008-09.
- 16 straight losses from January to February 2026, the longest skid in franchise history.
- Third consecutive year out of the playoffs, with elimination clinched in March.
LaVine is a capable scorer, and the trade was never indefensible on talent alone. But the exchange swapped a 28-year-old All-Star who had broken a drought for a player whose arrival coincided with a free fall. Sabonis remained, the one piece from the 2022-23 high still standing, surrounded by a worse team than the one he joined.
For a fan base that waited 16 years to matter again, watching the rebuild collapse into a fourteenth-place finish is its own kind of cruelty.
A Franchise That Develops Stars and Exports Them
The indictment is not that Sacramento drafts badly. It scouts well. Haliburton, Fox, and a Coach of the Year all passed through the building. The problem is what happens after the talent arrives.
This is a front office that finds the right people at the wrong moment, grows impatient, and ships them somewhere they can win. The pattern is now too long and too consistent to call bad luck. Sacramento develops Finals-caliber talent and exports it, then watches the postseason from home.
Haliburton will miss the entire season after his surgery, per the Pacers’ update on his recovery timeline, so he will not add to the tally this June. The other three will.
When the trophy is handed out in mid-June, it will go to a Spur, a Knick, or a coach Sacramento decided it no longer wanted, and the Kings will watch the way they have learned to.
