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The 24-25 NBA season will be 193 days long. It starts in late October and ends in mid-April and there’s nothing you can do about it. All 30 teams will play 82 games—there’s no way to rage quit or opt out. So wouldn’t it be more fun to try to win most of them?

The Sacramento Kings certainly think so. Over the last two seasons, the Kings have clawed their way out of the NBA’s sub-basement because they’ve been brave enough to try. Rather than churn through faceless draft picks in the hopes that one of them might someday be good, they’ve simply acquired good players. At the 2022 trade deadline, they traded a pre-breakout Tyrese Haliburton for franchise center Domantas Sabonis; six months later at that year’s draft, they opted for the older, more polished Keegan Murray over allegedly higher upside options like Jaden Ivey. And by signing DeMar DeRozan this summer, the Kings are betting that day-to-day competence is next to excellence.

After blitzing the league with an all-time great offense in 2023, the Kings failed to relocate that same mojo last year. Although the general gestalt behind the roster and game plan remained intact, the Kings had only the 13th best offensive rating in the league, down 2.5 points per 100 possessions from the prior year. Whereas they once befuddled the rest of the league with their intricate, whirring attack, the limits of their personnel were laid bare: their best shooters were bad playmakers and their best playmakers were unthreatening shooters. More, their star players carried qualifiers—De’Aaron Fox is one of the best point guards; Domantas Sabonis is almost an elite big man. 

Accordingly, DeRozan is perhaps the anti-King—they completed the second-most passes of any team; he made the fourth-most unassisted two-pointers in the league. Even as he ages into his mid 30s, DeRozan is a devastating one-on-one scorer, averaging 25.5 points, 4.7 rebounds and 5.1 assists per game over his three years in Chicago. While he was once an explosive young player, his game is now defined by its economy. Every move is intentional; no steps are wasted. When DeRozan is really humming, he has the same studied grace as late-stage Roger Federer—he’s so aware of his athletic limitations that he’s developed a precision that’s become his greatest strength. 

In this sense, DeRozan is most comfortable operating in the spaces that defenses are programmed to ignore. Last year, DeRozan ranked in the 86th percentile as an isolation scorer and was the second-most prolific mid-range scorer. As such, he presents a problem that defenses are no longer equipped to solve—asking a defense to stop DeRozan in the mid-post is like expecting a Zoomer to know how to send a fax.  

For a Kings team that has leaned on schematic complexity to succeed, DeRozan’s ability to win simply is a boon. His steadiness will punch up the Kings’ middling half court offense. Even if DeRozan’s teams aren't aren't always the most efficient, his steady shotmaking ensures a fairly high baseline. Like Carmelo Anthony or Kobe Bryant, he’s an offensive sin eater—he takes the bad shots so that his teammates don’t have to.

Still, DeRozan doesn’t make the Kings a contender; he might not even necessarily make them a playoff team. At this point in his career, DeRozan does the things that make an individual player good, but not the things that make a team good. His scoring is largely self-contained—he doesn’t have much utility without the ball and he’s not the most daring passer. He approaches defense like it’s an unskippable YouTube ad that he has to sit through before he can be on offense again. Although he’s a killer regular season player, the best opponents are able to exploit the fact that he’s neither potent enough to captain a playoff offense, nor versatile enough to blend into one. 

From the most cynical perspective, DeRozan’s flaws are real and damning. There’s a reason that none of the league’s best teams tried to sign him, and that reason is probably because he hasn’t made a three-pointer in the playoffs since 2018. 

But who cares? Adding DeRozan presents essentially no downside—it doesn’t foreclose on more fruitful potential pathways because those more fruitful pathways don’t exist. Unless, say, 14 teams in front of them suffer unimaginable tragedies, the Kings don’t have a realistic chance to win a title: the gap between the Kings and the Celtics couldn’t be bridged by 10 DeMar DeRozans. Conversely, Sacramento is even further away from being bad enough to land Cooper Flagg or Ace Bailey. 

But by trading for DeRozan, the Kings have made their team better, maybe even better enough to win their first playoff series in 21 years. At the very least, they’ve guaranteed that a greater share of the next 193 days will be good ones. Ultimately, success is best measured in beams, not banners.