Less than 48 hours from tonight, the Sacramento Kings will be on the clock with the No. 4 overall draft pick, and are currently in the process of making a final decision about what to do with it as the rumor mill churns throughout the league.
Sacramento is one of the harder to projects teams in the draft’s Top 10 decision, as their options to trade for an established player in the league and augment their mid-20’s talent or draft a young, promising athlete have caused confusion about their intentions throughout the NBA.
But despite the conflicting rumors, one thing is agreed upon: no one knows what the Kings’ decision on Draft Day will be.
During a television appearance, Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN said Sacramento’s future will most likely be undecided until the moments the bell chimes and Adam Silver takes to the podium to announce their pick.
“I think it’s going to go right down to the wire. I think it’s going to go down to Thursday night, probably when they’re on the clock and they see what the best offers are for Jaden Ivey… If you (Sacramento) take the best player on the board, it isn’t necessarily a position of need, and because the value is in Ivey, it’s why they’re so open in Sacramento to seeing what they can get back in a trade,” Wojnarowski said. “This is a team that has the longest playoff drought in the NBA. They want to be back in the postseason. They’re trying to put a group together with new head coach Mike Brown that gets them into the playoffs for the first time in a decade and a half.”
Their cold feet to take the best player available might be because — as Marc Stein noted in his recent Substack and has been extensively reported — Ivey apparently doesn’t want to be in Sacramento (via Stein):
Purdue’s Jaden Ivey confirmed Monday during a predraft media session that he has had no contact with Sacramento in advance of Thursday’s draft. Various rival teams have noted that Ivey shares the same CAA representation as Tyrese Haliburton and thus concluded that Ivey was never going to privately audition for the Kings after they dealt Haliburton to Indiana seemingly without warning in February — and after Haliburton repeatedly expressed how eager he was to be at the heart of Sacramento’s efforts to finally end the league’s longest playoff drought (now at 16 seasons and counting).
But in spite of the cold shoulder from Ivey, talks of drafting the Purdue star have remained hot, with the option of…
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