30Q: What If Vlade’s Right?

As it is every year around this time and especially around this team, fans begin to assess their place in the NBA pecking order; just how far down the list do we have to go before we find the Sacramento Kings? We sift through a hundred different lists from a hundred different prognosticators with hot takes and cold hard “facts” about who’s headed to the playoffs, who sits in the lottery and who’s fans should start sacrificing their $10 LowBrau Bratwursts to the lottery gods, or the lopsided trade gods or the Texas-sized asteroid heading for the Pacific, and save for the brave few over the last decade, we’ve always seemed to find the Kings at the bottom of most predicted standings, at the top of most projected draft boards. The swirl of armchair experts and the random accounts with “sources” on Twitter, those suspected trolls in the comment section of every Kings article on every site, Danny from accounting who played JuCo ball in Wyoming and has been a Warriors fan “before Darren Davis”, the asshole preview writer who couldn’t spell Greta Gerwig’s name right if his writing gig depended on it; they all know the Kings suck, have sucked and will continue to suck in perpetuity and long past your corporeal demise. The feeling is as ubiquitous as is it is endlessly depressing.

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