The Sacramento Kings are one of those teams that’s seemingly stuck in ‘no-man’s land.’ That is, a team that is not bad enough to get a high draft pick and accelerate a rebuild, but not good enough to be a threat in the playoffs. With the Western Conference shaping up to be as tough as ever, the Kings are going to need a breakout season from some of the players on their roster to remain competitive.
As presently constructed, the Kings roster is good enough to fight for a play-in spot. Head coach Doug Christie, who took the helm after Mike Brown was fired last December, will have a full training camp and preseason under his belt to implement his system. The Kings actually finished with a winning record with Christie as head coach, going 27-24 after he was named as interim.
Following the end of the Kings’ season, the team opted to remove the interim tag and officially make Christie the franchise’s head coach. There are a couple of players on the Kings’ roster who could be candidates for having a breakout season, but one name stands out in particular in second-year big man Isaac Jones.
Isaac Jones will have breakout season for Kings
Players such as Devin Carter and Keon Ellis are prime candidates for breakout years, but they also have veteran players ahead of them on the depth chart at guard. The starters in the backcourt figure to be Dennis Schroder and Zach LaVine, with Malik Monk as the first guard off the bench.
In the frontcourt, the rotation looks a little less certain. The Kings lost Jonas Valanciunas, Jake LaRavia and Trey Lyles, all of whom saw regular minutes in the frontcourt last season. With the lack of frontcourt depth on the Kings’ roster, Jones is the best candidate to have a breakout season.
Jones went undrafted in the 2024 NBA Draft, and ended up signing a two-way contract with the Kings. Early in the 2024-25 season, he was called into action and became a regular in the Kings’ rotation. Jones was limited to only 50 games due to his two-way contract, and he hit the halfway mark before the All-Star Break.
Jones received a few DNP’s after that to preserve his NBA eligibility, and before the postseason hit, the Kings opted to convert his contract to a standard deal using an open roster spot they had following the trade deadline.
With the Kings’ frontcourt depth taking a hit this offseason, Jones figures to compete with Dario Saric, Drew Eubanks and rookie Maxime Raynaud for reserve frontcourt minutes. During training camp, he’ll have a prime opportunity to beat all of them out for a consistent spot in the rotation.
During his rookie season, Jones appeared in 40 NBA games at a little over seven minutes per game. He averaged 3.4 points and 1.4 rebounds with splits of 65.1 percent shooting from the field, 37.5 percent shooting from the three-point line and 63.9 percent shooting from the free-throw line.
Jones’ best stretch of the 2024-25 season came at the beginning of December when he had back-to-back 12-point games while shooting 85.7 percent from the field. He is familiar with the system already and showed signs last year of being a productive NBA rotation player.
Without the restraints of a two-way contract from the start, Jones is the best candidate on the roster to have a breakout 2025-26 season.
