Who is the best player on the Sacramento Kings?

The Sacramento Kings are a fascinating team for many reasons. One of them is that it’s hard to pinpoint their best player. Last season, De’Aaron Fox led the team in scoring (26.6 PPG). However, Domantas Sabonis was the one who received the most MVP votes. You also have to consider where newly acquired DeMar DeRozan falls into this equation.

So, who is the Kings’ best player for the 2024-2025 season?

To truly answer a question like this, we would need hours of film and data analysis. And while I’ve watched a fair amount of these players (I watched 261 full NBA games last season), such a deep dive might require more words to explain than you fine people are willing to consume. Chances are, when you click on a quick article like this, you want an immediate answer.

That’s the beauty of all-encompassing, single-number stats. They let you learn a lot about a player very quickly, because (as the name suggests) they try to tie a single number to someone’s impact on winning and losing.

Now, they’re not perfect. For example, these stats can only tell you how good a player is on his specific team in the specific role that team asks him to play. Still, these one-number stats have become more and more accurate over time.

This is especially true of the methodology offered by Dunks & Threes, which I cite quite often on this site: Estimated Plus-Minus (EPM). EPM is great because, unlike most single-number measures that only include box score/play-by-play data, it also incorporates information from the tracking data (which became public in 2013-14).

To save time and your attention span, we will use EPM to try to answer our question.

Since all of the Kings players we mentioned are in the heart/near the end of their prime, it’s okay to use last season’s EPM data to predict this season’s hierarchy, as it’s unlikely that Fox, Sabonis, or DeRozan will see a drastic uptick/downtick in their performance.

(Sidebar #1: There’s a chance DeRozan will hit a bit of a slump given his age (35 at the start of next season), but given how gracefully he’s aged so far, I don’t think that’ll be the case.)

Without further ado, below are all the EPM results for all non-rookie players (as in they didn’t play in the NBA last year) currently on the Kings’ roster (again, this is all provided by the Dunks & Threes website):

Based on EPM, Fox is the Kings’ best player for next season. The reason for this is likely defense. While Fox and Sabonis are fairly evenly matched on offense (Fox had a +3.1 OFF EPM while Sabonis had a +2.9), Fox is clearly a much better guard defender than Sabonis is as a defensive anchor (Fox had a +1.4 DEF EPM while Sabonis had a -0.2).

(Sidebar #2: I don’t always agree with EPM, but in the case of the Fox/Sabonis debate, I’m on their side. Fox gives you more two-way balance and Sabonis isn’t good enough on offense to make up for the lack of flexibility he gives you on defense. This became pretty clear when we saw them both in the 2023 NBA Playoffs.)

Interestingly, Keegan Murray is ranked higher than DeRozan in EPM. This is a perfect example of how one-number metrics are meant to measure a player’s performance in their specific team context.

If you were to rank the top 100 players in the NBA last season, DeRozan would probably end up higher on that list. However, Murray was better at being a role player on a halfway decent Kings team than DeRozan was at being an overextended number one option on a mediocre Chicago Bulls team. I will say that I wouldn’t be surprised to see Murray make a leap and surpass DeRozan as a basketball player next season.

The weakness of the role/team context of one-number metrics is also evident in Jordan McLaughlin’s place on this list. No one would say he’s a better player than Malik Monk or Kevin Huerter. But because he was in a super-consolidated role on a team that was in contention for a championship, it fueled his EPM output.

One more thing I want to point out. I find it interesting that the top five players in EPM (Fox, Sabonis, Murray, DeRozan, and Keon Ellis) are also the five players I have projected to be the Kings’ starters next season!