While everyone loves to point to the Houston Astros in baseball or this season’s Philadelphia 76ers in the NBA, the popular narrative these days is that the only way to build a championship caliber team and draft one, two or even three players who will develop into superstars and take your team to glory.  The way to get those players in the draft?  Be as bad as you possibly can for a few seasons and then you’ll just get those draft picks just right and BOOM.  Your team will be the next version of the San Antonio Spurs.

This has been the cry of most Mavs fans this season.  Fans are upset anytime the team wins a game.  They question why the team, coaching staff or management would DESTROY the future of this franchise for a “meaningless” game.  This isn’t even hyperbole.  If you check your Twitter feed during a typical Mavericks game, those are the kinds of sentiments you’ll see from the same kind of people who rooted so hard for this team at its best of times.

Plain and simply: there’s no set way to build a championship level team.  If there was, everyone would do it.  So while this new mindset of a team needing to rebuild unless they win 55 games each season is gaining a bigger following each day, the fact is that there are more examples of continued losing just sticking around than it leading a fruitful future.  A huge example of this is the Mavericks opponent on Tuesday night: the Sacramento Kings.

The Sacramento Kings easily could have won the 2002 NBA Championship.

Like Mavs fans and their feelings about the 2006 NBA Finals, Kings fans will probably gripe about the officiating in this game seven of the 2002 Western Conference Finals against the two-time defending champion Los Angeles Lakers until the day they leave the Earth.  Also like the Mavs, the Kings also probably stay asleep at night thinking about their missed opportunities to seize the series down the stretch.  If they beat the Lakers and advance to the NBA Finals, they would have easily beaten Jason Kidd’s New Jersey Nets (who were swept by the Lakers).

Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out that way and things only went down hill from there.  They had a few more high quality regular seasons but an aging core slowly separated after playoff losses that followed.  By 2006, the Kings had fallen to a 44-38 record after flying as high as 61 wins during that 2002 regular season.  Sacramento would lose to the San Antonio Spurs in the first round in six games.  After making it to eight straight postseasons from 1999-2006, the Kings have now clinched their 12th straight season of missing the playoffs.

It’s not like Sacramento has barely missed the playoffs most of those seasons.  Their average win total since the 2006-2007 season is just 28 per year.  So obviously with a win total that low, you’re picking towards the top of the draft year in and year out.  Picking at the very top of the draft is the way to build your team, right?  Here’s a team of Sacramento’s first round picks since the last time they made the playoffs:

C – Demarcus Cousins, Spencer Hawes, Willie Cauley-Stein
PF – Bismack Biyombo, Thomas Robinson,
SF – Omri Casspi
SG – Tyreke Evans, Ben McLemore, Bogdan Bogdanovic
PG – De’Aaron Fox, Nik Stauskas

Not exactly a collection of guys ready to light the world on fire.  Of course we all know how great “Boogie” Cousins is, but it just never quite worked out in Sacramento.

A lot of people would probably just point to the organization’s overall dysfunction and ineptitude in the front office/ownership over the last decade.   The team was owned by the Maloof family and brothers Joe and Gavin were the face of the family in Sacramento from 1998-2013.  While the Kings made their playoff runs through the early 2000’s, those two were lovable figures in the NBA and were almost like Mark Cuban when it came to energy and cheering on their team courtside.

All of that went away after a while as the family sold the team to current owner Vivek Ranadive.  New ownership has at least steadied the ship as far as getting the team into a modern NBA arena in the Golden 1 Center and shooting down the possibility of relocation that surrounded the team for a good number of years.  The on the court product? Still not looking any closer to playoff contention than they did five or ten years ago.

How does any of this compare to the Mavs franchise?  None of it matches or looks the same if it were something in a mirror, but being in the lottery is something that might just stick if you’re not careful.  There is no doubt that the easiest way to acquire a superstar is to find one in the draft and let them develop into one.  Clearly, the Kings haven’t been able to do that and even when they did with Cousins, they still couldn’t win enough games to warrant keeping him around.

As a Dallas Mavericks fan, I’m very excited about the possibility of landing one of these talents like Michael Porter or Mavin Bagley towards the top of the draft this summer.  Especially after being fortunate enough to land Dennis Smith Jr. at pick number nine last year.  What I’m not pumped about is the possibility of them absolutely whiffing on their pick and this entire season of losing will be for nothing.  I understand it’s a chance you need to take at least once or twice, but the odds are decent that Dallas has put themselves into a spot where they could be picking here for the next decade still looking for their next franchise player.

Just ask the Sacramento Kings about it.