SAN ANTONIO
The Sacramento Kings came to San Antonio on Friday night looking for two things: their first win of the preseason, and some sign that their starting group could function as a unit before the games start counting. By late in the third quarter at Frost Bank Center, they had neither. The Spurs led the Kings 101-70 late in the third, per Sportradar's live feed — a 42-18 first quarter that effectively ended the competitive portion of the evening before it began — in Sacramento's preseason finale, played without Malik Monk, Dylan Cardwell and Maxime Raynaud. This is a live, in-progress report from Friday night; that 31-point margin is the score as of reporting time, not a final, and the fourth quarter had yet to play out when this story published.
The first quarter is the whole story in miniature. San Antonio scored 42 points in the opening 12 minutes and allowed 18, per Sportradar's quarter-by-quarter scoring, then kept the pressure on with a 29-19 second quarter. Preseason finales are supposed to be about evaluation — final rotations, final auditions, the last film before rosters lock. A 24-point first-quarter crater turns the night into something else entirely: damage management for the visitors, and a long, loud dress rehearsal for the home crowd. The Kings, who tipped at 5 p.m. Pacific as the road team in the middle window of Friday's 12-game finale slate, spent the evening chasing a game that had gotten away from them almost immediately.
The Monk Question Follows Sacramento Home
The more consequential news for Sacramento on Friday was not the score. Sports Illustrated's Kings coverage reported the team's availability for the finale: Monk out, Cardwell out, Raynaud out. Monk's absence is the one that follows the Kings into opening week. Per reporting from James Ham carried by SI, Monk has been managing left ankle soreness through training camp and the preseason and has been working with the team's medical staff, and his availability for opening night depends on how the ankle responds over the next few days. SI's preseason preview of the finale noted that Monk had yet to see the floor in the preseason at all — an entire October of buildup, and one of Sacramento's most important offensive players has not played a minute of it.
That is not a reason to panic, and it is not nothing, either. Ankle soreness being managed carefully in October is standard practice for a veteran a team expects to lean on; rushing a scorer back for a preseason finale in San Antonio would have been malpractice. But the calendar does not negotiate. The regular season opens Tuesday, October 20, and the Kings are now days away from it with a key rotation player whose status is, in the most literal sense, day-to-day and response-dependent. Every practice report between now and Tuesday just became required reading in Sacramento.
A Starting Five That Barely Met
Monk's absence compounded the Kings' strangest preseason problem, one SI's three-things preview of the finale laid out plainly: Sacramento's starting lineup had barely played together. Per that preview, Domantas Sabonis had logged roughly 10 minutes in the preseason and Ben Simmons roughly eight — the kind of numbers that mean the Kings' first unit effectively meets for the first time when the season starts. Add in a winless preseason — Sacramento arrived in San Antonio still looking for its first victory of the exhibition slate, per SI — and Friday's finale was less a tune-up than an introduction, staged in front of a hostile crowd that was enjoying itself far too much.
To be fair to the Kings, preseason records are the most disposable statistic in basketball, and no banner has ever been raised for October. Coaches use these games to answer specific questions, and sometimes the answer is ugly. But there is a difference between experimenting and never once fielding your actual team, and Sacramento's October has been the latter. When SI's preview is counting a starting center's preseason minutes on two hands, the finale's lopsided first quarter stops looking like an aberration and starts looking like the predictable product of a month spent in pieces.
What Tuesday Demands
The preseason is over now — Friday's 12 finales closed it, as our guide to finale night laid out — and the Kings' real season begins Tuesday, October 20, the night the league tips off for real, previewed in our regular-season opener preview. Between now and then, Sacramento has three questions and no more exhibition games in which to answer them: Is Monk's ankle ready? Can a starting five that shared roughly a quarter of preseason basketball find a rhythm at regular-season speed? And was Friday's first quarter in San Antonio a meaningless October crater, or the first honest scouting report on this team? The Spurs, for their part, head into Tuesday looking like the ready ones — 42 points in a first quarter will do that for a reputation. The Kings have four days to become a team. Follow the countdown at the Previously sports hub.
