The Sacramento Kings faced a choice in the 2018 NBA Draft: pick Duke big man Marvin Bagley or European guard Luka Dončić?
As most Kings fans are well aware, the team drafted Bagley, then watched Dončić become one of the premier players in the NBA, with five straight All-NBA first-team nods following his rookie season. Bagley, meanwhile, has become somewhat of an average center, and is no longer on the Kings.
It would appear that the Kings made a franchise-altering mistake in that draft, but don’t tell that to former general manager Vlade Divac, the man responsible for the decision. He still thinks the jury is still out.
In interview Croatian outlet Index.hrDivac was asked to explain passing Dončić. As he did right after the draft, Divac pointed to the presence of Kings guard De’Aaron Fox as the reason why Bagley was the better pick, and implied that Fox could still justify the decision if he has a better career than Dončić.
From Index, interpreted by Google Translate:
“I had De’Aaron Fox at that position that I drafted a year earlier. At that point, I thought Fox was a player who could become a franchise player in the next period. Time will tell if I was wrong. Like things. stand now, it seems I am, but I trust little Fox to have a better career.”
Since that draft, Dončić and the Mavericks have reached the playoffs four times, with an NBA Finals appearance last season. Fox and the Kings reached the playoffs once in 2023, losing in the first round to the Golden State Warriors.
Dončić certainly seems to think that Divac should have taken him.
The logic that Dončić and Fox were mutually exclusive as franchise stars is also hard to swallow considering the Mavericks reached the Finals with Dončić and point guard Kyrie Irving as their leading scorers.
Index pressed Divac on that fact and received the argument that Irving and Fox are different types of scorers, and an attempt to shift some of the questioning to the Phoenix Suns:
“Irving is a classic scorer, just like Luka. Fox is not, he is a player who needs the ball, just like Luka needs it. I could just take Luka, but then I would have to trade Fox. Interestingly, Phoenix also skipped Luka, and then their coach was Igor Kokoškov, who was their coach in Slovenia.”
There’s a lot to unpack there. For starters, portraying Irving as a player who doesn’t always need the ball in his hands, unlike Fox, is curious given that one of the knocks on Irving throughout his career is that he actually needs the ball as a score-first. point guard
Divac also logically contradicts himself by portraying Irving as a classic scorer, like Dončić, then trying to conversely paint Fox as a player who needs the ball, like Dončić. There may have been a translation error here, but most NBA fans would describe classic scorers as players who need the ball in their hands.
This is all built on the premise that a team with Dončić and Fox simply wouldn’t work, which seems silly. Maybe they’d have to sacrifice some of what makes them great working together, but Dončić was a 37.8% shooter on catch-and-shoot 3-pointers last year while Fox shot 39.1%. Having to manage both of those multidimensional threats sounds like a bigger deal for the defense than the offense.
Divac praised Dončić as a player “on the right track” to win MVP, and he also denied a long-standing rumor that he passed over the Slovenian because of a conflict with his father Sasa.
This is all in the past, however, even if the Kings have yet to reckon with what many believe to be a missed opportunity for a Hall of Fame talent. Divac stepped down as Kings GM in 2020 and was replaced with Monte McNair.
