Marvin Bagley has the Juice
Thirsty, thirsty, tryna choose
I mean, I know I’m pretty cool
My nitty bag, my kitty boost
I got the juice, I got the juice
Ten months ago, the Sacramento Kings found a way to miss in a can’t-miss situation. Last May, the Kings won the NBA lottery. Not literally—that honor fell upon the woeful Phoenix Suns—but essentially. By conjuring good luck with ping-pong balls, the Kings grabbed the second overall pick and guaranteed themselves at least one of the top two consensus players: DeAndre Ayton or Luka Dončić.* Whoever the Suns didn’t draft, the Kings would. They didn’t even have to make the decision between the two. Their fate, a pleasant one, was sealed. Cannot miss.
The Kings, probably out of force of habit, missed, drafting Not Luka Doncic after Phoenix snagged the hometown Ayton. Not Luka, who certainly prefers his given name of Marvin Bagley III, was Sacramento’s man at number two.
If Kings GM Vlade Divac is to be believed, the decision to take Bagley over Doncic was an easy one. Bagley’s talent level, work ethic, fit on the team, confidence, and desire to be in Sacramento “checked all the boxes” when they pulled the trigger on the Duke big man instead of the Slovenian phenom. Bagley didn’t shy away from the pick either, saying the day after going number two overall, “I still think I’m the best player in the draft and I stand by that.”
Following Sacramento’s selection, the Mavs traded up to draft Luka, the Hawks traded down to draft Trae Young and the Grizzlies scooped up Jaren Jackson Jr.—who, along with Ayton, all look great in their rookie seasons, thank you very much—and everyone here looks like they know exactly what they’re doing except for the eternally incompetent Kings.
And if you cast your eyes solely on Luka in Dallas—or Jackson in Memphis and Young in Atlanta, but particularly in Dallas—this would certainly appear to be the case. Over the course of the season, Doncic has shed virtually every doubt that lingered on draft night. The just-now 20-year-old former EuroLeague MVP has been tapped as the future face of the Mavs and looks poised to lead them back into the playoffs in their forthcoming Dirk-less near-future. He’ll win Rookie of the Year by a landslide, if not unanimously.
So it’s not difficult in the squinty hindsight afforded to us in the mere ten months since grabbing Not Luka to see the 2018 Draft as another example of the Kings making a mistake, potentially a ruinous one. Should Luka’s star rise to the levels of hype he’s whipped up this season, the Kings passing on him would consign Marvin Bagley to a future of trivia fodder. Not as glaring a mistake as Sam Bowie, but if Bagley and Doncic are now roommates on the same coin of history, one side very clearly has a hell of a lot of shine on it already.
But friends, I am here to testify: there is another side to that coin, and it too shimmers. Marvin Bagley can play ball.
In reality, this should have been written weeks ago. Things looked really different in Sacramento then. We were coming out of a trade deadline that saw the Los Angeles Clippers trade their best player away and the Los Angeles Lakers not getting a particularly talented man with a unibrow (or anyone else of consequence either), placing the Kings firmly in the hunt for the 8th seed in the Western Conference. Which, if we’re being honest with ourselves, was unfathomable at the beginning of the season.
To wit, following a loss to the Jazz in October, I sent the following text message:
People will give them credit for being a tough team tonight and say that there’s a lot of positives to take away here, but it just don’t seem possible that they’re ever going to actually go out there and beat a team, you know? And no one is demonstrably worse than them, so it’s not like they’ll ever get the “we showed up and we’re just better than you” wins. So that really only leaves the “we’re going to play harder than you” wins, and in this regard they might have a shot if things go well early. They’ll have a lot of reasons to be discouraged and mail it in later in the season, but if they get the ball rolling early and just don’t get their heads kicked in night-in and night-out in the early season, they might win 25 games
So yes, I’m a fool because I fatuously capped their upside for the year as .300 team and in the second week of February the Kings were playing meaningful basketball games with a very clear path to the 8 seed. If the Lakers kept stinking, and the Clippers fell off without Tobias Harris, the freaking Sacramento Kings might make the playoffs in the Western Conference in 2019. Yowza.
Things have not gone well since then, and a big part of it is because Marvin Bagley banged knees awkwardly with Malcolm Brogdon in a brutal home loss to the Bucks. (Another big part of it is because the Kings went 1-5 over a key stretch of games against the best teams in the league, including Golden State, Oklahoma City, Denver, the Clippers, and the aforementioned Bucks.) As we approach the middle of March, the King’s playoff hopes have more or less flat-lined.
Luckily, Bagley managed to avoid significant injury on the collision, but he hasn’t played since, and Sacramento is (smartly) taking their time bringing him back as the Young Kings play out the string.
But before that collision, Bagley was balling.
His averages in February—18.4 PPG, 9.7 RPG, 1.4 APG, 1.2 BLK, 0.9 STL—were uniformly up from the rest of his regular season numbers (13.9, 7.2, 1, 1, 0.6). He shot 48% from the field during the run, just a shade below his season mark of 50.1%, while upping his free throw percentage from 69% to 78%. Not only that, Bagley was beginning to fill a role that has been vacant since the ghost of Zach Randolph started haunting this team: a legit bucket getter.
With De’Aaron Fox still developing an outside jumper and Buddy Hield better off the pass than breaking defenders down with the ball in his hands, Bagley assumed the role of a player who put his hand in the air and got the ball thrown to him so he could go to work. It wasn’t always pretty, but it was coming along.
A week prior to the Brogdon screen, the Kings gave the Warriors a run for their money in Oracle before eventually falling by two points. While challenging the NBA’s best, Sacramento routinely gave Marvin the ball on the right block with Kevin Durant on him. KD ate him up, using his length and savvy to pile up five blocks/steals on Bagley, but the strategy was seemingly set. We believe we have an edge here and we’re going to feed the youngest of the Young Kings.
Despite the blanket that Durant draped on him, Bagley got himself to the line 14 times (and sunk 11 of them) and finished the night with 28 and 14 while pacing the Kings with 33 minutes played. The loss was the Sacramento’s fourth of the season to Golden State, but both Bagley and the organization drew praise from Durant afterwards. In Oakland and elsewhere, Bagley has shown more than a glimpse of the player that Divac believed in when passing over Doncic.
Luka seems destined to develop into a walking triple-double by the end of this sentence, but what Bagley does well jibes with Sacramento’s aims. With De’Aaron Fox as the tip of the spear, the Young Kings look to get out and run as much as possible, pressing their speed advantage. Hield and Bogdanovic flare out wide as Fox and Bagley scream up court. In a league that is exclusively populated by exceptional athletes, the Fox/Bagley tandem stands out as particularly explosive.
As a rookie, his jumper is true-enough from 18 feet in, and his scoring instincts and athleticism have already made him a useful player on the block. As Bagley’s range stretches out—he’s shooting a ghastly 25.8% on 1.3 attempted threes per game, but the stroke doesn’t look broken—he’s going to start causing real problems for defenses. At the time of writing, Bagley is one day shy of his 20th birthday (HBD, Young King!). Some additional muscle on his 6’ 11” frame is to be expected as he matures, as is continued growth defensively. You can see that Sacramento would like to build around a core of Fox/Hield/Bagley/Giles with minimal squinting required.
So no, Marvin Bagley is definitively not Luka Doncic. And the Kings, despite the deadline acquisition of Harrison Barnes and the promising displays of improvement from Fox, Hield and Harry Giles, aren’t going to make the playoffs this year. Boo hoo. Marvin Bagley has the juice, and for a franchise that has seen so little success in such a long time, the future is brighter than any other point in recent memory.
It will be tempting, now that the Young Kings have fallen out of the playoff picture, to zoom ahead and concentrate only on the upcoming playoffs, especially because Bagley is still listed as day-to-day as he recovers from his knee injury. But if you’re even remotely interested in seeing the reasons why the Kings didn’t take Luka and get a jump on a fun team for next year, try to catch one of Sac’s last 10 games of the season. You’re going to be watching more of them in coming seasons anyway.
*This will be the only time I correctly hit the accent marks on Luka’s surname.
