The Sacramento Kings were faced with a choice in the 2018 NBA Draft: select Duke big man Marvin Bagley or European guard Luka Dončić?
As most Kings fans are very aware, the team chose Bagley, then watched Dončić become one of the premier player in the NBA, with five straight All-NBA first-team nods after his rookie season. Bagley, meanwhile, has become a somewhat average center, and is no longer on the Kings.
It would appear 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 apparently thinks the jury is still out.
In an interview Croatian outlet Index.hr, Divac was asked to explain passing over Dončić. Like 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 choice, and implied Fox could still vindicate the decision if he has a better career than Dončić.
From Index, interpreted through Google Translate:
“I had De’Aaron Fox at that position, whom I drafted a year earlier. At that moment, I thought that Fox was a player who could become a franchise player in the next period. Time will tell if I was wrong. As things stand now, it looks like I am, but I have faith in little Fox that he will 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 have reached the playoffs once in 2023, losing in the first round to the Golden State Warriors.
Dončić certainly seems to think Divac should have taken him.
The logic that Dončić and Fox were mutually exclusive as franchise stars is also hard to swallow considering that the Mavericks reached the Finals with Dončić and point guard Kyrie Irving as their leading scorers.
Index pressed Divac on that fact and got 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, as is Luka. Fox is not, he is a player who needs the ball, just like Luka needs it. I could only take Luka, but then I would have to trade Fox. Interestingly, Phoenix also skipped Luka, and then their coach was Igor Kokoškov, who was his coach in Slovenia.”
There is a lot to unpack there. For starters, to present 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 does need the ball as a score-first point guard.
Divac also logically contradicts himself by presenting Irving as a classic scorer, like Dončić, then attempting to conversely paint Fox as a player who needs the ball, like Dončić. Maybe there was a translation error here, but most NBA fans would describe classic scorers as players who need the ball in their hands.
This is all the built on the presence that a team with Dončić and Fox just wouldn’t work, which seems silly. Maybe they would have to sacrifice some of what makes them great to work 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 those multi-dimensional threats sounds like a bigger issue for the defense than the offense.
Divac did praise Dončić as a player “on the right track” to win MVP, and he also denied a longstanding rumor that he passed over the Slovenian due to a conflict with his father Sasa.
This all in the past, though, even if the Kings still have to reckon what many believe to be a missed opportunity on a Hall of Fame talent. Divac stepped down as Kings GM in 2020 and was replaced with Monte McNair.