The Sacramento Kings faced a choice in the 2018 NBA Draft: select Duke big man Marvin Bagley or European point guard Luka Dončić?
As most Kings fans know, the team drafted Bagley and then watched Dončić develop into one of the best players in the NBA, earning five straight All-NBA First Team selections after his rookie season. Bagley, meanwhile, has become a pretty average center and is no longer with the Kings.
It looks like the Kings made a game-changing mistake in this draft, but don’t tell that to former general manager Vlade Divac, the man responsible for that decision. He apparently thinks the jury is still out.
In an interview with Croatian media Index.hrDivac was asked to explain why he passed on Dončić. As he did immediately after the draft, Divac pointed to Kings point guard De’Aaron Fox as the reason Bagley was the better pick, and implied that Fox could still justify his decision if he had a better career than Dončić.
Excerpt from the index, interpreted via Google Translate:
“I had De’Aaron Fox at that position, who I had 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. As it stands, it appears that he is, but I have confidence in little Fox and I know he’s going to have a better career.”
Since that draft, Dončić and the Mavericks have reached the playoffs four times, including 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 it.
The logic that Dončić and Fox were mutually exclusive as franchise stars is also hard to accept given that the Mavericks reached the Finals with Dončić and point guard Kyrie Irving as their leading scorers.
Index pressed Divac on this fact and got the argument that Irving and Fox are different types of scorers, as well as an attempt to shift some of the questioning to the Phoenix Suns:
“Irving is a classic goal scorer, just like Luka. Fox is not, he is a player who needs the ball, just like Luka needs the ball. I could only take Luka, but I would have had to trade Fox. Interestingly, Phoenix also passed on Luka, and their coach was Igor Kokoškov, who was his coach in Slovenia.”
There’s a lot to be said for that. 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 criticisms leveled at 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, and then conversely trying to portray Fox as a player who needs the ball, like Dončić. There may be a mistranslation here, but most NBA fans would describe classic scorers as players who need the ball in their hands.
This is all based on the premise that a team with Dončić and Fox simply wouldn’t work, which seems silly. Maybe they should sacrifice some of what makes them so good at working together, but Dončić made 37.8 percent of his three-point shots last year, while Fox shot 39.1 percent. Dealing with these two multidimensional threats seems like a bigger problem for the defense than the offense.
Divac hailed Dončić as a player “on track” to win the MVP award, and he also denied a long-standing rumor that he abandoned the Slovenian due to a conflict with his father Sasa.
But that’s all in the past, even as the Kings still face what many see as a missed opportunity to land a Hall of Fame talent. Divac stepped down as the Kings’ general manager in 2020 and was replaced by Monte McNair.
