The Sacramento Kings may be staring at an uncomfortable reality: Darius Acuff Jr. is the only dedicated point guard on the roster, and there’s no backup or veteran mentor behind him.
That is why Dennis Schroder keeps surfacing as a possibility, even if it would qualify as a pretty wild reunion.
Sacramento already lived through the point guard scramble in the 2025 offseason. After De'Aaron Fox moved on, the Kings had no true answer at the position. They tried Malik Monk as a starter, but that never really fit his game.
So the Kings turned to Schroder, a veteran who has long shown he can handle the job in FIBA play and still has plenty of ability. The issue was never whether he could play.
It was where he fit. Schroder has never looked like a clean starting point guard in the NBA, while he’s much more effective coming off the bench - something Sacramento eventually discovered.
Russell Westbrook ended up filling the backup role, and he outperformed expectations in a big way. Even in his 18th season, he was “a man on a mission.” Meanwhile, the Kings moved Schroder to the Cavs at the deadline, and Cleveland recently sent him on to the Hornets.
A return to Sacramento would not be an easy sell. Plenty of Kings fans were not happy with how things went the first time around, and Schroder was openly critical of the organization after he left. Once he was with the Cavaliers, he also gave a couple of unflattering interviews about his time in Sacramento.
Still, there’s a case to be made that the fit wasn’t as cleanly bad as it looked. Schroder did have stretches where he helped the Kings off the bench, and the bigger backdrop matters too: last season was a mess, the team went into 2025-2026 in rough shape, injuries piled up, and the playbook had to be adjusted almost every game.
Under those circumstances, it’s not hard to see why things never fully clicked. If both sides came back with realistic expectations, a second run could go better than the first. At the very least, Schroder would ease some of the pressure on Acuff.
Even so, a reunion still feels unlikely. The Kings and Schroder have both moved on, and Sacramento would not be able to bring him back without making a major trade. But the bigger point is hard to ignore: the Kings do have options, and they can’t afford to enter the season unprepared.
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What makes the exercise more revealing for Sacramento is how much it depends on unresolved playing time questions around Zach LaVine and Emanuel Sharp. If those two are featured more heavily than expected, the whole stat race could tilt in a different direction, and that would say plenty about how the Kings are choosing to build their nightly rotation. [Read more 🡒]