Earlier this week, we ranked the NBA's top 15 front offices. Today, we conclude these rankings with the bottom 15. Before kicking off the first half of these rankings, we covered the traits that tend to make a successful front office.
Since we're covering the less successful front offices today, let's talk about the ways in which poorly run teams tend not to embody those traits: The basic purpose of this exercise, again is to determine which front offices you would want to run your favorite team if you could make that choice. These are the front offices I likely would not recommend if given the choice. Something to keep in mind here, though, is that this does not mean every front office listed here is explicitly bad.
A point I hammer home every time I publish Front Office Rankings is that there are more well-run teams than poorly run teams. With that in mind, let's conclude this ranking of the NBA's best front offices, starting all the way at the bottom. On March 7, 2026, the Sacramento Kings had the worst record in the NBA with a potentially generational draft looming.
This is a team that has missed the playoffs in 19 of the past 20 drafts. Losing is in their DNA at this point. If they just could have kept doing what they've been doing for the past two decades for another five weeks, they would have ended the season with the league's worst record.
The Wizards did so in reality and got the No. 1 pick. The Kings finished the season on an 8-10 stretch and fell to No. 7 in the draft. We don't punish teams for bad luck, but we certainly punish teams for bad vision.
No lottery team misunderstood the assignment more than the Kings did. In a spring defined by discourse about how to fix tanking, the Kings were the tanker that didn't actually know how to tank. They were just naturally bad.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
