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Kings are 0-6 and Domantas Sabonis reportedly wants out, but a team source says he and Darius Acuff Jr. are ‘in great communication’ as Sacramento visits Dallas
Tim MacMahon says Domantas Sabonis wants out of Sacramento and the Kings would move him for the right deal. A team source says the Acuff rift story is false, Doug Christie says ‘we have to help him,’ and the 0-6 Kings visit Dallas.
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The Sacramento Kings are 0-6 and still looking for their first win of the 2026-27 season, and on Monday the conversation around them moved from the scoreboard to their locker room. On The Hoop Collective podcast, Tim MacMahon said that Domantas Sabonis is unhappy in Sacramento and wants out, and that the Kings would trade him if they could find the right deal. A team source told a Sacramento reporter on Sunday night that a different story, about Sabonis and rookie Darius Acuff Jr. not getting along, “could not be farther from the truth.” The Kings visit the Dallas Mavericks tonight at 8 p.m. ET (3 a.m. Tuesday, Cairo time).
We found no public comment from Sabonis or the Kings about the latest report as of Monday evening, Cairo time. Here is what was said, what came before it, and why moving a 30-year-old center with a $45 million salary is harder than it sounds.
What Windhorst and MacMahon said
The clip comes from a Sunday-morning episode of the podcast, after the Kings lost 136-105 at Memphis on Saturday. Brian Windhorst starts by pointing at the box score: Acuff took 25 shots in that game and Sabonis took five. He also says plainly that he had not seen the game. “I didn’t watch the game, nor have I talked to anybody about it. It’s Sunday morning,” Windhorst says. “But we know that Sabonis has talked about this. Acuff took 25 shots. He took five. They’re 0-6.”
MacMahon then goes further. “Quite frankly, Sabonis wants out of there, and if they can move him, they would,” he says. “So, he’s not happy. It’s a bad situation.” The clip closes with a reminder of the limits: “Well, they can move him. It’s moving him for a trade that makes sense.” In other words, the Kings are not expected to give Sabonis away just to end the partnership.
Where it started: ‘Get me the ball more’
The idea that Sabonis and Acuff want different things on offense is not new. After the season-opening loss to the Clippers, Acuff took 24 shots in his NBA debut, going 5 of 24 with no made threes, while Sabonis had 14 points on 5-of-5 shooting, 18 rebounds and eight assists. Asked how the Kings could generate more three-point attempts, after they ranked near the bottom of the league last season, Sabonis answered with a plan that ran through him.
“Maybe something you saw on tape to generate some more … get me the ball more so I can swing it and get guys open,” Sabonis said. “We took a lot of one-pass shots, pick-and-roll shots without passing the ball. Those numbers are really high. And I feel like we’re best when we kind of mix it up: point guard shoots, point guard hits the corner, point guard hits me. Then I can make the read. That’s where I’m best at.”
A game later, he sounded warmer about the rookie. Sabonis called Acuff “a very smart, high-IQ player at the point guard position” and said his own job was “to get him open and try to make life easier for him.” In early October, at media day, he had waved away trade talk altogether: “It’s all made up. I don’t know where you guys get most of it from,” he said, adding that he had “a great relationship” with general manager Scott Perry.
The report, the denial, and the numbers
On Sunday, Sean Deveney wrote in a trade-rumor column that Sabonis “is not enthused about playing with a ball-dominant guard like Acuff,” that the Kings “have no interest in keeping him there,” and that a first-round pick coming back for him would be “a major score, and a long shot.” That report was widely shared on X, and Sacramento reporter Brenden Nunes answered it that night with the line from a team source.
The two stories do not have to contradict each other. A player can get along with a teammate and still want a different situation, and the MacMahon clip does not say Acuff is the cause. Matt George, who covers the Kings, made the same point on X on Monday, writing that “we’ve known Sabonis was positioning to move on, just like the Kings have been positioning to move him,” and that it does not make Acuff the reason.
The numbers fit both readings. Acuff is averaging 26.3 points, 6.3 assists and 3.7 rebounds, ninth in the league in scoring, but he is shooting under 40 percent and leads the league in field-goal attempts at about 24 a game. He tied the NBA rookie record with nine threes in the loss at Memphis; we wrote about that in our story from Sunday. Sabonis is averaging 16.0 points, 15.8 rebounds and 7.3 assists on 70.4 percent shooting, and he leads the league in rebounding, but he is taking only about nine shots a game, the fewest since his second season. In the Memphis game he had one field-goal attempt through three quarters and finished with 11 points, 14 rebounds and eight assists in 38 minutes. Our full recap is here.
Doug Christie: ‘We have to help him’
Kings coach Doug Christie did not talk about Sabonis after Saturday’s game. He talked about the rookie. “Man, we have to help him,” Christie told reporters in Memphis. “It’s an absolute must. The kid is special. He’s highly competitive. He wants to win.” Christie added that opponents tell you what they think of your players, and that Memphis had put seven defenders on Acuff when the teams met earlier this season. “We put him in position to win ball games and he’s going to win a lot of them.”
Acuff, for his part, did not want to talk about his own stat line. Asked about the nine threes, he said: “It’s good, personal-wise, but it don’t matter because we’re losing, so them two don’t go well together.” He said the Kings had to “hang our hat on the defensive end.” The numbers show why. Through six games Sacramento is scoring about 109 points and allowing about 128, a point differential of minus-19 per game that is the worst in the NBA, and its bench is averaging a league-low 19.5 points.
Why a trade is hard
Sabonis is owed about $45 million this season and $48.6 million next season, the final two years of the four-year, $186 million extension he signed in Sacramento. That is a lot of salary for a team to match, and the Kings have said they want a pick back. In October, Jake Fischer reported that the Kings “view that Domantas Sabonis has positive trade value, that they would need a draft pick to come back in a deal, which I just don’t think is plausible right now.” Deveney put it the same way on Sunday.
Writers have floated several teams, Utah among them, as possible fits, but each runs into the same salary-matching problem. Sabonis is also coming off a season in which a knee injury limited him to 19 games, and the 0-6 start is not helping the market for him or for Zach LaVine, who is listed as questionable for Monday’s game with an elbow injury.
What’s next
Keegan Murray (ankle), Maxime Raynaud and Ben Simmons are listed out in Dallas. Dylan Cardwell was downgraded to questionable on Monday. The Mavericks are 4-2 and have listed Kyrie Irving as doubtful with left knee management, two nights after his 35-point game against Houston.
After that, Sacramento hosts the Lakers on Wednesday, November 4, at 7 p.m. PT (5 a.m. Thursday, Cairo time) and the San Antonio Spurs on Friday, November 6, at the same hour. The worst start in NBA history is 0-18, shared by the 2009 Nets and 2015 76ers. On October 30, Kevin O’Connor wrote on X that the Kings would not be favored in any of their next 14 games and that “0-19 is on the table.” If the Sabonis situation is going to be resolved, the next few weeks will probably show how much the Kings want it resolved before the February 11 trade deadline.
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