SACRAMENTO KINGS
Let's Skip 2008!

If anything sums up the meager prospects for the once-proud Sacramento Kings franchise in 2008-09, it's this: the defining moment of the season came in mid-August, two and a half months before the start of regular-season play. That's when the trade sending perpetual migraine Ron Artest to Houston became official, netting Sacramento a 2009 first-round pick and a throwback to the good old days in twilight-of-career guard Bobby Jackson.

While the first-rounder will surely help the as-yet glacial rebuilding process somewhere down the line, it's Artest's absence that will matter in Sacramento this season. Win or lose — and lose they will — there will be no more leadership crises, no more will-he-or-won't-he-go trade distractions, no more walking on eggshells at Arco. The mercurial forward is somebody else's problem now.

The bad news is that Artest, for all his flaws, was the last irreplaceable talent on the roster. What's left in his absence is a hodgepodge of has-beens (Brad Miller, Shareef Abdur-Rahim) and young strivers (Beno Udrih, John Salmons), plus one future all-star in Kevin Martin. At 25, Martin has already shown that he's capable of prodigious scoring (23.7 points per game last year) and deadeye shooting (40.2 percent from three-point range). But he has yet to demonstrate that he can accomplish these feats as the featured player in an offense, that he can get a basket when his team needs one. Martin's game is almost too smooth, too natural — he goes with the flow of the game rather than imposing his will to change its direction.

It's possible that with another year of experience behind him and a huge void in leadership opening up before him, Martin will blossom into a take-charge kind of player. He seems to have the right man on the sidelines to get him there in Reggie Theus, whose first year of coaching at the NBA level was notable both for his willingness to dish out discipline off-court, sometimes to the vocal dismay of his players, and for his ability to coax hard-nosed, hustling basketball from his team on-court. Udrih and Salmons flourished under Theus, putting up surprisingly good numbers when given the chance to start games, and both figure to see extended minutes this year. If their tough-minded style of play rubs off on Martin, the Kings could get a whiff of .500, as they did in 2007-08.

But in a Pacific Division loaded with talent, from the A-list Lakers and Suns to the suddenly respectable Warriors, a .500 finish means golf clubs and fishing poles, not X's and O's, come playoff time. That's the reality of life in the Western Conference.

The other reality facing the Kings is that they are not too many years removed from the damn-the-consequences, win-it-all-today personnel moves that brought them tantalizingly close to championship glory, and rebuilding takes time. (With a salary cap looming overhead and an annual draft that lasts only two rounds, reloading a roster is a painstaking process for NBA general managers.) Luckily, at age 28, Salmons is the oldest of Sacramento's key contributors, so time is one thing — maybe the one thing — the team can afford to part with. As the calendar pages turn this season, the Kings would have to consider themselves lucky to take their licks in the Pacific while developing their young players without too much strife or injury. But you know they'll be hoping that 2009 draft pick is a doozy.