The Sacramento Kings recently shook up their coaching staff. It appears their roster may be next.
ESPN’s Shams Charania reported that Sacramento will field trade requests for All-Star guard De’Aaron Fox ahead of the NBA trade deadline on Feb. 6. ‘There will be plenty of suitors, but it’s believed that Fox has a target destination in mind ahead of 2026 free agency,’ Charania added.
Fox is averaging 25.2 points, shooting 46.8% from the field and 32.4% from three, in addition to a career-high five rebounds and 6.2 assists. He’s in the fourth season of a five-year, $163 million contract and is set to become a free agent following the 2025-26 season.
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According to James Ham, citing multiple sources, Fox may already have a preferred destination in mind:
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Fox, who was drafted out of Kentucky by Sacramento with the fifth overall pick of the 2017 NBA Draft, earned his first All-Star nod during the 2022-23 season, when the Kings made the playoffs for the first time in 16 years. Fox was named the league’s inaugural NBA Clutch Player of the Year and Mike Brown was named NBA Coach of the Year, but the Kings have struggled to replicate that success and missed the playoffs entirely last year during the 2023-24 season.
Although some claimed that friction between Brown and Fox ultimately lead to Brown’s dismissal, Fox clarified that he wasn’t responsible for the termination.
‘I feel like there’s this perception that people thought that we were at odds,’ Fox told ESPN in December. ‘You can ask anybody in this organization: me and Mike have never even had an argument. We could disagree with something. We talked about it and it was gone.’
Fox doubled down on social media, writing, ‘There was never any push back about anything. This narrative of us butting heads or me going to management saying anything is (expletive). So you can run with that if you want to,’ he wrote on social media in December.
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