The 6 most important games in the Sacramento Kings schedule

The NBA has announced its schedule for the 2024-25 regular season, with 80 of the Sacramento Kings’ 82 regular season games now known (the other two will be determined depending on the outcome of the Emirates NBA Cup).

As you may have noticed from the title, we're going to look at some of the most important games of the Kings' regular season. But before we do that, I want to make it clear that I'm a staunch proponent of the school of thought that all games/minutes/possessions are equal. Talk to any coach at any level and they'll tell you that any given Tuesday game in November means just as much in terms of the win-loss column as the last game of the season.

I do admit, however, that some games are more important to the dynamics and morale than others (remember, this game is played by humans, not robots), so it's worth doing such an exercise. However, given the extremely arbitrary nature of this analysis, I'm not going to rank these games from least important to most important. There are just a few games that I consider to be particularly significant.

And now, without further ado, the six most important games of the Kings’ regular season.

We've already discussed the importance of this game in another post, but in case you missed it (or just don't feel like reading the post I linked in the sentence before), here's the elevator pitch.

This game is the Kings' season opener, their home game, the first time they've had DeMar DeRozan on their team, and it's a game against one of the teams that represented their side of the standings in the Western Conference Finals. This is their chance to start the season strong, make their fans happy, prove the DeRozan trade was a good idea, and dethrone one of the projected leaders in the West.