Sacramento Kings: De’Aaron Fox’s rise to one of the West’s top point guards

Taking a closer look at Sacramento Kings guard De’Aaron Fox’s swift rise to one of the top point guards in the Western Conference

De’Aaron Fox is one of the most exciting young players in the league. Fox’s constant growth, extreme quickness, and dynamic playstyle make tuning in to any random Sacramento Kings game worth your time as a basketball fan.

And although the Kings have been the league’s punching bag since before Barak Obama was elected President, Fox’s 2019 campaign, in which he led the team to 39 wins (the franchise’s best record since 2006), should inspire confidence in the young point guard and his team’s future.

The Houston native was the consensus 6th overall recruit in the class of 2016. Fox, the second-highest point guard in the class after Lonzo Ball, chose to team up with fellow 5-star prospects Bam Adebayo, Malik Monk, and Wenyen Gabriel at the University of Kentucky, hoping to revitalize Rupp Arena after a (relatively) quiet 2015-16 season. In college, he showcased his trademark speed and led his team in steals and assists.

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As many freshmen do, he had his struggles – Fox’s main vice at Kentucky was never being able to space the floor for his teammates. He wound up only hitting 17 3-pointers in the entire season at under a 25 percent mark. However, Fox showed clear promise, specifically in an extremely hyped Sweet 16 matchup against Lonzo Ball’s UCLA Bruins, where he scored 39 and helped hold Lonzo to only 10 points.

Fox’s good size, playstyle, and struggles were reminiscent of fellow Wildcat John Wall – and that’s exactly who Fox was compared to in pre-draft coverage. Fox was drafted 5th overall – the 3rd point guard off the board – but has quickly established himself as one of the top 3 players from that draft. The order would depend on how you, the reader, feel personally about Jayson Tatum and Donovan Mitchell (I think he’s 2nd behind Mitchell).

In an interview with Chris Haynes of Yahoo Sports, Fox says there’s “no debate” that he’s the fastest player in the NBA, baseline to baseline, ball in his hands. Yes, faster than a healthy John Wall. Yes, faster than Russell Westbrook. That speed helps him and his team a great deal, as he was the highest-scoring point guard in transition in 2018-19 with 442 points (1.04 points per possession) – and his teammate Buddy Hield was the second-highest transition scorer overall at 496 points (second only to Giannis).

That brings us to his passing. It’s really, really good. As a rookie, Fox averaged 4.4 assists per game, which is great for a rookie, especially a rookie on a bad team. This past season, he picked his assists up to 7.3, and increased his assist-to-bad-pass-turnover ratio from 3.14 (320/102) to 4.09 (590/144) – above the average ratio in 2018-19, which was 3.89.

Fox made the 5th most passes, 4569, this past season and only had 144 bad pass turnovers. He’s not only a willing passer, but an extremely accurate one and his passing prowess both lend to and feeds off of his ability to score with ever-increasing efficiency.

So, his shooting – one of the main things he was dinged for in the pre-draft process. Something that still haunts his comp and fellow Wildcat, John Wall. The same guy who shot less than 25 percent from the college 3-point line started off as a rookie shooting about 31 percent from 3 and increased that to 37 percent as a sophomore, albeit on only 2.9 attempts per game. This was just one of the many things that led to Fox being a finalist for Most Improved Player, finishing 3rd in voting to Pascal Siakam and D’Angelo Russell.

He’s not an elite shooter yet, but he made a huge leap and has to be respected by defenses now –  in college especially if he were having an off shooting night, defenses had the liberty of sagging off of him and paying closer attention to Bam Adebayo and Malik Monk.

To really illustrate how much Fox has improved as a shooter, let’s just look at FG% throughout the season for each of his rookie and sophomore seasons. I’ve divided all of his 797 and 1102 shot attempts from his first two years into groups of 10 shots, with the final group of each season being seven shots and 12 shots, respectively. (797 being a prime number really threw a wrench in my hopes of having either equal-sized groups each year or having the same number of groups in both years.)

Here’s 2017-18:

This plot and the next are smoothed, meaning what’s shown in blue is essentially a trend line, and the gray area around the blue line is the confidence interval. We see that right around chunk 50 is where Fox’s shooting peaked and started to decline. Chunk 50 is pretty much right after the All-Star Break, suggesting that he hit the metaphorical ‘rookie wall’, at least in regards to his raw shooting percentage. On the season, Fox shot about 41 percent. Contrast this with what Fox did in 2018-19.

Since Fox took way more shots this past season than he did last year (due to playing more games, more minutes, and no longer sharing a role with George Hill), there are more chunks. However, Fox did finish with a much-averaged field goal percentage and actually closed the season with a higher percentage than he started with.

Fox shot 53 percent to close the season during the month of April while shooting 45 percent post-all-star break (Fox shot 46 percent pre-all-star break). That’s a real, tangible improvement from year 1 to year 2, and get this – he’s 21 years old.

Plenty of players improve from year 1 to year 2, but a second-year player finishing top-3 in Most Improved Player voting, as Fox did, seems to auger very well for a player. Since 2008-09, the other second-year players to earn that honor are:

"Nikola Pekovic (good player whose career was cut short by injuries)George Hill (played key roles on several very good teams)Rudy Gobert (2x DPOY)Nikola Jokic (All-Star, 1st Team All-NBA)Anthony Davis (All-Star, 1st Team All-NBA)Marc Gasol (All-Star, 1st Team All-NBA, DPOY, NBA Champion)Kevin Durant (All-Star, 1st Team All-NBA, MVP, NBA Champion)"

While Fox will probably never win a Defensive Player of the Year award or reach MVP levels of play, he’s in pretty good company in that list. With Fox being only 21 years old, if he keeps up this pace, he can certainly contend with (if not wholly outperform) the likes of Luka Doncic, Donovan Mitchell, Ja Morant, and Jamal Murray for an All-Star spot in the West once the current leading group of guards’ performance begins to taper off.

The NBA is chock-full of excellent young players. On a given night, you may be able to watch Luka Doncic hit a barrage of stepback 3-pointers, Karl-Anthony Towns showing off his guard skills in a 7-foot-tall body, and within the next couple of months, whatever Zion Williamson has in store for us.

But if you want to watch a young player with the technical skill and decision-making of a 10-year veteran coupled with the blistering speed of, well, a fox – stay up past your bedtime and tune in to see the Sacramento Kings’ budding point guard feed knockdown shooter Buddy Hield behind the 3-point line or find the burgeoning 20-10 man Marvin Bagley for a layup. And if he gets the ball in transition, get ready for a real spectacle.