The Sacramento Kings have reopened a door that appeared firmly shut just three weeks ago. Sacramento is weighing whether to bring Russell Westbrook back for a second season — or to hand the same role to Victor Oladipo — as the front office searches for a veteran guard to guide No. 7 overall pick Darius Acuff Jr. through his rookie year, Jake Fischer and Marc Stein reported in The Stein Line’s Monday night intel column.
Russell Westbrook and Victor Oladipo rank as two of several veteran guard options Sacramento will continue weighing for a late-summer back court addition, sources say. The Kings were among several teams that observed Oladipo workout in Las Vegas during Summer League. https://t.co/bPV3tl480h
— Jake Fischer (@JakeLFischer) August 4, 2026
The report lands more than a month into a free agency period that has passed Westbrook by entirely. The 37-year-old declined his player option at the end of June expecting a market that never materialized, and the team he started 58 games for last season had shown no public appetite for a reunion, until now.
What changed since July
The reversal is the story. On July 17, Fischer addressed the idea of Westbrook returning to Sacramento during a Bleacher Report livestream and left little room for interpretation.
“I haven’t heard that the Kings would want him back really in any fashion,” Fischer said at the time.
18 days later, the same reporter says the same franchise is considering exactly that. The connective tissue is Acuff, the 19-year-old the Kings drafted seventh overall in June to be their lead guard of the future.
Sacramento wants an accomplished veteran in the locker room to speed up his development, per the Stein Line report, and the search has narrowed to a familiar face and a comeback story.
The market context matters too. Free agency opened five weeks ago, and Westbrook remains unsigned — a near rerun of last summer, when Sacramento didn’t add him until mid-October.
If the price is the veteran’s minimum and the alternative is nothing, a front office that spent July lukewarm on a reunion can talk itself into one by August.
The case for and against running it back
Westbrook’s on-court resume from last season is stronger than his frozen market suggests. Across 64 games and 58 starts in his 18th NBA season, he averaged 15.2 points, 6.7 assists and 5.4 rebounds per game while hitting 33.8 percent of nearly six 3-point attempts a night, per Basketball-Reference.
He added six triple-doubles to a career total of 209, and his 10,351 career assists have him fifth on the NBA’s all-time list. As a floor-raiser for a rebuilding roster, the production was real.
The counterarguments are just as real. Westbrook shot 42.7 percent from the field and 69.4 percent from the line, both below his career marks, and Sacramento’s numbers did not improve with him out there.
The Kings posted a minus-12.1 net rating with Westbrook on the floor against minus-7.7 with him off it. On a 22-60 team, no single rotation piece deserves the blame — but the mentor job description calls for someone comfortable ceding the floor to Acuff, and Westbrook logged 29.0 minutes per game as a near-full-time starter a season ago.
The fit question isn’t about talent; it’s about role.
Oladipo’s three-year road back
Oladipo arrives at this conversation from the opposite direction. The 34-year-old hasn’t appeared in an NBA game since tearing his left patellar tendon with the Miami Heat during the 2023 playoffs, the last in a run of major leg injuries that began with a ruptured quad tendon in 2019 and swallowed the prime of a two-time All-Star who won Most Improved Player and made an All-Defensive team in 2018.
His comeback bid has been public and, by the accounts of those in the gym, credible. Oladipo held a pro day for scouts in Las Vegas during Summer League last month, and the Kings were among the teams in attendance, per the Stein Line.
ESPN’s Jeremy Woo reported that Oladipo went through full-court five-on-five in the session and that evaluators came away describing him as being in “excellent shape.”
The statistical picture is more sobering. Oladipo spent the bulk of last season with the G League’s Wisconsin Herd and produced modest numbers — 14.0 points, 4.4 rebounds and 3.8 assists per game on 39.4 percent shooting across 26 appearances.
He is also navigating the process without representation. “I don’t have an agent right now just me and my family,” Oladipo wrote in a post on X last month, adding that he would rather show teams he is ready than argue the case with analytics.
There’s a thread connecting the two candidates beyond the job itself: Oladipo and Westbrook shared a backcourt in Oklahoma City in 2016-17, the season Westbrook averaged a triple-double and won MVP. Nearly a decade later, they are effectively competing for the same locker room chair.
The roster math that decides this
Whichever direction Sacramento leans, the mechanics are tight. The Kings still hold a veteran minimum exception to make this kind of signing, and with 13 players on standard contracts, they have two open spots on a 15-man regular season roster.
But cap specialist Yossi Gozlan of CapSheets pegs Sacramento at just $1.3 million below the luxury tax line and $3.4 million shy of a first-apron hard cap, meaning the front office would likely need to shed money — with stretching the $10 million still owed to DeMar DeRozan as the most obvious lever — before carrying a full 15 into opening night.
One thing this search does not signal is a Zach LaVine exit. Fischer reported that a source close to the situation told The Stein Line the Kings are proceeding as though LaVine will open the season in Sacramento and that “no buyout” is being discussed.
LaVine, who picked up his player option, carries a cap hit just under $49 million in the final year of his deal. The competition for the mentor chair isn’t limited to two names, either.
Gabe Vincent, Cameron Payne, Lonzo Ball and Aaron Holiday remain unsigned veteran options at the position. And Sacramento’s own history argues against urgency: The franchise waited until camp had nearly arrived before signing Westbrook last October, and nothing about a rebuilding timeline forces its hand in early August.
For Acuff, the outcome shapes his first professional season either way. A Westbrook reunion would put one of the most decorated point guards ever a locker away — with the risk that the veteran’s minutes come out of the rookie’s development time.
An Oladipo signing would deliver a lower-usage mentor and one of the league’s great perseverance stories — with no guarantee his body allows him to model anything on the floor. The Kings spent July insisting they didn’t need either.
August, apparently, has them thinking harder.
