With the NBA All-Star break festivities in the rearview mirror, the unofficial second half of the 2025–2026 NBA season starts when play resumes on Thursday. This is when teams truly make their postseason pushes to lock in a top-six seed, or at worst, nab a play-in tournament berth. However, on the eve of the second half, one Western Conference team made a surprising announcement regarding its two highest-paid players.
On Wednesday, the Sacramento Kings revealed that both Domantas Sabonis and Zach LaVine’s seasons were over. Both had surgery for lingering injuries, ruling them out for the remainder of the season and all but vanquishing any hope of the Kings making a postseason push.
Sabonis, whose last game was one of his best with 24 points and 15 rebounds in a Feb. 4 loss to the Memphis Grizzlies, had meniscus surgery in his left knee, per the team. As for LaVine, he last played in Sacramento’s next contest following the Memphis loss, a Feb. 6 defeat to the LA Clippers. He struggled in the contest with just 6 points in 18 minutes of play, and his season came to an end via finger surgery.
Kings coach Doug Christie talked about the losses of two of the team’s best players and how the Kings will move forward with their active roster.
“It makes it tough. You feel for Zach, you feel for Domas, because you know how much hard work they, and a professional athlete in general, put in with their life dream of being successful,” Christie told the media. “Unfortunate for us, but there’s going to be more opportunities for some of our young players to continue to develop and do it in high-leverage moments because we’re here to win basketball games.
Sabonis is a three-time All-Star, a two-time All-NBA selection, and led the league in rebounding each of the last three seasons. However, this season has been a nightmare for the Lithuanian big man, who has been in and out of the lineup all year. He strained his hamstring during preseason, which forced him to miss the season opener, but he then played in the next six games, posting a double-double in each.
He finishes the year playing in just 19 games and averaging 15.8 points, 11.4 rebounds, and 4.1 assists. All of those are career lows for Sabonis across his five years in Sacramento.
A rib contusion had forced Sabonis to miss two games, and he returned from that to play five more games before the knee injury struck. That sidelined him for two months, causing him to miss 27 additional games. While he returned in mid-January, he clearly wasn’t his normal self during the eight games of playing through the injury. Thus, the Kings made the decision to proceed with the surgery to have him fully available for next season.
As for LaVine, he is a two-time All-Star who missed two weeks of games from mid-December through early January due to an ankle injury and then missed a pair of games in late January to a back ailment. He hurt his finger just before the All-Star break, missing the last three games, and it’s apparently serious enough to require an operation.
LaVine finishes the 2025–2026 NBA season having logged 39 games and putting up 19.2 points, 2.8 rebounds and 2.3 assists per game. His scoring is his lowest average in eight years, while his rebounds and assists are both the lowest of his 12-year NBA career. Unfortunately for LaVine, he is quite familiar with season-ending injuries as this is the fifth time in his dozen years that the season will end with him sidelined.
At 12–44, the Kings have the NBA’s worst record, so any chance of a postseason appearance for them was extremely slim, even before announcing this news. This will mark the third straight year that Sacramento doesn’t take part in the NBA playoffs, as well as the 19th time over the last 20 years it will miss out on the postseason.
The team still has veterans in Russell Westbrook and DeMar DeRozan, but as Christie said, this presents opportunities for younger players to have an impact. Among those are the only rookies on the roster in Nique Clifford and Maxime Raynaud, who just happen to play the same positions as LaVine and Sabonis, respectively. It should also allow more court time for Devin Carter, the team’s lottery pick in 2024 who has struggled to find consistent playing time in his two seasons.
