Zach LaVine did the obvious thing. In late June, Klutch Sports CEO Rich Paul told ESPN’s Shams Charania that LaVine was exercising his roughly $49 million player option for the 2026-27 season.
Of course he did. LaVine’s 2025-26 season ended before the All-Star break when he chose to undergo surgery on a tendon injury in his right hand. He averaged 19.2 points across 39 games before that. No team in free agency was handing a 31-year-old coming off hand surgery anything close to $49 million on the open market.
So he took the money. Good for him. The interesting part is what it does to Sacramento.
Kings general manager Scott Perry has spent months trying to move LaVine’s salary, and the opt-in actually helps more than it hurts. An expiring $49 million contract is a far more usable trade chip than a long-term commitment. Teams looking to dump salary or chase cap space next summer will absorb one year of pain in a way they never would for three.
Here is evidence of that logic in action. Sacramento reportedly turned down a deal that would have sent LaVine out for Trae Young. Read that again, because it explains everything about where this front office’s head is at. Young is the better player. Young is also attached to a new extension. Perry chose the expiring contract and the flexibility that comes with it over the name.
Whether that is smart depends entirely on what Sacramento does with the room. A bad team that clears cap space and then spends it badly is just a bad team with extra steps.
The Kings are not buying LaVine out. Reporting has been clear on that, and the organization has publicly framed this as a big year for him in what amounts to a contract season. That framing is doing a lot of work, because Sacramento has not promised him a starting job or any guaranteed minutes.
That is the tension. The Kings need LaVine to play well enough to be attractive in February, which requires giving him real minutes and real shot volume. But they also have younger players who need those same touches, and a front office in transition rarely wants to hand the ball to a guy it is actively trying to trade.
My prediction: LaVine starts, he scores, and he is gone by the deadline. He has always been an efficient volume scorer when healthy, and some contender or fringe playoff team that loses a guard to injury in January will make the call. Sacramento will take back a shorter deal plus a pick and call it a win.
The uglier version of this story is also on the table. LaVine struggles out of the gate, the hand never feels right, the Kings cannot find a taker, and the $49 million simply evaporates into a lost season. That happens to teams in this exact position all the time.
But a healthy, motivated LaVine on an expiring number is one of the more tradeable contracts in the league, precisely because it ends. The money is already spent either way. The only question left is whether Sacramento turns it into something that matters.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
