The Fantasy Basketball Encyclopedia

Player Dossier · Sacramento Kings

Domantas Sabonis

Domantas Sabonis remains Sacramento's best redraft player, but a repaired left meniscus, reduced 2025-26 playmaking, and a managed role on a tanking roster make his old first-round floor unsafe.

Team: Sacramento Kings · Age: 30 · Position: PF/C · As of: 2026-07-18

2026-27 median projection

GP MPG FG% FT% 3PM PTS REB AST STL BLK TO
62 30.0 .568 .750 0.4 16.8 11.8 5.2 0.8 0.3 2.6

Nine-cat: top-25 to top-40 per game, with totals risk. Points: A-, Sacramento's clear No. 1. Dynasty: 7.0/10; Hashtag ranked him 61st and the crowd 63rd in July.

Role and evidence

Sabonis averaged 15.8 points, 11.4 rebounds, 4.1 assists, 0.9 steals, and 2.7 turnovers in 29.7 minutes across only 19 games in 2025-26 (ESPN player statistics). His assists had been 6.0 in 2024-25, so the projection restores only part of the lost creation now that Acuff will handle the ball.

Sabonis underwent surgery to repair his torn left meniscus on February 18 (NBA/AP medical report). He has since said he feels "ahead of schedule" and expects to be ready for the start of next season and to play at the All-NBA level Sacramento is used to (Sactown Sports). Standard meniscus-repair return-to-cutting windows run about six months, which from February 18 lands in mid-August — before camp opens.

A June report said Sacramento was listening on Sabonis and LaVine, but GM Scott Perry said in July that he anticipates both remaining for 2026-27 and expects Sabonis to help build winning habits in the rebuild (NBC Sports Bay Area). Reporting also suggests the trade market thinned: Detroit was not interested and Charlotte's path was complicated by its acquisition of Naz Reid.

Correction 2026-07-18: this dossier previously treated pre-camp clearance as an open unknown and priced trade risk as a live offseason discount. Both are superseded — by Sabonis's own recovery statement and by Perry's on-record July comments. Trade risk is now a February deadline tail rather than a preseason discount. The 30.0 MPG projection is retained but is explicitly a tanking and load-management assumption, not a medical one: no post-surgical report supports a 4.7-minute cut from his 34.7 MPG 2024-25 baseline, and the reason to hold it there is a 22-win roster managing a 30-year-old big, not the knee.

External ranks show the full disagreement: SI placed him 18th overall, a healthy ceiling, while Hashtag Basketball's July dynasty list put him 61st after the shortened season.

Range

Career record

Pre-NBA: Gonzaga, two seasons. 2014-15: 38 games, 9.7 points, 7.1 rebounds, 0.9 assists, 0.3 blocks on .668 from the field and .664 at the line; WCC All-Freshman and second-team All-WCC. 2015-16: 36 games, 17.6 points, 11.8 rebounds, 1.8 assists, 0.9 blocks on .611/.357/.769; first-team All-WCC and AP honorable-mention All-American. The sophomore year is the template — extreme two-point efficiency, elite rebounding, negligible three-point volume. Draft: 2016, first round, 11th overall by Orlando, traded on draft night to Oklahoma City with Victor Oladipo and Ersan İlyasova for Serge Ibaka. Traded to Indiana on July 6, 2017 in the Paul George deal, and to Sacramento on February 8, 2022 in the Tyrese Haliburton deal. Three-time All-Star (2020, 2021, 2023), two-time All-NBA Third Team (2023, 2024), and NBA rebounding leader in 2023, 2024, and 2025.

Season Age Team GP MPG PTS REB AST STL BLK 3PM FG% FT% TO
2016-17 20 OKC 81 20.1 5.9 3.6 1.0 0.5 0.4 0.6 .399 .657 1.0
2017-18 21 IND 74 24.5 11.6 7.7 2.0 0.5 0.4 0.2 .514 .750 1.9
2018-19 22 IND 74 24.8 14.1 9.3 2.9 0.6 0.4 0.1 .590 .715 2.2
2019-20 23 IND 62 34.8 18.5 12.4 5.0 0.8 0.5 0.3 .540 .723 2.7
2020-21 24 IND 62 36.0 20.3 12.0 6.7 1.2 0.5 0.8 .535 .732 3.4
2021-22 25 IND 47 34.7 18.9 12.1 5.0 1.0 0.5 0.7 .580 .740 3.0
2021-22 25 SAC 15 33.6 18.9 12.3 5.8 0.9 0.3 0.3 .554 .743 3.5
2021-22 25 Total 62 34.5 18.9 12.1 5.2 1.0 0.4 0.6 .573 .741 3.1
2022-23 26 SAC 79 34.6 19.1 12.3 7.3 0.8 0.5 0.4 .615 .742 2.9
2023-24 27 SAC 82 35.7 19.4 13.7 8.2 0.9 0.6 0.4 .594 .704 3.3
2024-25 28 SAC 70 34.7 19.1 13.9 6.0 0.7 0.4 0.9 .590 .754 2.9
2025-26 29 SAC 19 29.7 15.8 11.4 4.1 0.9 0.2 0.3 .543 .727 2.7
Career 665 30.8 16.1 10.7 4.9 0.8 0.5 0.5 .559 .729 2.6

Fantasy history: Year-by-year season-end nine-cat finishes are not retrievable from public archives — Basketball Monster and Hashtag paywall their final ranks, and the NBA.com final top-150 page would not load on repeated attempts — so no specific rank is asserted here. The shape is well established from the verified lines: from 2019-20 through 2024-25 Sabonis was an early-round category asset built on an unusual three-way combination of elite field-goal percentage, league-leading rebounds, and guard-level assists from a center, offset by exactly two negatives — three turnovers a night and near-zero blocks for the position. The blocks hole is the reason he never graded as a true top-five nine-cat player despite three rebounding titles. In points formats he has been more valuable than in categories throughout, because assists and rebounds are fully paid and the missing blocks cost nothing. 2025-26 is not a fantasy season in any meaningful sense at 19 games; totals leagues got almost nothing from him.

Durability: 81, 74, 74, 62 (of a COVID-shortened schedule), 62 (of a 72-game season), 62, 79, 82, 70, 19. Through 2024-25 this was one of the better availability records among high-minute centers, including a full 82 in 2023-24. 2025-26 collapsed it: a partially torn meniscus in the left knee in mid-November 2025 was initially given a 3-to-4-week timeline, then extended by another 4 to 5 weeks on December 19; he missed 27 games, returned in mid-January 2026, played eight games, and then underwent season-ending surgery to repair the meniscus on February 18, 2026; he has since reported being ahead of schedule and targeting opening night. He played 11 games before the tear and eight on a knee that had not held up.

Trajectory: The career has two structural leaps and one recent break. The first leap is 2018-19, when the field-goal percentage jumped from .514 to .590 on a stable role — a genuine finishing improvement, not minutes. The second is 2019-20, when Indiana gave him the offense: minutes went 24.8 to 34.8 and he added three rebounds and two assists, then pushed assists to 6.7 in 2020-21 and to a career-high 8.2 in 2023-24 as Sacramento's hub. The 2024-25 assist drop from 8.2 to 6.0 at unchanged minutes is real and role-driven rather than age-driven, and it is the number the 2026-27 projection has to price with Acuff on the roster. The critical caveat on 2025-26 is that essentially the entire 19-game sample was played on a torn meniscus — 11 games before diagnosis and eight on a premature return — so the .543 field-goal percentage, the 0.2 blocks, and the 4.1 assists are evidence of an injured knee, not of decline, and should not be extrapolated. What genuinely argues for caution is the calendar: he turned 30 in May 2026, his value is built on interior finishing and volume rebounding rather than shooting, and a repaired meniscus in a 30-year-old high-minute big is the specific injury that tends to remove the last step of burst. The rebounding should survive; the efficiency and the minutes are the parts at risk.

Career sources: ESPN career stats · Wikipedia — Domantas Sabonis · NBA.com, initial left knee timeline · ESPN, extended absence · NBA/AP, meniscus repair surgery

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