After spending the past couple of seasons trying to rebuild, the National Basketball Association (NBA) franchise the Sacramento Kings made many changes in the 2007 off-season, trying to once again build a playoff-caliber team.

The changes began with head coach Eric Musselman being replaced by former Sacramento player, Reggie Theus.

Soon after came the 2007 NBA Draft, where the Kings had only the one pick, number 10 overall, which they used on center Spencer Hawes.

In addition to these changes, the Sacramento Kings acquired power forward Mikki Moore from the New Jersey Nets, and Kevin Martin signed a contract worth $55 million, extending his period with the team for five more years.

However, the Kings also lost some key players over the off-season, with backup point guard Ronnie Price leaving for the Utah Jazz, and Corliss Williamson retiring.

The team claimed fourth-year point guard Beno Udrih off waivers from Minnesota. Udrih quickly assumed the starting point guard job, as usual starter Mike Bibby was injured.

With a starting line-up that included the volatile but talented Ron Artest, Martin, Udrih, Moore and Brad Miller, the general consensus among NBA pundits was that Sacramento wouldn't figure in playoff calculations in season 2007-08, and should just be aiming to improve on their 33-49 win-loss record for season 2006-07.

The pre-season form of Sacramento indicated there may be another long-season ahead, as they won only three of nine games, mostly against their Pacific Division rivals.

With a first-up horror road trip to Western Conference powers San Antonio and Dallas, it was difficult for Sacramento to gain any momentum to begin the season.

As expected, the Kings dropped those first two games, and ended up going 5-9 for the month of November.

Their form wasn't disastrous, more inconsistent, where they'd put some good numbers up on one particular occasion, but not follow it up the next game.

December started on a positive note for the Kings, with back-to-back wins against the highly-rated Houston and Utah.

However, inconsistency again reared its ugly head, and the Kings ended up dropping their final four games for December, to go 6-8 for the month, and finish 2007 with an 11-17 season win-loss tally.

Whilst this was a slight improvement on the previous season, it could hardly be said that Sacramento were setting the NBA alight.

The new year began quite positively for Sacramento. For the first half of January,

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