Only one of three former Sacramento Kings players shined in their season debut with the new team

This offseason, the Sacramento Kings parted ways with three of their top ten players for the 2023-24 season. Now Harrison Barnes (San Antonio Spurs), Davion Mitchell (Toronto Raptors) and Chris Duarte (Chicago Bulls) are all playing for new teams. And now that the regular season has officially begun, everyone has made their season debut. And even though it's only one game, it looks like there's only one of them that we should really miss.

We'll start with Duarte since he had the least eventful debut. As it stands, Duarte is clearly not part of the Bulls' competitive rotation, as the fourth-year winger didn't enter the game until there was 1:46 left in the fourth quarter and the Bulls were trailing the New Orleans Pelicans 123-108 . Coming in, Duarte only took one shot (a meaningless 3-pointer with 28 seconds left in the game).

Unlike Duarte, Mitchell plays a fairly important role on his new team. It looks like head coach Darko Rajaković wants Mitchell to be his number one off the bench, as the fourth-year guard led the team in minutes played among bench players (24:33). However, Mitchell didn't take advantage of his chance. Yes, Mitchell had eight points, three assists and two steals, but he also had five turnovers and only made 40% of his shots from the floor.

Barnes is the only one of those three to hold a starting role on his new team (to be fair, he was also the only one to start with the Kings). In his debut for the Spurs, Barnes played just over 29 minutes (29:11) and posted statistics of 17 points, four rebounds, two assists and one steal while shooting 7 of 10 from the floor and 2 of 10-5 from three. He finished the game tied on points with the great Victor Wembanyama and finished second on the team.

One theme we always try to make clear on this site is that there are many more nuances to a game than just points, rebounds and assists. To truly paint an accurate picture of what's going on, you need to combine statistical analysis with a thorough film study.

Unfortunately, a deep dive into the history of these three is beyond the scope of this article. Instead, let's look at a metric that attempts to capture a player's overall performance: the estimated plus-minus (EPM) for a single game. This is just a one-game version of the one-number metric of Dunks & Threes that we constantly cite here.

In any case, based on this metric, Barnes was the only one to perform average/above average, placing in the 52nd percentile of all players in single-game EPM. Meanwhile, Duarte and Mitchell remained in the bottom quartile, placing in the 32nd and 30th percentiles in the category, respectively.