The Sacramento Kings are an American professional basketball team based in Sacramento, California. The Kings compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a member of the Western Conference Pacific Division. The Kings are the first and only team in the major professional North American sports leagues located in Sacramento. The team plays its home games at the Golden 1 Center. Their best seasons to date in the city were in the early 2000s, including a very successful 2001–02 season when they had the best record in the NBA at 61–21 (a winning percentage of .744).

The franchise began with the Rochester Seagrams (a semi-professional team) from Rochester, New York, that formed in 1923 and hosted a number of teams there over the next 20 years. They joined the National Basketball League in 1945 as the renamed Rochester Royals, winning that league's championship in their first season, 1945–46. They later jumped with three other NBL teams to the Basketball Association of America, forerunner of the NBA, in 1948. As the Royals, the team was often successful on the court, winning the NBA championship in 1951. The team, however, found it increasingly difficult to turn a profit in the comparatively small market of Rochester and relocated to Cincinnati in 1957, becoming the Cincinnati Royals.

In 1972, the team relocated again, this time to Kansas City, Missouri, and renamed the Kansas City–Omaha Kings because it initially split its home games between Kansas City and Omaha, Nebraska; the nickname was changed to avoid confusion with the baseball team dubbed the Kansas City Royals. After three seasons, the team truncated to Kansas City Kings, but continued to play several home games per season in Omaha, through March 1978.

The franchise again failed to find success in its market and moved after the 1984–85 season to Sacramento, where they presently reside. Since 2006, the Kings have had sixteen consecutive losing seasons, the most in NBA history.

The basis of the purely-professional Royals team that came into existence in 1945, after two decades of sponsored 'semi-professional' team, Seagram was the team's main sponsor and received the bulk of what monies were made. One of the team's early stars was Lester Harrison, a local high school star of some publicity before joining the team. Harrison later became the team's captain, coach, manager, and chief scout over the next two decades. Among visitors to Rochester to play the team were the Original Celtics, the New York Rens, and the Harlem Globetrotters.