You might have missed it, but the once maddeningly inconsistent Sacramento Kings dashed out to a 5–1 start this season while avoiding any extended stretches of bad basketball. They treaded water at their worst and, at their best, put on truly inspired displays of athleticism in transition and muscle on the interior.

Since that start, the Kings have faltered a bit, losing three straight — including blowing 20-plus point leads twice — before an inspired 94–91 victory over the Spurs on Saturday stopped the bleeding and pushed Sacramento’s record to a still-impressive 6–4 despite a pretty tough early schedule. Folks have highlighted the strong play of some of Sacramento’s key contributors, and hailed the Kings as the league’s biggest surprise.

So the big question left to be answered is: “Will it last?”

Statistically, there are a couple of reasons to think this could be real. Start with the aforementioned schedule: putting aside Sacramento’s home-and-home sweep of Denver and the disappointing loss to the injury-ravaged Thunder, the Kings have played seven games (including four roadies) against teams that could win 50-plus games. The Kings have dominated the glass on both ends, which their personnel suggests could be sustainable.

Offensively, their shooting actually has been horrid — they’ve hit just 29.8 percent of their threes and rank just 24th in the league in effective field goal percentage — and it almost has to improve from here, at least marginally.

This all suggests upside, even over and above the .600 ball that Sacramento has played thus far.

There’s a big, honking caveat to putting too much stock in Sacramento’s hot start, though. The Kings’ above-average offense to to this point has been built almost entirely on the strength of a remarkable free throw rate. After the double-overtime win in Phoenix that brought Sacramento’s record to 5–1, the Kings had attempted 239 free throws. This was 32 more than the next best team and 78 percent — seventy-EIGHT percent! — more than the league average at the time.

And it’s not just that they were getting to the stripe; they weren’t missing once they got there. Through their first six games, the Kings hit 82 percent of their free throws. Combine the two stats in this paragraph and you get a staggering 196 made free throws, or nearly 33 a game. This is how a team that can’t shoot and plays very average defense starts the year 5–1.

The funny thing about looking at stats this early in the year, of course, is that you need to accept a very real paradox: the things that suggest a team could be great (i.e. “The Kings are historically awesome at getting to the line so far”) are the very same things that portend trouble on the horizon (i.e., “Can the Kings possibly stay nearly this good at getting to the line? And if not, can they still win?”). Consequently, a lot of the arguments that one can find oneself making for an early hot streak being a fluke can manage to sound bizarrely complimentary.

To avoid speaking in generalizations, it makes sense to look one-by-one at the players who buoyed the Kings’ free throw numbers through their first two weeks, and then take a glance at what the team as a whole has done in the four games since.

Let’s start with the good news for Sacramento: DeMarcus Cousins is a nightmare for opposing defenses. He has bulled his way to the free throw line and hit his shots at a respectable rate his whole career — he’s had two finishes in the NBA’s top 10 in attempts, and has converted a decidedly un-Drummondian 73 percent of them in the past two seasons. The bad news, however, is that nobody has ever spent a full season getting to the free throw line at the rate Boogie did in this season’s first six games, and the guys who have come closest were people that opponents were actively trying to send there:

I’m actually open to the possibility that Boogie has the beef, athleticism, savvy and willingness to take a bruising to get himself into the 24-year-old Barkley’s stratosphere. Still, there’s some regression to expect here: two fewer attempts per game and a drop (from 82 percent to, say, 72 percent) in his FT% could still be worth more than two points a night or so to Sacramento which, as per-game averages go, is quite a bit.

There’s a bigger problem here than Cousins, though, which is that Sacramento’s other high-usage players are also getting to the line at a crazy rate and, in their cases, this bears no resemblance to anything witnessed previously in their careers. Underlying Sacramento’s 5–1 start was the following concerning statistic: only four Kings who played significant minutes in those six games boasted usage rates above 20 percent* and all of them drew fouls at career-high rates:

*20 percent wasn’t chosen arbitrarily; it’s something of a magic number for the usage rate statistic, since each possession is “used” by exactly one player, five players occupy the court at a time, and 100 percent / 5 = 20 percent.

OK, a couple disclaimers. First, you can’t just take that differential and neatly dock it from the Kings’ offensive efficiency for a couple of reasons. First, these guys — and the guards especially — will likely use more possessions this season than they have in the past, so it’s fair to expect them to come in above their career averages in those numbers. Second, possessions that don’t end in FTAs can — obviously — end in points. If these four players take 10 fewer free throws per 100 possessions, that probably means about 4 more FGAs, some of which would be converted (though, at Sacramento’s current dismal level of shooting efficency, maybe not many). So, on one hand, we’re not saying the Kings figure to be 16-plus points per game worse once their free throw shooting comes back to earth.

But, on the other hand: holy shit. Even for a six-game sample, that is an enormous deviation from anything that is even remotely reasonable to expect going forward. I said above that I can partly buy the foul-drawing side of it for Cousins, and I’d add Sessions to that statement; in his career as a generally league average offensive player, one of Sessions’ greatest skills has been his ability to get to the rim and, consequently, the charity stripe. Two years ago, in a similar role in Charlotte, Sessions had a 25.7 percent usage rate in limited minutes and took 11 FTA’s per 100 possessions, converting nearly 85 percent of them. So, fine, that could be real.

Gay and Collison, however, are another story. Though praised by many for his increased willingness to play out of the post this season, Gay is still attempting threes roughly in line with his career norms and has actually taken fewer shots at the rim in favor of more mid-range jumpers this season. This was true even during the Kings torrid 5–1 stretch. Look:

Rudy’s shot selection is similar to what it’s always been and, at age 28, it’s not like he’s simply adding additional bulk or burst. All of which suggests less foul-drawing but the result, as shown above, has been the exact opposite. Praise for his nascent post game aside, the smart money absolutely screams “anomaly.” And when you strip away the foul-related parts of Gay’s offense, it’s sort of the same old story: too many long twos, too many turnovers, too much of a ball-stopper.

And Collison: wow. His free throw percentage has been awesome for his entire career, but his pedestrian foul-drawing has limited the impact of that skill. His foul shooting was unleashed as a legitimate offensive weapon only because he essentially doubled his career-long frequency of getting to the line during Sacramento’s 5–1 debut. Anything shy of such a leap forward would relegate Collison to the same passable but unremarkable role he’s inhabited for much of the prior five seasons of his NBA career.

Clearly, we’ve established how a Kings team that couldn’t shoot and played league-average defense jumped out to a 5–1 start: it relied upon (probably sustainable) rebounding and (probably unsustainable) foul-drawing and free throw shooting.

Now, what about the four games Sacramento has played since?

The highlighted column tells a lot of the story. The Kings’ offense has actually been better in most respects during their recent slide, despite playing a couple of those games against elite defenses in Dallas and San Antonio. That said, the free throw gap is enormous: Sacramento has only made a slightly lower percentage of their shots from the line in the past four games (79.5 percent versus 82.0 percent in their 5–1 start), but they are taking way fewer attempts from the charity stripe. After averaging an otherworldy 39 FTA in their first six games, the Kings have averaged 28 in their last four, or 11 fewer FTAs per game.

Here’s maybe the scariest part of that discrepancy for Sacramento fans: the Kings’ .283 free throw makes per field goal attempt during their 1–3 slide is still really good. Other than Sacramento, only the Toronto Raptors have done achieved even this lesser number so far this season. But even “really good” hasn’t proven enough for Sacramento to overcome their other shortcomings.

Obviously, four games is a very small sample but the disparity between the way the Kings started and what they’ve done since is demonstrative of an intuitive reality: they simply don’t have the shooting or defense to run with the powers in the Western Conference. The only way for the Kings to end up within shouting distance of the eighth seed — let alone sustain anything approaching their crazy-hot start — will be to produce from the free throw line at an unprecedented rate. Well, almost unprecedented; see if you can spot which of the following is not like the others:

For the uninitated: SYR is the Syracuse Nationals, FTW is the Fort Wayne Pistons, and eight of the top nine teams on that list played before the shot clock was introduced in 1954. Taken as a whole, the list reveals both the greatest achievement and the most worrying harbinger of the Kings’ season thus far. They will draw a ton of fouls this season. They may even lead the league in that category. But unless they can keep drawing them at a rate that is unheard of in the modern NBA, it won’t be enough to carry them to the postseason.