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SACRAMENTO – Midway through last season, former Kings coach Dave Joerger was sitting courtside at the Golden 1 Center before a February home game when he decided to make light of a subject that was weighing heavily on the Kings’ long-struggling franchise.

This was pre-tipoff in the NBA, that time when hoops colleagues talk shop while players warm up and the crowd trickles in. And Joerger, the former Memphis Grizzlies coach who has been known to share his views on his team’s personnel in any setting, no matter who it might piss off, had an uncomfortable joke to share about the Dallas Mavericks’ Luka Doncic.

He had been chatting with a member of the Mavericks’ staff who was in town that day, and was seated near the general manager, Kings legend Vlade Divac, who was behind the choice to take big man Marvin Bagley III out of Duke with the No. 2 pick rather than the Slovenian sensation in Doncic. They were hardly alone on this front, as Phoenix took center DeAndre Ayton first overall (despite having Doncic’s national team coach at the time) and Atlanta sent Doncic to Dallas in exchange for Trae Young and a first-round pick (which became Cam Reddish) at No. 3.

But the sting felt different in Sacramento, where the Kings have the league’s longest playoff drought (2006), and so many fans who have been airing their grievances on local sports talk radio ever since saw Doncic as their favorite franchise’s savior. And now, here was Joerger adding a bit of salt to the wound.

According to two **** who witnessed the interaction, Joerger told Divac, in a passive-aggressive jest, that he had negotiated an in-season trade with the Mavericks that would finally bring Doncic their way.

Cue the record scratch. As if this topic wasn’t touchy enough already.

Just two months before, Joerger’s public comments about the Kings not drafting Doncic were widely perceived as being critical of the front office.

“I think perhaps there was an idea that there was a ceiling on him,” he had said then. “I don’t see it, unfortunately for us.”

What’s more, Joerger’s insistence that Bagley come off the bench had caused frustration all season long and played a pivotal part in the coach’s well-chronicled clash with former assistant general manager Brandon Williams. It wasn’t just the fans, it seemed, who were fixated on the decision not to draft Doncic.

So Divac, unamused by his coach’s barb, fired back.

“Do I get their coach, too?” he said in reference to the Mavericks’ Rick Carlisle.

When this story made the rounds last summer, the takeaway from the Kings’ perspective was clear: The difficult dynamic between the front office and the team’s acerbic coach was not healthy enough to continue on, and so it was that Divac started fresh by firing Joerger and Williams and, ultimately, hiring Luke Walton as coach. Truth be told, the logic that was applied by Divac then — from this vantage point — holds up just fine now.

If I’ve learned anything about team dynamics in nearly two decades of covering this league, it’s that synergy from top to bottom is an absolute must. But nine months later, with Doncic having evolved into an MVP-caliber talent in his second season and the injury-riddled Kings facing the prospect of missing the playoffs for a 14th consecutive time, the picture that it paints couldn’t be more painful for the locals.

All of which brings us to Wednesday night.

To see Doncic put on such a wondrous show on the Kings’ home floor in the Mavericks’ 127-123 win was to wonder if Kings fans will ever truly move on from this what-might-have-been scenario. Even with the slew of injuries that have held them back this season, they have a young core of De’Aaron Fox (18 games missed), Bagley (30 games missed) and Buddy Hield that remains promising and have plenty of reasons to remain patient.

Fox, in particular, has come on strong after an ankle injury kept him out through mid-December. In the last seven games, he’s averaging 24.1 points (50.4 percent), 8.4 assists, 5.6 rebounds, two steals and one block per game. The Kings, who became a surprise team last season in large part because they played with pace but who slowed down drastically earlier this season, are the league’s second-fastest team during that seven-game span.

This is key, of course, because it was Fox’s presence that had everything to do with Divac’s decision to pass on Doncic in the first place. With Fox emerging as a unique and dynamic lead-guard, **** say Divac had concerns about Doncic’s ball-dominance and simply believed that Bagley was a better long-term fit alongside Fox.

Would Fox be able to do what he does best alongside a player who, despite being a small forward, is currently third in the NBA in usage rate behind only Houston’s James Harden and Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo? We’ll never know. But Doncic’s incredible ascent, and the widespread belief around the league that he’s the kind of special talent that should never have been passed up by any team, is drowning out all the nuance here.

Making matters worse, the Kings (15-26; four games out of the eighth spot) are already running out of time when it comes to making a playoff push. And as is always the case for a long-suffering sports franchise, the daunting weight of failures past — even the ones that this team had nothing to do with — presses down nonetheless. So the ghost of Doncic, it seems, won’t be going away anytime soon.

Especially if his bi-annual visits to Sacramento keep going like this.

Not only did Doncic turn in his NBA-leading 12th triple-double, finishing with 25 points, a career-high 17 assists and 15 rebounds as Kings owner Vivek Ranadive watched in agony from his courtside seat, but after the game Doncic also reiterated his stance that he too believed he was headed to Sacramento at one point.

“They came to Madrid (to see him play for Real Madrid and to share a dinner on June 5, 2018),” the 20-year-old Doncic told The Athletic about the Kings’ contingent’s visit during the draft process. “They came with the owner. Everybody came, so I honestly thought they were going to pick me.”

So, I asked, was it ever made clear to him why they didn’t?

“I mean, I think it’s because of Euroleague; it’s different basketball,” Doncic said. “I was averaging in Europe — in the Spanish League — like 12 points (per game). And in Euroleague 14 (points per game). So it’s different basketball.”

But not only was Doncic wrong about his own numbers — as you can see here, they were a bit higher than that — he left out the most impressive achievements of them all: Youngest player ever to win the Euroleague MVP, and Euroleague champion. Those two feats, above all else, are what scouts and executives bring up whenever reporters like yours truly ask if Doncic was worthy of the No. 1 pick.

By the time Doncic’s visit was nearing an end, he offered one final moment that might send Kings fans crying into their pillows again. When a local reporter showed Doncic a picture of a fan who had created his own Doncic Kings jersey, the Mavs star stopped our brief conversation, sat up in his chair to take a closer look, and smiled. And then, for reasons that only he knows, he requested that the picture be text-messaged to the team’s PR man, Scott Tomlin, so he could keep it as a keepsake of sorts.

“Can you send that?” he said. “I want to see that.”

So did they, Luka. So did they.