Sacramento Is 1-6 and Dead Last. Darius Acuff Jr. Is the Whole Case for Watching.

The Sacramento Kings finally won a basketball game on Monday night, 115-100 in Dallas, and the reason was the same reason anyone has bothered to watch them for two weeks: a 19-year-old rookie who was the No. 7 pick in the draft and is now, seven games into his career, the engine of an NBA offense.

Darius Acuff Jr. put up 25 points, five rebounds and six assists against the Mavericks, and it was arguably his least spectacular outing of the young season. He has scored 33, 22, 19, 34, 38 and 25 in the games since a 12-point, 5-of-24 debut against the Clippers. He leads all rookies in both points (26.1 per game) and assists (6.3), and he's doing it at 36.6 minutes a night — the workload of a veteran starter, assigned to a teenager.

The high-water mark came Oct. 31 in Memphis, when Acuff went 9-of-14 from three and scored 38 in a 136-105 loss, becoming the first teenager in NBA history to make nine threes in a game. Two nights earlier in New Orleans he'd gone for 34 points and 14 assists, joining LeBron James as the only players ever to hit those marks in a game at that age. He has already passed Jason Williams on the franchise's rookie scoring list.

That is the good news, and it is genuinely good. The rest of the picture is why the Kings spent the first two weeks of the season as the league's only winless team.

Sacramento is 1-6, with a point differential of minus-14.1 per game, scoring 110.1 and allowing 124.3. Their power rating sits 30th of 30 at minus-10.56 — roughly a 10.5-point underdog to an average team on a neutral floor, and that's with the schedule already graded as difficult. Championship futures in the market are priced at 100,000-to-1, which is less a forecast than a formality. The defensive numbers are the ugliest part: a 135.8 defensive rating over the last five games and 150.3 weighted across the last three. Whatever else Doug Christie's staff is fixing, they are not fixing that yet.

And the roster around Acuff has been gutted. Ben Simmons ruptured his Achilles before the season started. Keegan Murray has played two games — 7.0 points on 29.4 percent shooting, 0-of-7 from three — while sidelined by the ankle issue that has bothered him since late October. Zach LaVine, the team's second-leading scorer at 23.4 a night, surfaced on the injury report before the Dallas game. De'Andre Hunter's hold on a starting job has become a running local debate. Domantas Sabonis is doing Domantas Sabonis things — 15.0 points, 14.6 rebounds, 6.9 assists — but he can't cover for a perimeter that gets shredded.

Which is the real question of this season: is the Acuff experience sustainable, or is it a sugar high on a structurally broken team? He's shooting 40.6 percent from the field and 31.3 percent from three on enormous volume, with 3.6 turnovers a game and a minus-8.7 plus/minus. Those aren't bust numbers; they're the numbers of a rookie asked to be the primary creator because nobody else can be. The criticism of his defense misses the point — the Kings' defensive problems predate him and will outlast this season.

The schedule offers a small test. A five-game homestand opens Wednesday against a 6-2 Lakers team averaging 122.5 points and shooting 39.7 percent from deep — a brutal matchup for a bad defense — followed by San Antonio, Miami, Orlando and Portland. Historically, Sacramento has been a .449 team at home versus .325 on the road, so the building is the best lever available.

The Kings aren't making the playoffs. What they can do is find out whether Acuff is a franchise guard, and whether they can build anything resembling an NBA defense around him before his rookie contract gets expensive. Seven games in, they have one answer and a lot of questions.