The NBA and the forces of Mother Nature may have just banded together to help Sacramento’s NBA draft status. As expected, the league canceled Monday night’s Brooklyn Nets/Portland Trail Blazers and New York Knicks/Sacramento Kings games due to the blizzard that is due to wreak havoc on the East Coast. The makeup dates will take place later in the season, but as Pro Basketball Talk’s Dan Feldman noticed , the night off for the Kings on Monday comes with a nasty early-March aftereffect. The Kings will make up the Knicks game on March 3, two days after taking on the Trail Blazers in Sacramento on the other coast of North America. From there, the team will dart across the country playing road games in San Antonio, Orlando, Miami, Orlando, Atlanta, Charlotte, Philadelphia and Washington – eight games in 11 days total, all on the road. After the final game of the road trip on March 14, the squad will then fly all the way back to its much-missed Sacramento home to take on the East-leading Atlanta Hawks on March 16th. That is a rough, rough half-month of basketball. All for a team that is currently 16-27, well out of the playoff picture, working under a coach in Tyrone Corbin that all assume to be a walking lame duck. All of this, however, goes a long way toward ensuring that the Kings will get to keep their lottery pick in this year’s draft. When the Kings traded for J.J. Hickson in 2011, the team sent a conditional first-round pick to the Cleveland Cavaliers and Omri Casspi in return. That pick was then sent to the Chicago Bulls in the ill-fated Luol Deng deal last season. The pick is protected through the