Kings Report

It’s been quite the week for the Sacramento Kings; where do I even begin? It turns out rock bottom had not yet come after that horrible loss to the Pacers last week.

I must have been on to something when I said last week that I wasn’t sure if Head Coach Mike Brown was being honest when he said that he felt that everyone was in a good place; I had definitely been picking up on something, because Brown was relieved of his duties as head coach last Friday, less than two hours after leading practice, right before the team was set to fly to Los Angeles to play the Lakers. This came as a huge shock to me, despite the feelings I had been having that I wasn’t sure the players were buying his message anymore; I couldn’t believe things were bad enough that they would let Brown go mid-season. I got flashbacks to other firings, like Bogdan Bogdanovic, who found out from the media that he was being traded and apparently never even got a phone call from the Kings; and after hearing other coaches react to the firing, such as Denver’s Head Coach Michael Malone who stated he was “not surprised that Mike Brown got fired because I got fired by the same person,” and said that the Kings have “no class,” I have to say I got a little panicked that we were headed back to the mess of a Kings organization of the last two decades; an organization that was turned around by Mike Brown, who led the Kings to their first playoff appearance in 16 years and was the first unanimously voted Coach of the Year in NBA history. Star player De’Aaron Fox has been getting a lot of the blame for Brown’s dismissal, but who knows how much truth there is to that?

While it’s definitely sad to see Brown go, the bright spot is that his replacement is former Kings player and assistant coach Doug Christie. Is a coaching change going to fix all of the Kings’ problems? Probably not, but I did like what I saw at the end of the Kings’ last game against the Philadelphia 76ers (which was at home, not in Philadelphia as I reported last week.) The Kings went on a 15-0 run in the last three minutes of the game after Christie had a talk that seemed to fire Fox and Domantas Sabonis up and get them to be the leaders that they needed to be. While Christie lost his first game as head coach, he’s won two since then, and the Kings are only one game out of the Play-in picture. The Kings play the Memphis Grizzlies here in Sacramento on Friday, January 3rd, then head down to San Francisco to play the Golden State Warriors on Sunday, January 5th, and then come back home to play the Miami Heat on Monday, January 6th. Our season isn’t over yet!