Despite the team’s denials, the Kings face a frustratingly obvious trend Originally broadcast on NBC Sports Bay Area
SACRAMENTO — When it was announced that several Miami Heat players, including star Jimmy Butler, would miss Monday’s game against the Kings, fans in Sacramento had one reaction.
“We had a blowout loss.” “We’re about to lose by double digits.” “We’re losing so much in this game.”
But what started as a light-hearted meme on social media turned into a notorious nightmare for Sacramento.
Four months into the 2023-24 NBA season, the Kings have established a reputation for folding when facing shorthanded teams or teams below .500. And to the contrary, they’ve managed to pull off impressive performances against the league’s top teams, including the West’s top-seeded Minnesota Timberwolves, the reigning NBA champion Denver Nuggets, and just one night ago, the Los Angeles Clippers.
It’s frustrating. It’s confusing. But that wasn’t a trend, according to Kings coach Mike Brown, who instead attributed Monday’s 121-110 loss to the fundamentals of the game.
“I mean, Paul George didn’t play last night,” Brown said when asked if he saw a trend in these losses. “We’ve played other teams where our top one or two guys weren’t playing and we’ve won games. The reality is we had some chances to box out. [and] We didn’t hit anyone. There were some chances early on where I felt we could have fought better. We didn’t quite catch the shooter. For me, it’s a trend more than anything.
“I’ve been saying this the last few days, I thought we did a great job of defending our three teams. Tonight we let our guard down a little bit and let guys do what they didn’t have at first.” And it hurt us. But I don’t feel like every time we play a team and the No. 1, No. 2 or No. 3 player on that team is out, we tend to lose. ”
Brown can deny what he thinks about his team all he wants, but history doesn’t lie.
When Sacramento suffered a miserable series of losses to the Houston Rockets earlier in the season, it felt like things couldn’t get any worse.
How naive were we? Let’s look back at some questionable results.
On December 20th, the Kings lost 144-119 to the Boston Celtics, who were without Jayson Tatum. Three days later, they lost to the Minnesota Timberwolves, who were without Karl-Anthony Towns and Anthony Edwards, Rudy Gobert and Jaden McDaniels combined for 75 points.
Three days later, on Dec. 26, there was even more concern in Portland when the Trail Blazers humiliated the Kings without starting guard Shaydon Sharpe and starting center DeAndre Olton.
That’s not the end.
The lowly Charlotte Hornets ended their 11-game losing streak against, you guessed it, the Kings. On January 2nd, they won a stunning 111-104 victory in front of their home crowd in Sacramento.
New Orleans beat Sacramento without Zion Williamson. Philadelphia beat Sacramento without Joel Embiid. Indiana defeated Sacramento without Tyrese Haliburton.
The list goes on.
Coach Brown said after the Jan. 18 loss to the Pacers, “A loss like this must hurt.”
It was. The Kings went on to win their next four games, defeating the Pacers about two weeks after losing to Indiana without Haliburton. and Halliburton on February 2nd.
Are you keeping up?
On February 7th, the historically underdog Detroit Pistons entered Golden 1 Center and defeated the Kings 133-120. without it The two top scorers are Cade Cunningham and Bojan Bogdanovic.
The next game, the Kings defeated the Nuggets 135-106 in Sacramento, and a week later they beat the Nuggets in Denver to begin a three-game winning streak that ended with Monday’s loss to the Heat.
Like Brown, Kings second-year forward Keegan Murray downplayed the severity of these losses to short-handed teams, saying every player in the NBA is in the league for a reason.
“Every team in this league is a good team,” Murray said after the game. “There are ups and downs, but every team has talented players, so those players stepped up. Jamie.” [Jaquez Jr.]bam [Adebayo] –Many people stepped up in different ways. In other words, when we played against teams that had lost their top players, so to speak, that happened in various situations.
“But we just have to come out every night and compete like we did last night.”
Murray had a great night on both ends of the floor, but his sharp shooting kept the Kings afloat in the fourth quarter after trailing by as many as 20 points.
In 36 minutes, he recorded 28 points on 10-of-14 shooting from the field and 6-of-7 from 3-point range, as well as five rebounds, one assist, three steals, and one block.
But of course basketball is a team sport, and despite the young forward’s impressive performance, Murray wants his team to focus on what it can control going forward.
“For us, it just brings a fight every night,” Murray said. It’s something we have complete control over. Effort is something you have complete control over every night. ”
For Kings star point guard De’Aaron Fox, he doesn’t give much thought to whether the losses are a trend. Instead, he would rather break down each loss to its essence and point out where the team went wrong.
He also made sure to give credit to the Heat, who struggled without some key pieces.
“That means we have to play better,” Fox said after the game. “We’ve got to be able to get stops. Obviously, there were times when we got stops up to four, six, eight.” [points] Then, the shot clock is used to decide the shot. But we have to be better.
“It’s not like they didn’t come here and play well.”
That’s true, but it doesn’t paint the full picture of what happened Monday night, or what has happened so often to the Kings this season.
Sacramento entered the contest as the No. 5 seed in the Western Conference. This loss dropped them to 7th place.
Some teams will have deflating losses from time to time, but it’s clear that the Kings have a strange problem when playing against certain teams. It was easy to laugh it off at the beginning of the season, but March is just around the corner and the playoff race is getting tougher.
