Kings ‘all-in’ approach with Mike Brown manifests with run to .500 after win over Warriors
The Kings’ 122-115 victory over the defending-champion Golden State Warriors on Sunday got Sacramento back to the .500 mark following an 0-4 start to the regular season. A theme throughout the team’s recent jaunt — winning six of its last eight — has been players’ willingness to buy in to what new head coach Mike Brown is selling.
“He’s been a head coach before and he just came off of a championship,” Kings guard De’Aaron Fox said. “I think he walks in here and already commands respect.”
Said Brown: “A team that truly believes is a dangerous, dangerous freakin’ team.”
That thought has been put to the test early in the season, particularly after a wobbly 0-4 start.
Brown, who was on the Warriors’ staff the past six seasons, tried some new and unique things with his players before Sunday’s contest. Practice on Saturday included a 36-minute “silent script” session where the team ran through its offensive sets without talking. Players called the session “weird” and Brown received some friendly ribbing from his assistant coaches for trying it out. They thought it went too long.
“But if they weren’t all in,” Brown said of his team, “we would have had a revolution before the game and that didn’t happen.”
During shootaround hours before Sunday’s game, knowing Stephen Curry was coming to Golden 1 Center on a run of scoring 39, 47 and 40 in his last three games, Brown had his team practice a new strategy that wasn’t worked on for a single minute of training camp: running a box-and-one defense.
The results were positive and the new look helped seal the win. While Curry finished with a game-high 27 points, he managed just six in the fourth quarter while the Kings held off the Warriors for the seven-point victory. The combination of trapping Curry, something else the Kings’ haven’t done much of this season, and the box-and-one proved effective.
“There’s got to be trust both ways,” guard Kevin Huerter said. “Players have coaches, coaches have players. There’s obviously a lot of trust from a coaching staff being able to throw that at us and trust us to do it in a game.”
The Kings won Sunday on the backs of stellar performances from their most important players. Center Domantas Sabonis had 26 points, 22 rebounds and eight assists. Rookie Keegan Murray posted his second-highest point total of his young career (21) while leading all players with a plus-16 in the box score. Murray made 5 of 9 from 3-point range.
Fox, who struggled during the first three quarters by shooting just 5 of 13 (38%), had 11 of his 22 points in the final frame on 5-of-6 shooting. He also made one of the plays of the game by blocking a corner 3 from Curry when the Warriors had a 111-110 lead with 4:19 remaining. Curry went scoreless over the final six minutes, which came after Golden State went on a 13-2 run when he came off the bench early in the fourth quarter.
Perhaps no Kings’ player has been challenged by Brown more than Fox. Brown has reiterated throughout the young season that he gets on Fox because he believes he should be an All-Star, but it’s going to take far more than Fox being a gifted scorer to get there.
Brown was asked before Sunday’s game what he learned from Curry while on the Warriors’ staff that Fox could apply to his game to reach another level in the sphere of NBA stars.
“If you want to get to that level, you have to have some sort of swag with your game,” Brown said. “Okay, what does that mean? That your matchup (with Curry proves) you’re a two-way guy. Simple as that.”
Fox has embraced Brown’s challenge to improve defensively and do the things outside of scoring that impact winning, which has set the tone for the Kings embracing Brown’s messaging and playing a better brand of basketball overall.
“It’s big for me. All my life, I’ve always been coached hard,” Fox said. “If something can be good, something could be great and (then) it can be perfect. So he wants to get as perfect or as close to perfect as we possibly can. And even if we play well, I know he’s going to have something to say. And I know what he’s saying is to make us better and to make me a better player and to make us a better team. So I’m always there to listen.”
Moving back to 6-6 has the Kings in the No. 9 seed of the Western Conference nearly a month into the season. The goal for Sacramento, of course, has been to make the playoffs or participate in the play-in tournament, meaning finishing as a top-10 team in the west — which seems achievable given the way the team has bounced back from its sluggish beginning.
In the more immediate future, the Kings have upcoming home games against the Brooklyn Nets, San Antonio Spurs and Detroit Pistons — three teams all below .500.
“I think we’re all bought in,” Murray said. “We know we can compete with any team in the league. ... We know we have a chance to win, and as a team, (we’re) figuring out how to win.”
This story was originally published November 13, 2022 at 11:10 PM.
