‘It’s Go Time’: De’Aaron Fox and Buddy Hield want to get Kings running again in 2020
Kings point guard De’Aaron Fox said he doesn’t make New Year’s resolutions, but Buddy Hield has one and his backcourt running mate seems willing to join him.
“It’s go time,” Hield said. “It’s a new year. We’re (34) games in so we have about (48) left. It’s go time. We can’t wait anymore.”
That sense of urgency finally seems to be setting in for the Kings (12-22). They lost their eighth in a row Tuesday, falling 105-87 to the Los Angeles Clippers (24-11) in a New Year’s Eve matinee at Golden 1 Center. The Kings are now 1-7 when they fail to score 100 points.
You know how many times the Kings failed to score 100 points last season? Seven. Seven times in 82 games.
The question now is what are the Kings going to do with these 48 games? They can try to unleash the beast this team’s offense was built to be or they can keep grinding on the finer points coach Luke Walton knows are required for participation in the NBA playoffs, if anybody remembers what those are after a 13-year postseason drought.
Ideally, they would find a middle ground quickly and discover a tempo that is conducive to winning now and later. At this point, they should be able to remember the little things Walton and his staff are teaching them without forgetting who they’re supposed to be.
That’s what Walton wants, but this team is 34 games behind in its development. Fox has missed 18 games due to injuries. Marvin Bagley III has missed 25. Dewayne Dedmon, the team’s biggest offseason acquisition and a player who was supposed to unlock the full fury of this team’s firepower, never showed up in any meaningful way — and now he wants to be traded.
“We’re struggling with some different groupings because those groupings keep changing and people’s roles are changing with guys coming in and out of the starting lineup,” Walton said. “So it feels like, occasionally, we get out there and there’s not a lot of chemistry flowing with certain groups.”
Trip to India threw off Kings’ start
The Kings haven’t had continuity since they left for India after a 48-hour training camp. On the third day of training camp a year earlier, former coach Dave Joerger had already lost his voice because he yelled at everybody to run so much. A year later, Walton was sitting on Drake’s plane for 20 hours. They say it’s a cool plane if you aren’t worried about your Wi-Fi connection, but they didn’t have room to run laps.
You can blame it on the plane or dismiss that as a tired excuse, but the fact is the Kings don’t run like they used to. They watch a lot of film and will find a hotel ballroom to conduct a walk-through if they must, but they don’t run as much as they should.
The Kings have a little bit of an identity crisis, maybe in more ways than one. Last season under Joerger, they unleashed one of the fastest attacks in the NBA, ranking third in the league in pace with 103.9 possessions per 48 minutes. This season, they are last at 97.5.
Unfortunately, the Kings might not be able to run like they did last year no matter how much they want to. They were trained to “GO!” from Day 1 last season and off they went, running, gunning and funning their way to 39 wins and a reputation as one of the best up-and-coming teams in the NBA. I stopped counting how many times they scored in four seconds or less, sometimes on the inbound after giving up a basket at the defensive end.
This season, the Kings have long stretches where they don’t score much at all. They had 17 points in the second quarter against the Clippers and 14 in the fourth. They attempted only 80 shots. Last season, they were second in the NBA in field-goal attempts with 93.1 per game. This season, they’re 25th with 87.3.
So why has this offense come to such a screeching halt? For starters, they don’t hurry the ball up the floor off the inbound like they used to. They don’t run nonstop.
“A lot of times for us, we see the ball go through the basket and I think sometimes guys just put their head down instead of getting it out and trying to score quickly,” Fox said. “That’s just something where I think our mentality has to change.
“Obviously, it’s natural when a team scores to kind of slow down, but I think that’s where the fast-break points came from last year. They would score and we would just get it out quicker. It’s something we’ve actually practiced and worked on, but we’ve just got to be able to translate it to the game. We want to pick our pace up. We’ve talked about it. We’ve practiced doing those types of things. We just have to be able to translate it.”
Kings aren’t conditioned to run
Fox said the team needs to “normalize” getting up and down the court quickly, but the Kings aren’t conditioned the same way they were last year, physically or mentally. Walton has prioritized the implementation of a half-court offense and a defense that will be good enough to win in the playoffs. He already knows what Joerger learned last season, which is that A) opponents will eventually slow you down; B) that style might not be sustainable over 82 games anyway; and C) you have to be able to “stop straight-line drives,” a phrase we heard from Joerger a thousand times last season.
Now we’re hearing those same words from Walton, but take a moment to consider the progress we can attribute to his teachings and the work these players have put in. The Kings are No. 1 in the NBA in fast-break points allowed, third in opponents’ second-chance points, 10th in opponent’s points in the paint, 15th in defensive rebounding percentage and 18th in defensive rating. Last season, they ranked 21st, 26th, 26th, 26th and 21st.
They’re still a little wobbly sometimes, but this season-long walkthrough is producing some of the desired results. Now they have to see if they can do it on the fly. Walton knows it’s time.
“He wants us to pick up the pace and we just have to be able to do that,” Fox said.
This is where the identity crisis goes a little deeper than this team’s need for speed. Not everybody is built for this. Fox, Hield and Bagley don’t have the defensive know-how that Cory Joseph, Trevor Ariza and Harrison Barnes possess, but Joseph and Ariza don’t run the way the young guys do. What good is general manager Vlade Divac’s fast young “super team” of Fox, Hield and Bagley if the Kings are going to play a game that’s better suited for Joseph and Ariza?
It’s a conundrum, but maybe the answer is this: Fox, Hield, Bagley and now Richaun Holmes have to accept the responsibility of leading this team under the tutelage of Barnes, Joseph and Ariza. Barnes is the consummate professional, so sound, so skilled and so polished in so many ways. Joseph and Ariza know every trick of the trade on the defensive end, even if they struggle offensively and can only summon their formerly elite defensive capabilities some of the time.
Fox, Hield and Bagley have to absorb all of that. They have to learn from those guys and they have to lead the way they did after Tuesday’s loss, when Fox and Hield stayed in the locker room after most left on New Year’s Eve, answering the most direct line of questioning yet from the media.
‘It’s never too late’
Is it too late?
“It’s never too late,” Fox said.
Is it time to panic?
“You can’t panic,” Hield said. “If you panic, you make everything worse, but the sense of urgency to go out there and play hard and make the playoffs — we have to go out there and compete.”
Walton made an important adjustment while Fox and Bagley were out of the lineup in early December. He shortened his rotation. He relied on Joseph, Ariza and Barnes. He benched Hield when he wasn’t shooting well, making good decisions or staying in front of his man on defense.
That’s what the Kings needed, but now they have a need for speed. They have to remember what Walton has taught them, but they can’t forget who they are.
Fox is back. Bagley will be back soon. It’s time for this team to go.
“When we run it with (Fox), it’s getting our confidence up,” Hield said. “And I think when we do it for two or three quarters straight and we see that we’re hard to stop on those runs, I think we’ll get back to our regular selves.”
Maybe that’s more than a resolution. Maybe it’s the solution.
The Kings have to find a way to win — now and later — and hope it isn’t too late.
Kings upcoming schedule
Jan. 2 vs. Memphis, 7 p.m.
Jan. 4 vs. New Orleans, 7 p.m.
Jan. 6 vs. Golden State, 7 p.m.
Jan. 7 at Phoenix, 6 p.m.
Jan. 10 vs. Milwaukee, 7 p.m.
This story was originally published January 1, 2020 at 4:00 AM.
