Sacramento Kings finally hit a turning point on defense in win over the Lakers
Wednesday night’s game against the Los Angeles Lakers could be viewed as an outlier for the Sacramento Kings. It could also be a turning point.
After trailing 67-61 at halftime and by as much as 14 points in the first half, the Kings flipped a switch. The Kings held the Los Angeles Lakers to 23 points in the third and 26 in the fourth in a 125-116 win to snap a five-game losing streak.
Holding the Lakers in check in the second half wasn’t an easy task. The Lakers are the top-scoring third-quarter team in the NBA, averaging 36.4 points. In the fourth quarter, the Lakers are the fourth-ranked team, averaging 33.5 points. For context, the Kings are ranked 23rd in the NBA in third-quarter scoring, averaging 27.1 points.
“The energy changed (in the second half),” Kings guard Tyrese Haliburton said. “They’re a team that feeds off rhythm and energy. Whenever they come here or anywhere, there is a lot of purple and gold, they just feed off that. Getting stops allows our crowd to get involved and it shuts their crowd up a little bit. It allows us to feed off that ourselves. We were getting stops and it took them out of their rhythm.”
Harrison Barnes added, “For us (the third quarter) has been our Achilles’ heel. We knew if we didn’t put up a stand and put up a fight in that third we would let this game slip away like the five previous. For us, it was really big to try and get stops and tonight we did.
On defense, the Kings were averaging 28.8 points allowed in the third quarter entering Wednesday’s game, which ranks third-worst in the NBA. In the fourth quarter, the defense isn’t much better, averaging 27.3 points, fifth-worst in the NBA.
So when the Kings outscored the Lakers 40-23 in the third quarter and used a 20-4 run to maintain a double-digit lead, it was viewed differently because of the previous second-half collapses.
The Lakers managed to cut the lead to two with 1:36 left, but a De’Aaron Fox jumper followed by a Chimezie Metu 3-pointer put the game away. The strong play could be used as a building block.
“It’s great to get a win like that here,” Fox said. “You really just want to carry it over. We had a lot of guys play a good game and a lot of guys made shots. We were able to get stops when we needed them.”
Another improvement the Kings made on the defensive end was points allowed at close range. The Kings rank worst in the league for most points allowed in the paint, averaging 52.8 a game. The Kings held the Lakers to 42 points in the paint and scored 70 of their own.
The 70 points in the paint marked a season high. The effort might have been aided by the Lakers’ small lineup; LeBron James started the game at center for L.A.
“We knew that they were not playing with a traditional center all the time, so we had to put pressure on the paint,” Barnes said. “We couldn’t rely on guys getting hot or shooting a ridiculous percentage from three to try and carry the day for us.”
The Sacramento Kings will finish off the week with a pair of games against the Houston Rockets at home on Friday and Sunday.
This story was originally published January 13, 2022 at 8:51 AM.