Kings facing frustratingly obvious trend, despite team’s denial originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area
SACRAMENTO — When it was announced that several Miami Heat players, including their star Jimmy Butler, would miss Monday’s game against the Kings, Sacramento fans had one mutual reaction.
“Blowout loss incoming.” “Double-digit defeat on the horizon.” “We are so losing this game.”
But what began as a lighthearted meme on social media has become a notorious nightmare for Sacramento.
Four months into the 2023-24 NBA season, the Kings have formed a reputation of folding when facing shorthanded teams or teams under .500. And, to the contrary, they have managed to string together some impressive showings against the league’s top dogs, 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 it’s not a trend, according to Kings coach Mike Brown, who rather 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 sees a trend with these losses. “We’ve played against other teams where their top one or two guys didn’t play and we’ve won games. The reality of it is there were some opportunities for us to box out [and] we didn’t hit somebody. There were some opportunities early on to where I felt we could have contested better. We didn’t quite get the shooters. To me, more than anything else, that’s where the trend is.
“I’ve been saying it the last few days, I thought we did a great job defending the 3. Tonight we kind of let our guard down a little bit, and let guys who weren’t hot initially get going. And it hurt us. But I don’t feel like it’s a trend that every time we play a team and their No. 1, No. 2 or No. 3 guy is out that we lose.”
Brown can deny the notion about his team all he wants, but history doesn’t lie.
When Sacramento fell miserably to the Houston Rockets in consecutive losses at the beginning of the season, things felt like they couldn’t…
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