Expectations are a dangerous thing.
Nobody knows that more than NBA coaches, and we had our latest example Friday when the Coach of the Year Curse came after Mike Brown. The Sacramento Kings deposed him as head coach on Friday, a little more than two years after taking over a 30-win team that hadn’t been to the playoffs in 17 years and failing to lead them to a championship.
I kid … slightly. Arguably, there were reasons here, and the Kings front office knows more about what was happening behind the scenes than you or me. As near as anyone can tell, this was the front office’s call and not an impulsive Vivek Ranadivé Special, as our Sam Amick and Anthony Slater noted Saturday.
At a 10,000-foot level, there wasn’t a lot of difference between this year’s Kings and the Kings of the last two seasons. Sacramento had a positive scoring margin on the season (plus-1.2, not far off the plus-2.6 of 2022-23 or the plus-1.7 of 2023-24). If you strip out their bad fortune in late/close games (something that tends to be pretty random over larger samples), the Kings’ underlying data wasn’t that different from the 48- and 46-win seasons of the two preceding years.
Notably, they also were 16th in defense despite a seeming paucity of defensive talent on the roster, and they were 14th a year earlier despite similar shortcomings. If you’re going to blame the coach, you also have to explain how a team with Domantas Sabonis at center, no backup bigs of note and a 6-6 “power” forward managed to form a credible NBA defense. The game that got Brown fired was one he narrowly lost with Alex Len as his starting center.
On the other hand, the Kings had dropped to 13-18, including five straight home losses, after Thursday night’s collapse against Detroit. Brown’s postgame news conferences increasingly consisted of him imploring players to do the things they weren’t doing, and the underlying message to the attuned ear seemed to be that his message wasn’t traveling as well as it used to.
Thus, reasonable people can argue about whether Kangz gonna Kang, or if it’s more of a story about the team’s response to Brown’s message not resonating with key players the way he once did.
But as I alluded to, there’s a bigger story here, about the hidden danger of surprise seasons. If you’re wondering why the average job timespan of a Coach of the Year award winner is barely two years, look here, because we’re talking about two highly correlated groups — with the Coach of the Year often being the one whose team was the biggest surprise.
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Brown might have been a victim of his own success at some level, after the invigorating “Light The Beam” campaign in 2022-23 when the Kings unexpectedly won 48 games and grabbed the third seed in the West. It was a perfect storm of health, production, weakened opposition and vibes, and as such, it was always going to be difficult to repeat, much less exceed in future seasons. That became a bit more clear when a 44-win Golden State Warriors team beat them in seven games in the first round of the playoffs.
Unfortunately, the success likely shoved the Kings in a direction where the short term became too prioritized at the expense of bigger-picture roster building; they just weren’t talented enough to be thinking this way. I say “likely” since I don’t have the counterfactual of a 35-win Kings season in 2022-23, but the roster moves speak for themselves.
To review: Sacramento traded its 2023 first-rounder to generate enough cap room to do a renegotiate-and-extend deal for Sabonis rather than make a pick and use the space to add another player. The Sabonis deal still paid him richly in the out years (he makes $40.5 million this year), so it felt like a bit of a pyrrhic victory given his relatively limited flight risk. (Few contending teams have cap room, not everyone needs a center, Sabonis isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, etc.) The organizational “win” was locking in Sabonis, but that thought process made a lot more sense if it was a 60-win team in the first place.
Mike Brown had coached Domantas Sabonis in Sacramento since 2022. (John Jones / USA Today)
Similarly, the Kings extended Harrison Barnes rather than seek to get younger or use him in a sign-and-trade, traded two second-round picks for Chris Duarte and waived Neemias Queta to sign JaVale McGee. A critical scouting fail on Sasha Vezenkov also shot their midlevel exception into the sun.
A year later, after winning 46 games, they went a step further by trading Barnes, Duarte and draft capital for a 35-year-old DeMar DeRozan. A player known more for raising his team’s floor than its ceiling, DeRozan hasn’t totally fit in his 31 games, and his lack of size at the four is an obvious problem for a team that lacks length and athleticism up and down the roster.
Look, any of these decisions were at least quasi-defensible in a vacuum. In the aggregate, however, they paint a picture of a franchise getting a bit out over its skis. And now, that same organization likely feels the pressure of De’Aaron Fox looking at his future. That, and his potential free agency, as well as seeing a future cupboard in Sacramento that is slightly bare.
It’s a movie we’ve seen before. Success is a hell of a drug, but surprise success, in particular, can be real plot twist in the team-planning process.
Take Atlanta, for instance. The Hawks made the 2021 Eastern Conference finals and then spent two years mistakenly thinking they were on the cusp of contention. In reality, they were the apex of averageness, going 120-126 in the following three seasons and finishing ninth, eighth and 10th, respectively, with three playoff wins in those seasons. A reckless trade for Dejounte Murray and some rose-colored extensions painted them into a cap corner, one the Hawks only now are emerging from.
Examples from the wayback machine are abundant — 2013-14 Phoenix Suns, anyone? — but for more recent fare, consider a few examples: Would the Los Angeles Lakers have attacked their roster more proactively in the summer of 2023 if their 43-win team hadn’t made the Western Conference finals? Would the Portland Trail Blazers have thought more about breaking up the Damian Lillard–CJ McCollum backcourt if it weren’t for their own deep run in 2019? For that matter, will the Indiana Pacers end up regretting their own “lock it down” reaction to their Eastern Conference finals run in 2023, which yielded $350 million in contracts for Obi Toppin, Andrew Nembhard, Pascal Siakam and T.J. McConnell?
We can go on. The commonality for all of them (well, not Indiana … at least not yet) is that they never got any closer to their intended destination than they did in the surprise season and ended up churning through coaches and roster convulsions.
There is one other thread: Those teams couldn’t stick through whatever their plans were once things got hard. I think that’s because it was a revised, improvised plan to start, and that made it easier to shift to Plans B, C and X and start throwing things at the wall.
It takes a strong organization to survive that. The Miami Heat went through that in 2017 when they miraculously turned around an 11-30 start with a 30-11 second half and nearly made the playoffs. Miami’s offseason was loaded with bloated contracts for the role players who turned around their season, and the result was two years of mediocrity and a slog of digging their way out. Finally, the Heat landed Jimmy Butler, drafted Bam Adebayo and Tyler Herro, found Duncan Robinson under a rock and pushed to the 2020 finals.
And in those two intervening disappointing seasons, with a combined record of 83-81, the thing they didn’t do was change coaches.
“What they did there is really hard to do,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said when I asked for his thoughts on Sacramento and Brown before Saturday’s Miami-Atlanta game. “If you’ve been losing for 15, 20 years since Rick Adelman was there, and to change the culture and make the playoffs — you stick with it. Some of our best moments have been when we lost or struggled with things and you all get in a room, and the organization basically says, ‘Figure it the F out; there are no changes.’
“This league is hard. You have to go through adversity together as an entire organization if you’re going to break through and get to the other side. But yeah, that sucks.”
The next question for the Kings — whether it’s Doug Christie or somebody else on the sideline — is whether they can course-correct effectively. The good news is that the basic ingredients of a half-decent, West Play-In Tournament-level team are there right now. The bad news is that the current group has a near-zero chance of being anything more than that.
With that last sentence, at least, hopefully we’ve reset the expectations to something more appropriate.
(Top photo: Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)