Mike Brown led Kings to first taste of success in 16 years, then they reverted to their old ways in 20 months

USATSI

Mike Brown was the NBA's Coach of the Year for the 2022-23 season. Monte McNair was the league's Executive of the Year in the same season. The awards are notable independently, but said quite a bit more as a pair. 

Remember, while the media votes for Coach of the Year, the NBA's top basketball decision-makers choose the Executive of the Year. These two groups, frequently at odds over practically everything, agreed on one thing after the 2022-23 campaign: that the two men guiding the Sacramento Kings, who had missed the playoffs 16 years in a row to that point, were the best in the league at what they did for an entire season. It was symbolic of a growing consensus within the basketball world. The Kings, yes, those Kings, finally knew what they were doing. They had a plan.

It only took the Kings a year-and-a-half to prove us wrong. On Friday, they fired Brown in one of the more surprising coaching changes in recent NBA history, and the path they took there was all the proof we needed to know that these are just the same old Kings from the playoff drought.

Let's recap. Brown won the 2022-23 Coach of the Year award unanimously. There was a literal consensus among voters that Brown had just had the best season of anyone in the profession. And on paper, his 2023-24 follow-up wasn't all that different. Sure, the Kings dropped from the No. 3 seed in the Western Conference to the No. 9 seed, but their record declined by only two wins, from 48 to 46, and their net rating dipped by less than a point, from plus-2.6 to plus-1.8. Those drops really only came because of late-season injuries to Malik Monk and Kevin Huerter.

They didn't reach the playoffs, but they at least managed to avenge their 2023 defeat at the hands of the Golden State Warriors by knocking them out of the Play-In Tournament. Was it a setback? Sure, but it was one based far more on external circumstance than poor coaching. The Kings didn't get worse. The West got better, and they just weren't quite as healthy as they were in their 2023 breakthrough. There was still quite a bit to build on.

The first red flags came during extension negotiations with Brown. At the time, Kings beat writer James Ham reported that the team's "failure to repeat the success of the previous year hasn't sat well with ownership." Mind you, that was ownership's first taste of success of any kind, and the franchise's first trip back to the playoffs since 2006. Eventually, an extension was reached, but the seeds of panic were planted. They sprouted with the July acquisition of DeMar DeRozan.

As was apparent at the time, the DeRozan acquisition made little sense. The last thing that a Kings team featuring Monk, Huerter and De'Aaron Fox needed was another high-usage scoring guard. Sacramento sorely lacked perimeter defense. With all of those guards and Domantas Sabonis controlling the ball, their ideal supporting pieces needed to be 3-point shooters who could space the floor for the incumbent core. So, naturally, the Kings added an extremely limited 35-year-old defender who is notorious for taking long 2s instead of 3s.

The DeRozan acquisition has predictably failed on both counts so far, but more importantly, he's struggled to even bring the Kings what they expected him to. Sacramento's model for success this season was based on the notion that they were suddenly built around the 2023 Clutch Player of the Year, Fox, and the 2024 runner-up, DeRozan. They weren't going to be an elite shooting or defensive team, but if they could just keep games close, they would be able to win them late behind all of the shot-making they'd accumulated. Well, the Kings are 6-13 in the clutch this season. Those 13 clutch losses are the most in basketball thus far.

They likely played a big part in Brown's firing, but it should be noted that clutch performance tends to be mostly random on a year-to-year basis because of how small the samples are. All it takes to swing a close game in the final seconds is a single made or missed shot. A handful of stars—most notably Chris Paul—lead consistently successful clutch teams. Most teams are at the mercy of small-sample shooting variance, and if the Kings show some superficial improvement in the post-Brown era, this will probably be why it happens. Even if interim coach Doug Christie doesn't actively make the Kings better, it's entirely possible that they get luckier late in fourth quarters and win some games they were losing earlier on.

None of this is meant to absolve Brown of his mistakes this season either. Keon Ellis is the best perimeter defender on the roster. Why his role was so inconsistent remains a mystery. The decision not to foul the Pistons on the catch in the final seconds of Thursday's loss, when they were up by three, was confounding in the moment and disastrous once Fox blew the game on a terrible foul that gave Jaden Ivey a four-point play. The decision to go after Fox in his post-game press conference as Fox reportedly mulls his future with the franchise certainly didn't help the situation.

But you just can't operate a franchise this way. You can't expect to develop any sort of stability or culture when you panic at the slightest setback. Yet this is exactly how the Kings have operated for the better part of two decades. The only reason Michael Malone was available to coach the Denver Nuggets to a championship was that the Kings fired him for a 2-7 stretch that came while star center DeMarcus Cousins was sidelined to due to a case of viral meningitis. They have Fox instead of Jayson Tatum right now because of an ill-fated trade with the 76ers meant to clear the cap space needed to sign veteran Monte Ellis... who proceeded to sign with the Pacers for reportedly less money than the Kings were offering.

This is the difference between well-run franchises and poorly-run franchises. Imagine if the Heat had fired Erik Spoelstra after his 9-8 start to the 2010-11 season? Or if the Celtics had broken up Tatum and Jaylen Brown like so many suggested after their early playoff defeats. Owner Vivek Ranadive was once a minority owner for the Golden State Warriors. There was a period in which quite a few experts thought Golden State was crazy not to trade Klay Thompson for Kevin Love. Those teams succeed in large part because they make disciplined, long-term plans and actually stick to them.

Despite brief notions to the contrary, there's just not evidence that the Kings have ever really done that, and the key stakeholders involved here seem to know it. When Fox's agent, Rich Paul, met with the Kings earlier this season according to The Athletic's Sam Amick and Anthony Slater, he did so to answer a single, critical question: what is the plan here? If they had an answer, it's not immediately visible.

It's possible that Brown's relationship with Fox was part of his downfall. Teams generally side with players over coaches when relationships fray. But it's naive to assume that a coaching change will be enough to convince him Sacramento is where he should spend the rest of his career when there isn't an immediate answer to that critical question Paul reportedly posed. Why should Fox stay with the Kings when he's getting linked to significantly more stable franchises like the Spurs and Heat?

At this point, there's no clear answer, and while it's too early to say for certain how Fox's future plays out, it's starting to look increasingly likely that the Kings will have to watch him and Brown succeed elsewhere just as they have Malone and Tatum. Until this franchise develops the patience to build and develop a winner properly, any meager scraps of success like the 2022-23 season will prove to be little more than fleeting respites from the dysfunction this franchise has spent the past two decades foisting upon itself.

Mike Brown led Kings to first taste of success in 16 years, then they reverted to their old ways in 20 months

Mike Brown led Kings to first taste of success in 16 years, then they reverted to their old ways in 20 months

Mike Brown led Kings to first taste of success in 16 years, then they reverted to their old ways in 20 months

Mike Brown led Kings to first taste of success in 16 years, then they reverted to their old ways in 20 months

Mike Brown led Kings to first taste of success in 16 years, then they reverted to their old ways in 20 months