LOS ANGELES — “The first thing is: We have enough.”
That was the message that new head coach Doug Christie had given to the Kings’ players after taking over the big chair in the wake of Mike Brown being fired. Christie emphasized it several times Saturday night, “And this is a message that I said to them — there is enough in this locker room.”
Christie brings a new voice to Sacramento, but he takes over the same roster — one very light on plus defenders.
That was evident from the opening tip in Christie’s debut game as head coach — the Lakers scored 40 points on 73.9% shooting in the first quarter Saturday night. In the third quarter, when the Lakers leaned into an inverted pick-and-roll, they scored 42 points on 75% shooting.
“I mean, everything felt great, other than giving up two 40-point quarters and fouling entirely too much,” DeMar DeRozan said of the first game under Christie.
“Obviously, giving up two 40-point quarters will never help you win the game,” De’Aaron Fox added.
Like the last five games Brown coached, the Kings lost Christie’s debut, 132-122.
With those six straight losses the Kings have fallen to 13-19 on the season. Sacramento sits 12th in the West and is staring up at the play-in — and in the deep Western Conference, a team will likely have to be above .500 just to be in the top 10 and make it to the play-in.
Already six games below .500, there is no grace period for Christie or this team to break in the new coach.
“I don’t accept a grace period, I expect to win every time we step out on the the ball floor, because there’s enough in the locker room to make it happen,” Christie said.
Is there?
There is on offense, where the Kings are once again top-10 in the league. Fox, DeRozan, and Domantas Sabonis form a trio of bucket-getters that can put up points against any team.
However, the team is 17th in the league on defense this season — and that ranking was a credit to Brown, a defense-first coach who prioritized that end of the court. The Kings were middle of the pack defensively last season (14th) and were 24th in the league the season their top-ranked offense carried them to the No. 3 seed.
This is not a roster with many plus defenders: Keon Ellis off the bench is one for sure, Keegan Murray is good but asked to cover the opponent’s best perimeter player nightly, and Fox is solid. However, that’s about it, and Sabonis is not a strong drop-back rim protector.
“It’s going to start on the defensive end,” Fox said of turning the Kings’ season around (comments that carry weight because of the rumors he might ask out of Sacramento). “We’ve been top-10 in offense the majority of the year, so that’s not where our problem lies at the end of the day. We have to, at some point, be able to buckle down and get stops when we need to.”
Getting stops also gives this team a chance to run — something else Christie has prioritized. He wants these Kings to get back to playing faster.
Sacramento is 25th in the league in the percentage of offense that starts in transition and just average (16th) in pace. Against the Lakers the Kings played closer to their old selves — at what would have been a top-10 percent of offense starting in transition — and that was against a Los Angeles team without LeBron James trying to grind the pace of the game down.
Christie hinted at other changes he might like to make, but there’s only so much he can do.
“Here’s the thing, we’re in the middle of the season. There’s not going to be some drastic change,” Kevin Huerter said. “There can’t be we don’t have enough practice time or training camp to do that. I think you saw us get back to our pace and something that I think we’ve been trying to play with all season… so that was nice to see.”
Christie’s pregame theme was not about changing the lineups or the Xs and Os. He focused on effort and said, ” We compete at an extremely high level—that is one thing that we will not compromise.”
The effort was there on defense for the Kings, but the execution needs work. A lot of work.
Changes have to come quickly. Firing Brown mid-season was a clear sign to the players that the Kings want to turn things around and win this season.
“That was a message that was very clear yesterday, was that we don’t see this as a lost season,” Kevin Huerter said. “We got to right the ship, we got to turn this around. We just lost number six on an away court, so there’s definitely no grace period.”
Christie agrees and kept saying, “There’s enough in the locker room to make [wins] happen.”
Is there? Christie will have the opportunity to prove his point and win the Kings’ head coaching job permanently over the coming months.
However, on the night of his head coaching debut, this looked like the same Kings on defense, and that may be a problem beyond any coach’s ability to fix.
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