That was the easy part, the transition from awful to good. Next step is the tough one, good to great.
Kings fans are thrilled with this season’s progress, a hungry audience given a meal of rump steak, starchy potatoes and organic lettuce. Now let’s talk about dessert and remember reaching the NBA playoffs is not a major accomplishment.
Everyone does it. Or almost everyone, other than the Kings for the past 16 years.
Here’s the difference. Great teams know the regular season is a long, slow warmup. They take a strategic approach to those soggy winter games. Some nights they sleepwalk. Other times they cruise. They try to avoid injury. Inevitably, they reach the playoffs. Coaches get fired for anything less.
Mike Brown knows this cruel world. The Kings’ coach was fired from three excellent jobs, twice by the Cleveland Cavaliers, once by the Los Angeles Lakers. His teams were filled with remarkable talent, including LeBron James and Kobe Bryant. His bosses concluded he wasn’t the right guy to blaze a path to the championship.
Couldn’t win the big ones. Too tough on players. Good, not great. Into the sunset he went.
Like many of us, Brown mellowed with age and earned another chance. His years assisting Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr produced four championships and proof that great teams don’t need a coach who screams and torments like a drill sergeant.
With great teams, mellow wins the race. Brown will never be as laid back as Kerr. He’s not wired that way. But Brown learned the wisdom of letting certain things go.
The Kings succeeded this season with the right mix of youth and speed. They finally had players who accepted the system and worked together. They won and had fun and weren’t ashamed to work for the Kings.
Brown, who long ago embraced the potency of three-point baskets based on a wonderfully archaic and simple pick and roll, inspired his men and let them play.
The Kings endured many challenges over the last 16 years, including a threatened move to Seattle and a forced sale to new management. The arrival of new owners a decade ago should have created stability. But some owners can’t keep their hands off the toys.
Such was the fate of the Kings. Until Brown was hired, managing partner Vivek Ranadive made bad situations worse by trying to run the Kings like a Silicon Valley startup. He thought constant disruption was somehow good.
He was wrong. The Kings aren’t a startup. They have been around in one form or another since 1945. They evolved in pitiful environments where they lacked money and support. After their first few years in Rochester, New York, they never aspired to greatness. Good was good enough.
The low hurdle created a franchise that lost respect among players, coaches, agents, fans, even referees. After a couple of games this season, youthful Kings moaned they didn’t get beneficial calls from refs thanks to their Sacramento uniforms. Nothing new there. It’s been that way since the Kings came to town in 1985.
Now hungry Kings fans deserve credit for helping the team become good. Fans began to abandon the product last season, leaving rows of unsold, empty seats at Golden 1 Center. It worked. Nothing tells owners to fix things better than empty seats. Ranadive hired Brown and promised the coach could run things without interference.
Great teams have stability. Peripheral players come and go, but core performers and coaches stick around. The Kings have been a masterclass in instability for many of the last 38 years, with predictable results. No matter what happens this season, the goal must be stability.
There’s one big downside to success. All those unsold, empty seats are suddenly valuable. It’s a seller’s market for the first time in decades. The price of beer, hot dogs and tickets will rise as the Kings stick it to their loyal fans. Somebody has to pay for all that goodness.
R.E. Graswich can be reached at regraswich@icloud.com. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram: @insidesacramento.
