Products You May Like
-
Ramona Shelburne, ESPN Senior Writer
THE TEXTS WOULD come in like clockwork. After every practice and every shootaround, De’Aaron Fox would check his cell phone for a detailed message from his now former coach, Mike Brown.
“He’d text me every day with a grade,” Fox told ESPN this weekend following Brown’s dismissal on Friday.
Fox liked the push.
“I’ve always been coached hard,” Fox continued. “I went to Kentucky because [former coach John Calipari] would be hard on me.”
So it bothers Fox that Brown’s harsh comments about a bad foul he committed on Jaden Ivey at the end of Thursday night’s unseemly loss to the Detroit Pistons, in what turned out to be the final postgame news conference of Brown’s Kings tenure, had anything to do with the organization’s decision to part ways with the coach Friday afternoon.
“I feel like there’s this perception that people thought that we were at odds,” Fox says. “You can ask anybody in this organization: me and Mike have never even had an argument. We could disagree with something. We talked about it and it was gone.”
If anything, Fox said Brown did exactly what he explicitly told him he’d do — because he knew Fox could take it and the team needed something to shake them out of the funk that ultimately cost Brown his job.
Three weeks ago, after a practice, Fox said he and Brown had a heart-to-heart about where the team was and what they could both do to help the Kings out of what has now grown into a 5-13 slide. Brown told Fox that he believed Fox could become one of the best two-way players ever at his position, but he had to keep pushing himself.
“I was fine with that,” Fox said. “He told me things, then he said it to the media. And obviously he still played me 40 minutes because he wanted me to do those things. He was being tough on that.”
This conversation between Fox and Brown came at the same time the organization was having difficult internal conversations about Brown’s future.
This summer, when management consulted with Fox before awarding Brown a three-year, $25.5 million extension, Fox gave his blessing, saying, “I don’t want another coach.”
But Fox’s decision not to sign an extension like his coach did this offseason sent a message that was consistent with his long-held priorities: winning and continuity.
This season, and with Brown’s dismissal, the team has done little of either.
IN LESS THAN two years, the Kings have gone from one of the best stories in basketball — making the playoffs in Brown’s first year and lighting up the Sacramento skyline after each win at the gleaming new Golden One Center — to holding 12th place in the Western Conference despite the offseason acquisition of six-time All-Star DeMar DeRozan.
By the numbers, things looked fine. The Kings’ offense ranks eighth in the NBA, five spots better than last season. The defense is 16th, just two slots worse. But they kept blowing big leads and losing close games despite having two of the most proven clutch players in the league in Fox and DeRozan — Fox won Clutch Player of the Year in 2022-23, and DeRozan was runner-up to Stephen Curry last season.
And Fox and Keegan Murray consistently rank among the best on-ball defenders in the league, so why wasn’t that translating into better defense?
For weeks, everyone hoped this was just a stretch of bad luck. That the shooting numbers, in particular Fox’s and Murray’s, would go back up. That Brown’s attention to detail in film sessions and practices would translate to the play on the court, both in late-game situations and in general.
Brown pushed them hard behind the scenes and publicly. Several of his news conferences ended up going viral. He made all the daytime talk shows last year when he brought a laptop to a news conference to explain why he got ejected from a game.
But calling out your team publicly — explaining how the team needed to be more methodical and play the right way “possession after possession” 26 times — lands differently when you’re losing.
“You can’t just throw your team under the bus like that,” one league source said.
As the losses mounted throughout November and December — 14 out of their past 20 — and the Kings fell further and further back in the Western Conference, the front office started looking for answers.
The Kings inquired about Chicago’s Zach LaVine, New Orleans’ Brandon Ingram, Brooklyn’s Cam Thomas and Washington’s Kyle Kuzma, league sources said. They looked at smaller moves, “just to change things up,” as one source put it. They even asked Brown if there were moves to make with the roster or the staff that might help, sources said.
“Nobody wanted to fire Mike,” one Kings source said. “He’s a good coach. People here really care about him. Until the very last moment we were trying to make it work.”
1:08
Malone: Kings showed ‘no class’ in firing Mike Brown
Michael Malone doesn’t hold back as he sounds off on the Kings for firing Mike Brown
THAT’S WHY, SOURCES said, the Kings let Brown handle the team’s film session and practice Friday morning following the Detroit loss, before informing him of their decision to fire him while he was on his way to the airport to fly with the team to Los Angeles.
General manager Monte McNair convened several calls and meetings with associate GM Wes Wilcox, team president Matina Kolokotronis and governor Vivek Ranadivé throughout the Kings’ disastrous 0-5 homestand, sources said.
After the loss to the Indiana Pacers on Dec. 22, Ranadivé flew out of the country for the Christmas holiday and wasn’t present at Thursday’s game against Detroit in which Sacramento blew a 19-point lead, including a 10-point lead with less than three minutes to go. But he was watching.
And when they all got in touch late Thursday night, it was resolved to sleep on it and talk again in the morning. That call began as the team was starting its film session. It led to a few more calls, and then finally, a decision.
McNair called Brown as he was driving to the airport to inform him of the decision. It was a somber call, sources said, between two men who’d been riding so high together less than two years earlier as Brown was unanimously voted the league’s coach of the year and McNair voted its top executive.
The Kings’ decision — and execution of the move — drew criticism from around the league. Nuggets coach Mike Malone called it “awful.” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said it was “shocking,” before adding, “I just know that I feel very fortunate to work in an organization that really values continuity and allows our team, our staff, our group to get through the rough patches.” Pistons coach J.B. Bickerstaff, for his part, called it “classless,” saying, “When Mike pours himself into his job the way he does, he deserves better than that … I thought it was s—-y, to be honest with you, the way it was handled.”
After informing Brown, Wilcox and McNair called Fox, DeRozan and All-Star forward Domantas Sabonis. Fox and DeRozan were getting ready to head to the airport. Sabonis was home sick and missed the call. None of them were consulted on the decision.
“That team has plenty of talent,” one source with knowledge of the team said. “The roster is fine. They had to make a change.”
An hour later, assistant coach Doug Christie was named the team’s interim head coach. The team found out as they sat on the plane, waiting to fly to Los Angeles.
It is Fox’s fifth coach in his eight seasons. It is the Kings’ 13th coach since 2005-2006, the end of Rick Adelman’s run in which the franchise made the playoffs during eight consecutive seasons. Of the previous 12 coaches since Adelman, only one has posted a winning record in Sacramento: Mike Brown.
Christie has worked closely with Sabonis for a number of years and brings instant credibility from his playing days in Sacramento, where he was a key contributor to the Kings’ successful run in the early 2000s. It remains to be seen if he’ll bring wins at the rate the Kings were expecting following Brown’s first-season success.
“Teams just got adjusted to us,” Kings guard Malik Monk said Saturday, when asked what has changed in the two seasons since the Kings won 48 games and finished third in the Western Conference. “They were surprised when we first came out with Mike, didn’t know how we were playing, didn’t know how we were going to play, and now just feel like they had time to adjust to us and get used to it.
“So, yeah, we just got to change things up.”