Supremely Underestimated Kings Becoming West's NBA Playoff Nightmare
For an entire regular season, across nearly 50 victories, the Sacramento Kings tried to show us they were legitimate.
They turned in the NBA's best offense. They won more road games than anyone in the Western Conference. They had two All-Stars likely to become All-NBA players in Domantas Sabonis and De'Aaron Fox. They churned out outrageous clutch performances. They won 48 games. They finished third in the West.
The Kings tried to show us they were more than fluky or merely the byproduct of a weaker (though still an overcrowded) Western Conference. They certainly tried to show us that they were more than a playoff stepping stone, more than an afterthought, more than a franchise simply content with ending a 16-year playoff drought. They tried to show us. They really did.
And yet, hardly anyone took the Kings seriously. Not really, anyway. Not in the vein their record and season-long performance suggested.
Two games into Sacramento's first trip to the playoffs since 2006, that's all about to change. It has to change, because the Kings are demanding it change, just like they have all season—only louder and more forcefully now.
On the heels of Monday's 114-106 victory against the Golden State Warriors, Sacramento has seized a 2-0 series lead over the sixth-seeded reigning champion it wasn't favored to beat.
Guess what? The Kings sure as hell are favored to beat them now. The folks over at FanDuel have them at -158 to win the series.
Restraint is a natural inclination at this moment. Two games is not the entire series. The Warriors are still the Warriors, at least in some ways. We need to see how they fare at home. And it's not like they're getting the doors blown off them. These first two games have been decided by a total of 11 points.
Still, benefit of the doubt is no longer Golden State's to enjoy. History, in fact, suggests this 2-0 hole is less of a major inconvenience and more of a death knell:
Never mind the past-is-prologue slants, though. This isn't about the Warriors losing. This is about the Kings winning, twice, on the NBA's biggest stage, against one of the league's (supposedly) most formidable title contenders, in ways that can and should only be described as inarguably convincing.
Sacramento successfully navigating two close calls is nothing new. The adjustments it has made to survive them are a different story.
Chief among them: a commitment to boarding their own misses. The Kings ranked 24th in offensive rebounding rate during the regular season, grabbing 25.3 percent of their misfires. That modest share was mostly by design. Sacramento preferred to get its defense set over snaring their own misses.
It was a rock-solid approach. Their offense was more than efficient enough without making offensive rebounds a priority, and in the absence of defensive depth on the roster, limiting opponent transition frequency made too much sense. Only Oklahoma City and Toronto allowed rival offenses to get on the break less often.
The Kings have flipped their philosophy against a Warriors squad that skews smaller on the frontline. Through two games, they have grabbed 37 percent of their own misses, a monstrous share that has allowed them to offset an overall lackluster half-court performance while dominating the interior battle. Sacramento will enter Game 3 as a plus-13 on second-chance points and plus-30 on points scored in the paint.
This approach could, theoretically, leave the Kings more vulnerable to defending in transition. It hasn't. The Warriors aren't especially athletic or getting a ton of rebounding from their guards and wings. They have not punctured holes in Sacramento's defense on the break.
Speaking of which: The Kings are playing defense! That was supposed to be their fatal flaw, the glaring weakness they could not overcome. It was instead a strength during Game 2. (To be fair, Sacramento displayed some good fundamentals during the regular season, which are outlined here.)
Golden State helped the cause by turning the ball over on more than 21 percent of their possessions. Many of those errors were self-sabotage at its apex. The Warriors tossed bad passes, dribbled into cramped spaces, paid zero attention to detail on the inbounds, etc.
Credit the Kings, though, with inflicting their fair share of chaos. Their approach to defending Stephen Curry, in particular, verged on divine.
Head coach Mike Brown threw a little bit of everything against the two-time MVP. Sacramento leaned on De'Aaron Fox's athleticism (again) but also used a box-and-one, blitzed him, changed the point at which they picked him up and probably did a trillion other things I'm not smart enough to spotlight.
Curry still went for 28 points and six assists, and the Warriors were a plus-three with him in the game, because of course. But the Kings will take a 9-of-21 clip from him, including 3-of-13 from deep, 11 times out of 10.
More critically, their defense on Curry displaced more of the creation burden on to the rest of Golden State's roster. The end result for the Warriors wasn't pretty. Andrew Wiggins (22 points, 9-of-19 shooting) was just about the only one up to the task.
Klay Thompson dropped 21 points and shot 5-of-10 on threes, but he couldn't take advantage of moments in which he was going up against Domantas Sabonis. Jordan Poole was a disaster (1-of-7 from the floor, on an injured ankle). Donte DiVincenzo didn't attempt a field goal in almost 13 minutes of action.
Caveats abound. One of them is about 6'6" tall and weighs in at 230 pounds. Do the Warriors still come up short Monday night if Draymond Green wasn't ejected for, uh, stepping on Sabonis' chest?
It's a fair question. But the Kings were ahead by four at the time, and this isn't their first rodeo. Golden State rallies are furious. Sacramento has also already withstood a bunch of them in this series.
Green's ejection is more pivotal for what it might mean moving forward than any of the immediate ramifications the Warriors suffered Monday night. If further discipline follows, it could be the literal end of Golden State.
Whether anything else should come out of Green's Flagrant 2 is debatable. It helps that x-rays on Sabonis' sternum came back negative. Sabonis also clearly grabbed Green's leg. But even if you believe this was an ejection fueled by Green's reputation, he needs to be smarter. End of story. He's too important to the Warriors to try getting away with some medium-to-heavy stomping, no matter how many calls he feels the refs are missing.
Others will be quick to point out that Green and Kevon Looney won't spend every night embroiled in foul trouble. And that the Warriors will inevitably shoot better than 32.5 percent from downtown. And that the Poole minutes will get better, because, well, how can they get any worse? And that Golden State is headed home, where it lost just eight times all year and owns a top-four net rating.
Great. Grand. Wonderful. Good luck getting Sacramento to care.
Continuing to doubt the Kings carries zero merit, if it ever did in the first place. Their series lead is rooted in neither luck nor perfection.
Sabonis went 5-of-17 from the field, with more turnovers (four) than assists (two) in Game 1. Kevin Huerter couldn't get it going Saturday night, either (3-of-12). The Kings were a minus-12 from beyond the arc in Game 2. Standout First Team All-Rookie lock Keegan Murray has made just one shot through 32 minutes of series action. Sacramento's half-court offense has been disrupted in many of the ways we all suspected.
It hasn't mattered. The Kings keep discovering ways to adjust and win.
Mike Brown, for his part, has delivered a masterclass from the sidelines, pushing virtually all of the right buttons. This is officially a Davion Mitchell series. And a Malik Monk series. Brown has done an excellent job reading the room and figuring out just how long he can get by with Alex Len in the middle, or with only one of his two stars on the floor.
Those concerns about Sacramento's offense getting a pace-of-play reality check in the postseason? They've disintegrated into smithereens. The Kings are pushing at every turn—not just off turnovers and live balls but after made baskets.
When Sacramento is forced to slow things down, Golden State has indeed made life difficult on Sabonis, blowing up a lot of dribble hand-off actions. The Kings have responded by deviating from their core offensive identity, incorporating more pick-and-rolls that allow them to poke and prod and hunt weaker defensive links:
Fox's in-between game allows the Kings to shift offensive tenets. He can hit eight different gears on a single possession, decelerating then accelerating only to decelerate again. The Warriors will see Fox pull-ups and floaters in their nightmares.
Two games, two close wins, aren't necessarily telltale of anything on their own. But these two performances don't stand alone. They are an extension of the Kings' entire season.
We now have 84 games' worth of evidence, 50 total wins of proof, that this is a team worth taking seriously. Their defensive showing in Game 2 may be revelatory. Their offense and depth and adaptability and guts in crunch time are not.
Long before now, these Kings tried to show us that they had arrived, that they weren't going anywhere, that they were every bit as menacing as their record and standing suggested. They tried to show us that they belonged.
They did show us, again and again and then again.
And now, when it matters most, they're showing us yet again, louder and more forcefully and convincingly still.
Unless otherwise noted, stats courtesy of NBA.com, Basketball Reference, Stathead or Cleaning the Glass. Salary information via Spotrac.
Dan Favale covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter (@danfavale), and subscribe to the Hardwood Knocks podcast, co-hosted by Bleacher Report's Grant Hughes.
