Sacramento Kings: Slight Improvement Not Enough Under Keith Smart

In Paul Westphal's final game as the Kings' head coach, the Kings were blown out of Denver with a 110-83 blacking. Last night, the now Keith Smart-led Kings lost a home game to those same Nuggets, 122-93.

Is the Blowout 2.0 a sign that the Keith Smart Kings are no better than the Paul Westphal Kings? No, not really. There is visual improvement. But things are hardly peachy in Sacramento.

The Kings are a better team than they were three weeks ago, when Westphal was fired. They're making steps in the right direction. But they're only making baby steps. And baby steps aren't enough.

The Kings are no longer losing from lack of effort. The effort, visually absent under Westphal, is palpable under Smart. What's costing the Kings games is a grand number of things, but for the most part, it isn't a lack of trying.

Certainly when the Kings found themselves in a 30-point hole against the Nuggets last night, they weren't exactly playing inspired basketball. You can't give the team—or Smart, for that matter—any kind of props when the squad continuously lets teams run up the score early.

And for the last three games—losses to Memphis, Portland and Denver, all by more than 12—the script was the same. The Kings came out and hung with their opponents in the first quarter, found themselves on the wrong end of a huge second quarter run and couldn't recover the rest of the way.

What needs to change? Plenty of things. Every Kings loss continues to show the exact same weaknesses that desperately need fixing.

For one, DeMarcus Cousins remains the teams only interior defender (until Chuck Hayes returns from his shoulder injury), and opposing teams know it. With Cousins as foul prone as he is, teams relentlessly attack the paint. Memphis had 62 points in the paint in their win, Portland finished with 52 a night later and Denver finished with 92 points in the paint on Wednesday.

So the team needs to fix its whole defensive approach. Far too often opposing guards are able to get past their defenders and attack the paint, where the Kings have only one guy who cares to block the rim but who far too quickly ends up in foul trouble.

Secondly, the Kings need to continue to work on their offensive game plan. Every night since Smart took over, the team has shown flashes of being able to work a consistent offense. In two contests the team managed to keep the ball flowing the entire game and they won both contests—a home win over Indiana and a road contest against San Antonio.

But every Kings loss shares the same offensive tale. The Kings run and pass the ball well in the early going and keep up with their opponents. But as soon as they find themselves in a deficit, ball movement goes out the window. Suddenly Tyreke Evans and John Salmons are jacking up bad shots, Jimmer Fredette is running out the shot clock and DeMarcus Cousins sits around the post unable to do anything because the Kings cannot or forget to get the ball in his hands.

Rather than wallow in misery after another destruction at the hands of the Nuggets, the Kings should all watch the game footage and learn from Denver. The Nuggets are everything the Kings should want to be—fast, unselfish, determined, unselfish, tough and unselfish.

Where Sacramento takes half the shot clock to get into their offense, Denver has built a well-oiled machine quick to pass and rarely takes an ill-advised shot. And did I mention the Nuggets play unselfish?

It's unfair for Smart to have to deal with everything at once. He's stuck with the youngest team in basketball and a good number of players that need to be molded before they can really become efficient NBA players. He's dealing with injuries (Chuck Hayes, Marcus Thornton), struggling shooters (Tyreke Evans, Jimmer Fredette) and veterans offering no quality to the team (John Salmons, Travis Outlaw).

Worst of all, he barely has any practice time to work with the team and build any sort of cohesiveness or even figure out what he wants to do.

Yet no matter how unfair it is to Smart, this is his chance. This is his chance to show that he deserves to stay as the Kings coach after this season. And in this league, baby steps aren't enough.