Brown shoulders blame for Kings’ self-inflicted mistakes

SACRAMENTO – After another game filled with self-inflicted mistakes, lack of focus and determination, Kings coach Mike Brown saw no reason to yell at his players in the aftermath of Thursday’s 113-100 loss to the Los Angeles Lakers.

For weeks, Brown has been preaching pretty much the same things to his players over and over, yet the results never really change much.

Whether it’s a failure to block out, take care of the paint, make better and cleaner passes or simply following the coaching staff’s game plans, the Kings have been stuck pretty much in the same rut, and there’s been no indications that things will improve any time soon.

“It is what it is,” Brown told reporters at Golden 1 Center. “That’s why I didn’t yell at the guys. There’s nothing to yell about. They know exactly what we have to do. It’s whether or not we go do it. Tonight we didn’t go do it.

“It starts with me. Somehow, someway I got to figure out how to get them to do it.”

Of course Brown had to shoulder the responsibility for his team’s failures. That’s what most good coaches do.

But with the Kings, the issues run far deeper than the coaching staff.

From the beginning of training camp, Brown and his staff have tried to stress the details to the Kings’ players, though it hasn’t seemed to have made much of an impression.

While Sacramento made a slight improvement in defending the paint – the Lakers scored 44 points in the paint compared to the 76 that the Denver Nuggets dropped on them a few days earlier – the Kings still are not matching the physical aspects that their opponents have been bringing.

That has led to the breakdowns in boxing out while opening things up for opposing teams to be active on the boards. Three days after allowing a season-high 15 offensive rebounds against the Nuggets, the Kings matched that by giving up another 15 to the Lakers that led to 18 second-chance points.

Then there were the turnovers (17) and a lack of ball movement that clearly frustrated the head coach.

“The way we played both defensively and offensively was not good,” Brown said. “They touched our paint whenever they wanted, they drove us whenever they wanted. They manhandled us on the boards.”

Because of all the mistakes that the Kings were making, Brown was forced to run through his timeouts far more quickly than he had hoped. He had just one for the final 14 minutes of the game and used that with about four minutes remaining.

“In order to be really good in this league, you got to fight through hard,” Brown said. “It’s not easy and it’s not going to be easy at any time. Sooner or later, we just have to make up our mind, no matter how tired we are physically, no matter how tired we are mentally, no matter what the officials are calling or not calling, no matter what’s going right or what’s going wrong … We got to make up our mind that we’re just going to leave it on the floor and try like hell to play the right way on both ends of the floor.

“Somehow, some way we have to make up our mind and decide who we want to be. Tonight was not a good performance at any level in terms of trying to let the Lakers and everybody else know that we want to get back to where we feel we should be in the standings.”

Brown did not rule out making lineup changes, although point guard De’Aaron Fox sounded like it doesn’t matter who starts for the Kings. It comes down primarily to a desire to get better.

“We got to go out there and execute the plan. If you’re just thinking about it [and] not doing it, then that means nothing,” Fox said. “At some point, especially in this conference, you keep losing games like this, then we look back like last year and you’re on the outside looking in. We keep talking about how good of a team we think we can be, but until we’re able to roll off consistent wins or be consistent as a team that means nothing.”

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