A Royal Pain
Fansided

Sacramento Kings travel 1,583 miles overnight to play the Spurs

By Tony Xypteras

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I was talking to Celtics-fan buddy of mine at the gym this morning, and we had a pretty solid conversation about how fantastic it is to play the Knicks in 2015. It’s a great pick-me-up game. The ball moved beautifully, everyone shot the ball well, the defense looked good (aided by a very poor Knicks offense, of course), and the team’s confidence should be extremely high heading into San Antonio tonight. The Sacramento Kings demolished the Knicks. It was beautiful.

The most noteworthy tidbit to come out of last nights win was Nik Stauskas’ return to the Kings rotation. George Karl told members of the media before the game that Nik was going to play, so that mystery was out of the way. The next obvious question was, ‘who was he going to replace?’

Karl elected to play a slightly bigger version of what most would consider ‘small ball’. He cut the prototypical backup power forwards out of the rotation completely, electing to use Andre Miller, Omri Casspi, Derrick Williams, and Nik Stauskas as the main reserve players. Stauskas responded to his newfound role with 15 points on 4-8 shooting in 25 minutes. It was the best Stauskas has looked in a long time.

You can get away with that lineup against the undersized and undermanned Knicks. We’ll see how Karl plays it tonight against the Spurs.

You can find the highlight package from last nights win below, along with our full recap here.

The Kings are in the middle of one of the more ridiculous NBA road trips you’ll ever see, and that’ll take them into San Antonio tonight on the second night of a back-to-back. To be fair to the schedule makers, the Kings weren’t supposed to play the Knicks last night. That was a makeup game from the January 26th game that was cancelled because of an expected blizzard.

Fortunately for the Kings, last nights game in New York wasn’t what I would consider ‘physically taxing’, but that travel distance is rough.

The Spurs defeated the Kings 107-96 on February 27th. DeMarcus Cousins didn’t play in that game, and the Kings played respectable basketball without him. If they can give a similar effort tonight with Cousins back in the lineup, they should be in decent shape.

San Antonio hasn’t played in three days. They are completely healthy, and should be well rested for tonight’s matchup. The exact opposite of what the Kings are, if you want to look at it that way.

The Kings actually beat the Spurs way back on November 15th. Michael Malone was the coach at the time, and I distinctively remember that game for how Greg Popovich used everyone aside from Tim Duncan on DeMarcus Cousins until the fourth quarter. Once the game got close, Popovich finally put Duncan on Cousins and he responded with two of my favorite Cousins moments of the season, both of which occurred in crunch time against the defending champions.

We’ll see how Popovich decides to defend Cousins tonight. It should be fun.

Sacramento Kings vs. San Antonio Spurs

Where: AT&T Center – San Antonio, Texas

When: 5::30 PM Pacific, 8:30 PM Eastern

Broadcast: Comcast Sportsnet California

Radio: KHTK Sports 1140 AM

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