According to Shams Charania of ESPN, the Sacramento Kings are parting ways with head coach Mike Brown. Hired in 2022, Brown helped the Kings snap a 16-year playoff drought during the 2022-23 season (his first with the team). Sacramento lost in the first round that year, taking the reigning champion Golden State Warriors to seven games.
Since then, the Kings have failed to meet expectations. Last season, they lost in the Play-In Tournament, falling to the Zion Williamson-less New Orleans Pelicans. And so far this season, they are in an even worse spot. The Kings are 13-18 on the year, sitting in 12th place in the Western Conference. They are 2.5 games out of 11th and 3.0 games out of 10th.
But the situation is far worse than Charania’s initial report.
Kings firing Mike Brown proves they are joke of NBA
Matt George, the host of Locked On Kings, revealed that the Kings fired Brown as the team was boarding their flight to LA, as they play the Los Angeles Lakers on Saturday.
He stated that Brown had just run a full practice and spoke to the media for 15 minutes. And based on George’s phrasing, this was all presumably without the knowledge that he was about to be fired.
The Sacramento Kings just fired Mike Brown right before the team boarded a flight to LA. He just ran a full practice and spent 15 minutes talking to the media.
— Matt George (@MattGeorgeSAC) December 27, 2024
Just bad man. Bad bad bad.
For a guy who did as much as Brown did for the organization—bringing them to the playoffs and snapping what was the longest active playoff drought in US professional sports—this was not a fair way to deal with the situation.
If Brown truly had no idea he was going to be fired prior to the flight to LA, it’s exactly the type of blindside that feeds the narrative of how dysfunctional the Kings organization has been over the years.
Brown inked a three-year extension back in June that was slated to make him the coach of the Kings through the 2026-27 season. Yet just 31 games into the first season of said extension, the Kings decided to fire him.
Up until their playoff appearance in 2023, the Kings were widely regarded as one of the worst organizations in sports. The constant disappointment that surrounded the franchise was simply a reality that the team lived in.
Firing the coach that dragged them out of that hole after a slow start to the year, especially after he just signed an extension, is a painful sign that the franchise could rapidly be slipping back into their dysfunctional ways.
Brown was the Coach of the Year in 2023, has been regarded as one of the best coaches in the league, and now, he’s out as the coach of the Kings. Obviously, the Kings' five-game losing streak has been ugly, and changes needed to happen. But was this the answer?
No matter how hard they try, the Kings can’t get out of their own way. Sacramento continues to be the biggest joke in the league.