How Kings beat Warriors in Play-In Tournament: Steph Curry and company headed home

Three of the four games between the Golden State Warriors and Sacramento Kings took place before December, either prior to or during Draymond Green’s indefinite suspension and preceding Steve Kerr’s rotational overhaul. In the fourth meeting in late January, Kevin Huerter and Malik Monk, currently injured for the Kings, combined for 52 minutes.

While there remains a level of familiarity and friendly contempt between the organizations and nearby cities, there have actually been subtle shifts within both teams that will have a tangible impact on the mechanics of the matchup. Here’s a preview of Tuesday’s No. 9 versus No. 10 elimination game, tipping at 7 p.m. Pacific Time in Sacramento.

Kings coach Mike Brown pregame: "We cannot play against their set defense every possession. We have to play fast after makes. We have to play fast after misses."

During the Kings’ infamous 16-season playoff drought, this is where they finished out of 30 teams in defensive rating: 27, 30, 19, 21, 27, 26, 22, 27, 23, 29, 29, 20, 23, 30, 25, 22. That trend didn’t change in Mike Brown’s first year as coach. Last season, they finished first in offensive rating but 24th in defense, ending the playoff drought by outscoring everyone.

The Kings took a slight step back this season — six seeds worse but only two fewer wins — because their offense suffered a sizable dip. Kevin Huerter slumped. Keegan Murray’s 3-point percentage dropped from 41 to 36. They had worse injury luck. Sasha Vezenkov, a touted offseason signing, hasn’t worked. Brown, in an effort to defend better, prioritized length and activity over shooting with some lineup choices.

It did translate well on the defensive end. They actually finished 14th in defensive rating, per NBA.com, the first time in 18 seasons that they’ve been in the top half of the NBA.

Out of necessity, it’s actually been even better lately. Without Huerter and Malik Monk, the Kings are starting second-year guard Keon Ellis and playing Davion Mitchell more. Ellis is a long, instinctual perimeter ballhawk, piling up deflections. Mitchell is a bulldog on the ball. De'Aaron Fox just had his best defensive season. Murray bulked up and took a defensive leap on the wing. The Kings actually have the eighth-best defensive rating in the NBA their last 15 games: 108.8. They are third in defensive rating since March 1.

Continue reading.

In March, when Memphis Grizzlies guard Desmond Bane chopped down on Kevin Huerter’s arm, tearing Huerter’s labrum and effectively ending his season, Sacramento Kings coach Mike Brown promoted Keon Ellis to the starting lineup and later announced a plan to keep Ellis in that spot for the remainder of the season.

Eleven days later, when Luka Dončić toppled over after a drive and fell onto Malik Monk’s right knee, spraining his MCL, the Kings were in sudden need of an extra guard to close games. Ellis delivered the first opportunity, finding himself on the floor in the consequential moments of a massive game against the Dallas Mavericks.

It’s a rapid ascent that might catch the casual observer by surprise. Ellis went undrafted out of Alabama in 2022 and spent his first 20 professional months on a two-way contract before the Kings elevated him to the roster in February. Ellis is still relatively unknown but is quickly becoming a large part of the Kings’ present picture while making a case to become a core piece of their future.

This doesn’t come as a shock to Ellis. It’s consistent with his pre-NBA basketball path, Ellis explained to The Athletic this week. He didn’t get high-profile Division I interest out of high school, opting for the juco route. He spent two seasons at Florida SouthWestern, exploding his second year to earn an offer from Alabama.

“I go to Alabama, and it starts back over,” Ellis said. “First year, I had to feel things out, figure out what I had to do to get on the court. That’s where I found the defensive side of myself.”

Continue reading.

SAN FRANCISCO — The Golden State Warriors find themselves as the butt of the Western Conference Play-In Tournament, needing two wins to make the actual playoffs. A loss this week pushes them closer to the inevitable end of their era.

That's the anticlimactic conclusion to 82 games: the No. 10 seed. And their latest spin is they play well with their backs against the wall.

It's true. The best players on this team have been through epic postseason triumphs, responding to several of the brinks to which they were pushed. Stephen Curry, Draymond Green, Klay Thompson, Chris Paul, Andrew Wiggins, Kevon Looney — they have earned credibility in this situation.

Yet, after 82 games, it's also clear the must-win boost is but the lone remaining hope to salvage this season. Though it's built on their history of meeting moments, it's also the last remaining juice with which to baste this jive turkey of a season.

This is where they are now.

"It just feels like we need to go win," Green said Sunday after watching the Warriors beat the Utah Jazz, 123-116, in a black sweatsuit and green cement Jordan 3s. "But it's exciting. You know, it's do or die. Probably feels more NCAA Tournament-ish. Kind of give you that feel. … We've just got to go win."

Legacies built in June don't feel right in March Madness.

It's hard to find confidence they can pull this off, yet their doing so would make perfect sense. Welcome to the betwixt that is the Warriors.

Read the rest of my story here.

The Warriors and Kings both held a shootaround in Sacramento this morning. It was the Warriors' first shootaround in at least a month. They've had very few this season.

On the Kings side, the most relevant bit of information came from a player who is out tonight. Malik Monk spoke for the first time since his MCL injury, wearing a leg sleeve as he strode up. He said he hasn't yet advanced to on-court work and couldn't determine whether a return during the first round of the playoffs (if the Kings make it) is a realistic goal.

“I can’t tell you because I haven’t ran yet," Monk said. "Once I do, I could give you an answer.”

On the Warriors side, their expected starting lineup became clear: Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Andrew Wiggins, Draymond Green, Trayce Jackson-Davis. In last year's first round, Kevon Looney averaged 30.1 minutes per game and had three nights of 20-plus rebounds. But he admitted that he is only scripted to play in small bursts against the Kings. Jackson-Davis, the rookie, will get the first shift on Domantas Sabonis and the Warriors will deploy Draymond Green at center plenty, next to Jonathan Kuminga.

SACRAMENTO — The boos that filled the sold-out Golden 1 Center came with eight minutes left in the fourth quarter.

The lowly San Antonio Spurs — the Victor Wembanyama-less Spurs, no less — led by eight against this Jekyll-and-Hyde Sacramento Kings team that is as confounding as any in all the NBA this season. They had looked so dominant in Los Angeles the night before, impressing the masses in a nationally televised win against LeBron James and his Lakers while making headway in the jam-packed Western Conference playoff race. And then, as had occurred so many times before in the past five months when the fan base's frustration has been on a steady rise, the letdown was happening again. So the locals unleashed all those decibels of dissatisfaction.

But Malik Monk wasn't happy about it.

By the time he had a chance to speak his piece after the Kings’ 131-129 win, to tell the Kings loyalists how they'd sounded so disloyal when the game was in the balance, the 26-year-old guard who helped stave off the upset didn't hold back.

"They were booing a little bit; I didn't like that," Monk, standing at center court and featured on the arena’s Jumbotron, said during the postgame beam-lighting interview that isn't typically so tense. "So I had to do something about it. I don't like that s—."

Behold the awkward vibes that have defined this bizarre Kings season.

If you didn’t know any better on some nights, you’d think this group that was roundly celebrated as the NBA’s Cinderella team last season was well on its way toward a 17th postseason absence in the past 18 years. All those joyful memories that surrounded their 2022-23 campaign, when De'Aaron Fox and Sabonis were named All-Stars en route to the franchise’s first postseason berth since 2006, come and go like the Sacramento River tide these days. And the inconsistency, as evidenced in the win over the Spurs in which the Kings only survived because of a Monk-led flurry in the final minute, is the primary root of all this unrest.

Read the rest of my story from March 8.

The NBA Board of Governors has discussed a proposal that the round to which a team advances in the NBA Cup would be used as the first postseason tiebreaker, league sources said. The league is polling general managers on NBA Cup advancement versus head-to-head results as the first tiebreaker to bring for a final vote.

The growth of Jonathan Kuminga is paramount to the Warriors franchise. And Tuesday night will be a blatant picture of just how much he's grown.

Kuminga was not part of the Warriors rotation in last season's first-round series against the Kings. By the end of the seven-game series, Kuminga totaled 36 minutes and 13 shots. In three of the games, he did not play. The only time he reached double digits in minutes was in the Warriors' Game 3 victory, when Draymond Green was suspended for stomping on Domantas Sabonis' chest.

Before that game, Kuminga was a staple in the Warriors' rotation. After a right foot sprain cost him eight games in January 2023, Kuminga returned to a lineup sans Steph Curry, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson. He started and played just shy of 27 minutes in one of the most surprising victories of last season: a road win at Cleveland without their best players. From that game on, save for a three-game absence in March, Kuminga was a fixture in the Warriors lineup. He averaged 22.9 minutes over his last 34 games and 8.8 field goal attempts. He even started 12 of those games.

But something about the matchup with the Kings did not make coach Steve Kerr comfortable playing Kuminga. (The something was his lack of rebounding, his propensity for rotational mistakes on defense and his lack of shooting.)

Now, in a game the Warriors must win to keep their season alive, they again match up with the Kings. Even more than last year, Kuminga is a staple in the Warriors rotation.

Over his final 43 games of the regular season, Kuminga averaged 29.6 minutes. He averaged 18.6 points on just over 13 shots per game, becoming a key ingredient to the Warriors' offense with his drives and cutting. He's played fewer than 20 minutes just twice since the turn of the calendar, and both of those times were around 19 minutes.

The Warriors’ season turned when Kuminga was paired with Andrew Wiggins in the starting lineup next to Green. The Warriors were better able to compete with athletic teams, and their respective downhill styles added variety to the Warriors' attack. But Golden State has shifted since. Wiggins, who struggled mightily to start the season and took some time away for personal reasons, has emerged as the premier wing on the team. Rookie big man Trayce Jackson-Davis has become a game-changer for the Warriors because of his vertical spacing and rim protection. Now he is the starter next to Green and Wiggins, and Kuminga is again coming off the bench.

What does this mean for Kuminga? We’ll see. This has been a year of progress for him. He solidified himself as a staple of the team's future, and his scoring average (16.1) was third-highest on the team, behind Steph Curry (26.4) and Klay Thompson (17.9). So it stands to reason Kuminga will be in the rotation against the Kings this time around and is vital to the outcome.

The next step for Kuminga, if he's central to the Warriors’ future plans, is getting him real playoff experience. And since this might be the only game, it figures he has to play significant minutes Tuesday.

If he doesn't – if, a year later, he still can't crack a postseason rotation — it will paint the strides he's made this season in at least a slightly different light.

Tuesday is a repeat of the seven-game 2023 first-round series that saw the Warriors prevail behind Steph Curry’s 50-point eruption in Game 7, this time the Greater Suisun Bay derby is a single-elimination affair. The Kings’ depth is threadbare after injuries to Kevin Huerter and Malik Monk, while after a rough start, the Warriors closed the year on a 26-12 heater and have been solid when Curry and Draymond Green take the floor together all season (+4.8 points per 100 possessions).

It would be cathartic for the Kings to knock out the Warriors after what happened last year and light that glorious beam, and Green’s antics are a wild card in a one-game situation. That said, only a fool bets against Curry in a situation like this, especially with the Kings’ injuries. The Warriors aren’t what they were, but they have at least one more battle in them.

Pick: Warriors

Odds for tonight's game, via BetMGM:

Spread: Warriors -2.5

Moneyline: Warriors -140, Kings +115

Total: 223.5