NBA: Dubs rolling, Walton out in Sacramento.
The Warriors are 15-2, while the Kings parted ways with head coach Luke Walton after losing seven of their last eight games.
This column is mostly going to focus on the Kings, but first things first.
The Warriors are cruising.
Golden State has the best record in the NBA, and they’ve been able to fend off the surging Phoenix Suns thanks to game after game of team-wide effort. That’s because their average point differential is +13.1, almost six points higher than the next best team (Miami, at +7.4). The Warriors have been consistent on both sides of the ball, putting up the most points per game and allowing the fewest in the league.
And even though superstar Steph Curry missed Friday’s matchup against Detroit and was held to just 12 points on 2-10 shooting Sunday against Toronto, Golden State won those games by a combined 18 points. Even though Curry couldn’t get his shots to fall, the Dubs shot 48.4% overall and a remarkable 45.3% from deep while limiting the Pistons and Raptors to 39.7% from the floor. What’s even more impressive is that even though they gave up 18 offensive rebounds to Toronto, they were incredibly efficient on offense, matching the Raptors’ 39 field goals on 20 fewer attempts.
While it has been a team effort all year, the games against Detroit and Toronto required serious offensive contributions from guys not named Wardell Curry.
Jordan Poole has arrived.
With Steph out of the lineup against the Pistons, Poole made a career-high 13 field goals on 59% shooting including 4-8 from deep. He led the Dubs with 32 points, plus 7 rebounds and 2 assists and finished +18 in his season-high 37 minutes.
Then he one-upped himself on Sunday against the Raptors, putting up 33 points, 4 rebounds, and 4 assists. As The Athletic’s Anthony Slater pointed out, Poole showed a new degree of poise and patience in the win against Toronto, which helped him make a personal best 8 threes on just 11 attempts (that’s 72.7%) and finished 10 of 13 overall.
Poole entered the season with just one career 30-point game, and has since done so three times in just the first month of play. Overall, he’s showing lots of signs that he can still be a valuable piece, even when Klay Thompson returns.
Andrew Wiggins is also here. For real.
Even though his total attempts are down, Wiggins is knocking his shots down at a career-best 49.4% clip. While his three-point shooting has dipped a little to 36.4% after a career year from deep last season, his aggressiveness inside the arc and his ability to fit into the flow of the offense have made that a non-issue.
The personal best 18.0 PER that he’s logged so far this season is backed up by how many other career highs he’s set this year (mostly by breaking previous personal-bests he set last season):
49.4% FG (previous best was 47.7% last year)
56.7% 2P FG (previous best was 52.9% last year)
73.8% on 2P within 3 ft of the basket (previous best was 70.6% last year)
46.2% on 2P from 16 ft to the 3P line (previous second-best was 38% last year)
59.4% TS (previous best was 56.8% last year)
36.4% of his 3PA have been in the corner (previous high was 24.7% last year)
93.8% of his 3P and 60.7% of his 2P have come off of assists (82.9% 3P and 47.9% 2P last year)
Also, in a turn that is both fun for fans and good for the team, a career-high 11% of Wiggins’ attempted field goals have been dunks, and he’s completed 22 of his 27 attempts.
Wiggins has been just as important as basically everyone but Steph (and maybe Draymond Green), especially since dropping 35 points on 14 of 19 shooting against the Timberwolves, his old team.
Prior to the Minnesota game, Wiggins was averaging 15.6 points, 4.3 rebounds, and 1.6 assists on 43.5% shooting overall and 33.3% from deep.
In the six games since then, he’s averaging around the same number of rebounds and assists but he’s putting up 22.2 points per game on 52.6% shooting overall and 38.7% from deep.
In the two games against Detroit and Toronto, Wigs put up a combined 59 points, 11 rebounds, 4 assists, 2 steals, and 2 blocks on 53.8% shooting overall and an astounding 58.3% from beyond the arc. It would be ridiculous to expect him to keep knocking his shots down at quite that rate, but his willingness to drive and get to his spots has made him look like an even better fit with the Warriors than he already did.
Golden State probably wont want to give him another $30-plus-million-per-year contract after his current one expires in 2023, but if he keeps playing with the fire we’ve seen of late they will have a hard time justifying letting him walk.
Meanwhile, the Kings are… not so hot.
And neither are some of their fans…
Per Sam Amick of The Athletic (and formerly of the Sacramento Bee), the Kings have dismissed head coach Luke Walton after a 6-11 start to the season including losses in seven of their last eight games.
If things don’t turn around soon, Sacramento is going to find itself firmly outside of the playoff picture. That’s pretty rough for a team that hasn’t finished above .500 or made the playoffs since they were eliminated in the first round in 2006.
The best hope for the Kings to even make it into the play-in in the West is to unseat the hot-and-cold Timberwolves, who had lost eight of nine before beginning a three-game win streak against the Kings, Spurs, and Grizzlies.
Sacramento has a worse record than the rebuilding Thunder, who are paying their current roster $50.8 million—which is what the Kings are paying just De’Aaron Fox and Buddy Hield alone. Sacramento has six players on their roster making as much or more than the largest OKC contract, which is a pretty strong indicator that general manager Monte McNair was not going to sit around and just hope things got better.
This isn’t the worst Kings team of the current playoff drought era—that honor belongs to the 17-56 team from the ‘08-09 season—but the current franchise doesn’t seem to know where it’s going. Still.
Here are the two key problems facing the Kings, as far as I can tell. Honestly, I’m not sure which is more important, since they both have Sacramento’s front office and coaching staff in two different tough situations.
The Bagley Blunder
One of the worst recent fumbles for the Kings came in 2018 when they drafted Marvin Bagley III with the second pick, something I wrote about in Saturday’s column on Kevin Love trade possibilities. Kings fans know all about this disaster, so I wont get into it too much here.
Simply put, when you could have had Luka Dončić and instead you end up paying $10+ million a year to a guy who has only appeared in four games this season, things aren’t going too well.
If Sacramento could swap Bagley for someone better than veteran role player Mo Harkless, who has been the Kings’ starting power forward so far, their roster could have Harkless as a great backup forward and Bagley’s replacement as their starter.
But that requires someone to take him off their hands. Good luck.
The Plethora of Point Guards
Even more recent than the Bagley catastrophe is the series of puzzling decisions regarding the Kings’ backcourt that began last November.
In the postponed 2020 NBA Draft, Sacramento selected point guard Tyrese Haliburton with the 12th pick. Haliburton has turned out to be a great addition—he averaged 13 points, 3 rebounds, 5.3 assists, and 1.3 steals with just 1.6 turnovers while shooting 52.9% on twos and 40.9% from deep.
Then, six days later, the Kings signed De’Aaron Fox (who was their first pick in the 2017 draft) to a five-year max extension to the tune of $163 million, which keeps him under team control until the 2026 offseason. So far, so good. Mostly.
Fox made the front office feel pretty good about their decisions last year, when he set career highs in minutes (35.1), points (25.2), field goals (9.1), two-point percentage (53.9), true shooting percentage (56.5), free throws (5.2), usage rate (31.0), PER (20.7), and offensive RAPTOR (+3.2), and had his second-best numbers for assists (7.2), steals (1.5), field goal percentage (47.7), three-point percentage (32.2), and RAPTOR WAR (3.4).
Eight months later, after finishing a disappointing 31-41 on the season and missing the playoffs yet again, things got interesting. After a great year from Haliburton and another solid year from Fox, the Kings decided to select another point guard—Davion Mitchell, a junior from the NCAA-champion Baylor Bears, who they used the 9th pick on in the 2021 draft. That means that with their last four top-15 draft picks (2017, 2018, 2020, 2021) the Kings have selected three point guards (and Marvin Bagley). Huh.
Sacramento has set themselves up to have a logjam in their backcourt.
After finishing a great rookie campaign with a negative overall RAPTOR thanks to typical rookie defense, Haliburton has a +1.7 overall rating so far this year, thanks to a three-point swing in his defensive rating from -2.5 last season to +0.5 this year. So far he’s averaging 12.9 points, 3.7 rebounds, 4.8 assists, and 1.7 steals while shooting 47% overall and 39.7% from deep, and in all 15 games he’s played he has been in the starting lineup.
Following a great ‘20-21 campaign, Fox has had a rough start to year five. He’s putting up 19.7 points per game, 3.3 rebounds, 5.8 assists, and 1.4 steals on 47.6% two-point shooting and just 24.3% on threes—all his lowest averages since at least his sophomore season, including his worst shooting, rebounding, and assisting since his rookie year. He’s taking way too many shots from 10-16 feet away (21% of his attempts) and is making just 35.9% of those tries. He’s also taking a career low number of shots within three feet of the basket, even though last year he finished a career-best 76% of his attempts in that range. Hopefully Fox will be able to round back into the form he showed off last year—if not, he may find himself stuck on the wrong end of this traffic jam.
In his first 17 games, Mitchell has averaged 25 minutes per game and has been an excellent defender despite standing just 6 feet 2 inches. His defense has been NBA-ready from day one, as we learned early on. After their game against the Warriors on October 24th, Curry praised Davion’s skills:
“Just the confidence of a guy coming in his third game in the league... you could definitely tell he has all the tools in the kit to be a defensive stopper.”
That said, he’s still gonna get cooked by the best of the best every now and then:
However, Mitchell’s offense is taking some time to round into form. Through 17 games, he’s averaging 8.9 points, 2.8 rebounds, and 3.8 assists on 45.1% two-point shooting and just 28.2% from three. His best completion rate is within three feet of the basket, where he’s connecting on 68% of his attempts, so if he can get his jumpers to fall he should be in a good position to make a real contribution to the Kings offense.
Meanwhile, the backup at the two guard positions has relegated sixth-year shooting guard Buddy Hield to a sixth-man role. That seems odd for a guy who started in almost 80% of the games he played over the previous three seasons, including 71 of 71 last year. Hield is the franchise leader in three-pointers (1,137) and has shot 40.8% from deep since arriving in Sacramento following the trade that sent All-Star center DeMarcus Cousins to the Pelicans in February of 2017. For context, Steph Curry made 1,191 threes over his first six seasons—Hield is pretty darn good at what he does, which is why he’s getting paid around $20 million each year through the ‘23-24 season. But is that sustainable if he’s going to continue playing less than 30 minutes a game off the bench?
So, the Kings need to figure out how they’re going to fit Fox, Hield, Haliburton, and Mitchell into two starting spots—veteran Harrison Barnes can technically play power forward against some smaller lineups, but normally he’s better suited to the small forward position, leaving just two slots left for starting guards. That is… a hard problem to solve.
If the Kings are willing to lean into rebuilding, they could package one or more of their older players—Hield (28), Richaun Holmes (28), and Barnes (29)—with Bagley to try to get some good young players in return who could actually line up with the timelines of Fox (23), Mitchell (23), and Haliburton (21). But after more than a decade of losing basketball, a full turn towards rebuilding would be a hard pill to swallow for the Sacramento front office and their fans.
Looking Ahead
All things considered, the Kings have had an understandably rough start to the season. They’ve had the sixth-hardest strength of schedule (1.02 per Basketball Reference) and six of their 11 losses came at the hands of the Jazz (11-5) (three times), Warriors (15-2), Mavericks (9-7), and Suns (13-3). Unfortunately, they also gave up close games to the Pacers (7-11), Thunder (6-10), and Timberwolves (7-9), and got smacked by the Spurs (4-11) and Raptors (8-10) in addition to their losses to the above .500 teams. They also have a better point differential than both the Lakers (9-9) and Grizzlies (8-8), in large part because they’ve blown games that they should have been able to close out.
Some of that is what happens with a young team. But some of it is what happens when your roster just isn’t constructed in a coherent manner.
I don’t think that interim head coach Alvin Gentry is going to be able to fix everything, but I do think that he’s a step up from what Walton brought to the table. After all, Gentry has been coaching since Walton was eight. He is in his 35th season in the league, and has made stops with eight different franchises. Aside from his time spent as an assistant or associate head coach with the Spurs, Clippers, Heat, Pistons, Suns, Warriors, and Kings, Gentry has served as a head coach five times—for the Heat, Pistons, Clippers, Suns, and Pelicans.
Warriors head coach Steve Kerr knows just how helpful he can be—Gentry was by his side as associate head coach in Kerr’s first year with Golden State when they won the 2015 championship. Per Rusty Simmons of the San Francisco Chronicle, both Kerr and Steph Curry praised Gentry’s role in on the ‘14-15 team when he returned to the Bay as the Pelicans’ head coach in 2016:
“Alvin was just huge, given that it was my first year coaching. I knew that I needed someone with head-coaching experience by my side, and on top of that, someone who could help install an offense,” Warriors head coach Steve Kerr said. “… He’s been around this game for a long time and has impacted a lot of people, a lot teams and a lot of players. He was just huge for us last year.
“He’s had an up-and-down year and dealt with a lot down there with the injuries in New Orleans and trying to build momentum,” Warriors point guard Stephen Curry said. “Because of who he is as a person and what he means to us and our accomplishments, it’s always great to see him and chop it up a little bit.”
All things considered, Sacramento can do a whole lot worse than Gentry. But in the end the success of this team may not depend on whether he can make the current set of pieces fit together, but on whether the Kings’ front office can figure out who is part of their future—and who needs to go.
The Kings host the 76ers Monday night at 7 p.m. PT.
The Warriors also play Philadelphia next, on Wednesday at 7 p.m. PT.