Mike Brown is the latest coach bitten by the NBA’s surprise season curse

Expectations are a dangerous thing.

No one knows this better than NBA coaches, and we had our latest example on Friday when the Coach of the Year curse came after Mike Brown. The Sacramento Kings fired him as head coach on Friday, a little more than two years after taking over a 30-win team that hadn’t been to the playoffs in 17 years and failing to lead them to the championship.

I’m kidding…a little. There were probably reasons for that, and the Kings front office knows more about what went on behind the scenes than you or I. As far as anyone knows, this was the front office call and not an impulsive Vivek Ranadivé special, as our Sam Amick and Anthony Slater noted on Saturday.

At 10,000 feet, there wasn’t much difference between this year’s Kings and the Kings of the last two seasons. Sacramento had a positive point margin this season (plus-1.2, not far from the plus-2.6 of 2022-23 or the plus-1.7 of 2023-24). If you factor out their bad luck in late/close games (something that’s more likely to be random in larger samples), the Kings’ underlying data wasn’t significantly different from the 48- and 46-win seasons of the previous two years.

Notably, they also ranked 16th in defense despite an apparent lack of defensive talent in the squad, and a year earlier they were 14th despite similar deficiencies. If you’re going to blame the coach, you also have to explain how a team with Domantas Sabonis at center, no backup players to speak of, and a 6-6 “power” forward managed to put together a credible NBA defense. The game in which Brown was fired he narrowly lost with Alex Len as the starter.

On the other hand, after Thursday night’s loss to Detroit, the Kings were down to 13-18, including five straight home losses. Brown’s postgame press conferences increasingly consisted of him imploring players to do the things they weren’t doing, and the underlying message to the careful ear seemed to be that his message was no longer being spread as well as it was earlier.

Therefore, reasonable people can argue about whether Kangz will be Kangor whether it’s more of a story about how the team’s response to Brown’s message isn’t being received as well by key players as it once was.

But as I suggested, there’s a bigger story here, which is the hidden danger of surprise seasons. If you’re wondering why the average tenure of a Coach of the Year award winner is barely two years, look here, because we’re talking about two highly correlated groups – with the Coach of the Year often being the one whose team it was biggest surprise.

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After the invigorating 2022-23 “Light The Beam” campaign, in which the Kings unexpectedly won 48 games and secured third place in the West, Brown may have become, in some ways, a victim of his own success. It was a perfect storm of health, performance, weakened opposition and spirit, and as such it was always going to be difficult to repeat, let alone surpass, in future seasons. That became a little more evident when a 44-win Golden State Warriors team defeated them in seven games in the first round of the playoffs.

Unfortunately, success likely pushed the Kings in a direction that placed too much emphasis on short-termism at the expense of building an overall roster. They just weren’t talented enough to think like that. I say “probably” because I don’t have the counterfactual assumption of a 35-win Kings season in 2022-23, but the roster changes speak for themselves.

To review, Sacramento traded its 2023 first-rounder to create enough room to renegotiate and extend the deal for Sabonis, rather than making a pick and using the cap space to add another player. The Sabonis deal still paid him handsomely in the years that followed (he’s making $40.5 million this year), so it felt like a Pyrrhic victory given his relatively limited flight risk. (Few contending teams have cap space, not everyone needs a center, Sabonis isn’t for everyone, etc.) The organizational “win” was fixated on Sabonis, but that thought process made a lot more sense if it was a 60-win team at all .

Mike Brown has coached Domantas Sabonis in Sacramento since 2022. (John Jones/USA Today)

Similarly, the Kings extended Harrison Barnes instead of trying to get younger or use him in a sign-and-trade, trading two second-round picks for Chris Duarte and waiving Neemias Queta to sign JaVale McGee. A critical scouting error by Sasha Vezenkov also derailed her mid-level exception.

A year later, after winning 46 games, they went one step further and traded Barnes, Duarte and draft capital for 35-year-old DeMar DeRozan. DeRozan, a player known more for stretching the floor than his team’s ceiling, hasn’t quite stayed fit in his 31 games, and his lack of size at four is an obvious problem for a team that’s struggling and lacks length and athleticism in the squad.

Look, each of these decisions was at least somewhat justifiable in a vacuum. Overall, however, they paint the picture of a franchise that is a little out of its depth. And now that same organization is probably feeling the pressure from De’Aaron Fox as he looks to his future. That and his potential free agency, as well as the prospect of a future cupboard in Sacramento that’s a bit empty.

It’s a movie we’ve seen before. Success is a damn good drug, but Surprise Success, in particular, can become a real plot twist in the team planning process.

Take Atlanta for example. The Hawks reached the 2021 Eastern Conference Finals and then mistakenly thought they were on the verge of contention for two years. In reality, they were the pinnacle of average, going 120-126 in the following three seasons and finishing ninth, eighth and 10th, respectively, with three playoff wins in those seasons. A reckless trade for Dejounte Murray and some pink extensions landed them in a cap corner that the Hawks are only now emerging from.

Examples from the Wayback Machine abound – 2013-14 Phoenix Suns, anyone? — but for more current results, let’s consider a few examples: Would the Los Angeles Lakers have attacked their roster more proactively in the summer of 2023 if their 43-win team hadn’t reached the Western Conference Finals? Would the Portland Trail Blazers have given more thought to breaking up the backcourt between Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum if they hadn’t had their own deep run in 2019? By the way, will the Indiana Pacers end up regretting their own “lock-it-down” response to their 2023 Eastern Conference Finals, which signed Obi Toppin, Andrew Nembhard, Pascal Siakam and TJ McConnell to contracts worth $350 million brought in?

We can move on. What they all have in common (well, not Indiana… at least not yet) is that they never got closer to their desired goal than in the surprise season and in the end had to fight through coaching and squad convulsions.

There’s another thread: These teams couldn’t stick to their plans when things got tough. I think that’s because it was initially a revised, improvised plan, which made it easier to move on to Plans B, C, and X and throw things at the wall.

It takes a strong organization to get through this. That’s what the Miami Heat experienced in 2017, when they miraculously turned around an 11:30 start with a 30-11 second-half score and nearly made the playoffs. Miami’s offseason was filled with bloated contracts for role players that turned their seasons around, and the result was two years of mediocrity and an arduous search for a way out. Ultimately, the Heat landed Jimmy Butler, selected Bam Adebayo and Tyler Herro, found Duncan Robinson under a rock and made it to the 2020 Finals.

And in the two disappointing seasons in between, with an overall record of 83-81, they didn’t change coaches.

“What they did there is really hard,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said when I asked him for his thoughts on Sacramento and Brown before Saturday’s Miami-Atlanta game. “When you’ve lost for 15, 20 years since Rick Adelman was there, you change the culture and make the playoffs, you stick with it. Some of our best moments were when we were losing things or struggling with things and we were all in a room and the organization basically said, “Think about it; There are no changes.’

“This league is tough. To break through and get to the other side, you must move through adversity together as an entire organization. But yeah, that sucks.”

The next question for the Kings — whether it’s Doug Christie or someone else on the sidelines — is whether they can effectively course-correct. The good news is that the basic ingredients for a half-decent team at the West play-in tournament level are already there. The bad news is that the chance of there being more in the current group is almost zero.

At least with that last sentence, we’ve hopefully reset expectations to something more reasonable.

(Top photo: Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)