The Sacramento Kings needed a win against the 28-40 Chicago Bulls because their schedule doesn’t get any easier.
Things were looking great for Sacramento in the first quarter after hitting 11 three pointers and gaining a 19-point lead in the second. Unfortunately, they began to abandon the successful offence and started giving up paint touches to their dribble-penetrating guards.
After the Kings went up by 19 in the second, they started blowing the lead and ended up losing to Chicago 128-116, with the Kings giving up an 88-57 scoring run. This loss also spoiled DeMar DeRozan’s achievement of hitting the 25,000-point mark in his career.
Sacramento was worse than Chicago in points given up in the paint, fast break points, assists, rebounds, and shooting percentage, which was truly telling of how poorly Sacramento performed.
Follows the same pattern as last night against Cleveland, Sacramento allowed 60 points in the paint versus 48, and allowed the opposing team to shoot over 52%, which is simply unacceptable.
Sacramento got trounced last night because they lost both the three-pointers and fast-break points.
With Coby White and Tre Jones able to freely attack the basket, Sacramento’s poor rotations gave Kevin Huerter and Nikola Vucevic open looks from 3 when the two guards weren’t scoring themselves.
Coby White seems to always play well against the Kings and he topped the scoring charts once again with 35 points. Huerter, who is a former Beam Team member, outscored Huerter for the game, but finished with 25 points on 5-9 shooting from deep which looks like he saved this game for the gameplan. Vucevic and Tre Jones also had solid performances which added to their team’s success against Sacramento.
Starting the game strong for Sacramento, Monk lit the floor on fire making 5 out of his first 6 threes, but didn’t score again until the 3rd quarter and didn’t take his first shot of the second half until 1:26 left in the third quarter.
After missing the game last night for personal reasons, Lavine returned but looked completely lost. With two made shots, he finished the game with 8 points total.
Malik Monk and DeMar DeRozan have accepted some of the blame for Lavine’s bad game; however, the tension rests on the starting five as they aren’t setting the tone right.
They are still not setting the tone to start halves or quarters. This, yet again, forced them to rely on the bench to give them a boost. Sacramentos defense relaxed as Monk described in the quote below after they opened up a massive lead that should have put the game away, allowing them to never get back in the game.
Despite his lack of offensive production, Devin Carter was impactful as Sacramento’s only player with a positive plus/minus for the evening.
In the next five nights, the Kings play the Bucks, Thunder, and Celtics all at home. If they want to have even the slightest chance against three of the best teams in the league, then they will need to step up their game and perform way better than they did out there tonight.
