The Sacramento Kings fired a good coach.
Mike Brown stepped into the heading coaching position for the league's most moribund franchise and immediately led them to the playoffs, snapping a 20-year drought. He followed that up with another winning season. He balanced relationship with competitive fire and was thought of inside and outside of the organization as an excellent coach. Yet the Kings fired him.
The Cleveland Cavaliers did something similar this past summer. J.B. Bickerstaff led the Cavaliers to the playoffs for two consecutive seasons, winning a round this past year. His fostering of the team's culture built a camaraderie that has sustained through to this year, and his emphases on defense and hustle built a defense among the league's best.
Yet the Cavaliers fired him.
For Cleveland, it was clear that they needed a new voice. J.B. Bickerstaff built nothing into something, but he wasn't the right person to take them to the next level. That may speak in part to his specific strengths and weaknesses as a coach, but they also speak to the need sometimes for a new voice to step in and breathe life into a message that may be getting stale.
Enter Kenny Atkinson, most recently an assistant under Steve Kerr for the Golden State Warriors -- serving alongside Mike Brown for a season before Brown took the Sacramento job. Atkinson has been a tremendous addition for the Cavaliers, making small but impactful changes to the offense, the rotations and how rising star Evan Mobley is deployed.
The results speak for themselves: a 15-0 start, 35-6 at the halfway point of the season, and a strong first-place spot in the Eastern Conference. The Cavaliers needed a new voice, and the one they got has sparked a run of excellence from the team.
Back to Sacramento, who may have found that exact same spark after firing their coach.
The Kings' Doug Christie is like Kenny Atkinson
Enter Doug Christie, an assistant coach with the Sacramento Kings who was elevated to interim head coach after Mike Brown was fired. This season was not going well for the Kings, who were abysmal in clutch situations despite have three of the league's best clutch scorers in De'Aaron Fox, DeMar DeRozan and Malik Monk.
The Kings went 0-5 in a late-December homestand, including three clutch losses, and that was it for Brown. While the manner of his firing was somewhat classless, the decision to bring a new voice into the locker room yielded instant results.
After losing his first game as interim head coach, Christie has led the Kings on a tear through the schedule. The former player has clearly connected to his team, and his messag eis getting through in a way that Brown's was not.
The result? Seven straight wins and 10 of 11 victories, including a 6-0 record in clutch games. Some of that is probably chalked up to luck in a small sample -- Christie is not a perfect clutch-time coach and Brown a disastrous one -- but something has changed about the effort level of the team now that Christie is running practices and calling plays.
DeMar DeRozan seems energized, the rotation is clicking together, and Domantas Sabonis is thriving in his role -- maximized under Doug Christie as Evan Mobley is under Kenny Atkinson. There is no need to argue over whether Christie or Mike Brown are better coaches in a vacuum; for this team, right now, a change needed to be made, and Christie has been a better coach there than Brown was able to be.
That's a realization that they made to their credit, and it has resurrected the Kings' season and put them back into playoff contention. Sacramento is now 23-22, which is 10th in the Western Conference and just three games out of fifth. Christie has them positioned to make it back to the playoffs if they can continue their excellent play of the past month.
Christie isn't working with the same pieces as Atkinson, so while the Cavaliers have a title contender on their hands, Christie's bump can only mean so much. Yet the impact he has had looks a lot like the impact Kenny Atkinson has had -- sometimes a team needs a new voice. Find the right one, and you can unlock excellence.