Why do I keep watching the endings of Sacramento Kings games? Maybe for the same reason that people slow down when they’re driving by the wreckage left by a car crash. Sometimes things are just so terrible, you can’t look away. Unfortunately, neither can Sacramento Kings Coach Mike Brown nor Phoenix Suns Coach Frank Vogel. Both coaches have had the unenviable bad fortune of having to stand there and watch their teams consistently crumple over in the 4th quarter like a couple of empty potato sacks.
On Monday, March 4th, the Sacramento Kings choked away a 22-point lead to fall to the Chicago Bulls, aided by an 18-point 4th-quarter performance. Just a few days later, they almost let the same thing happen against the San Antonio Spurs, a team with a 13-52 record that was missing rookie sensation Victor Wembanyama.
I can’t speak for the Suns, but I know a lot of Kings’ fans are starting to lose faith in the Kings’ coaching staff, helmed by a man who was the unanimous coach of the year just a season ago. But is it really the coaching that’s to blame?
Team Success
Okay, neither the Sacramento Kings nor the Phoenix Suns are bad this season. With just about 20 games left in the season, the Kings are 7th in the West and the Suns are 6th. And though they finished 3rd and 4th in the West last season, both teams are boasting win percentages that are not far off from where they finished last year. The Kings are down slightly from .585 to .581, while the Suns are actually up a bit from .549 to .587.
So what’s the problem? Well, the Suns have fallen well short of expectations so far this season. After adding Kevin Durant at last year’s trade deadline and inking Bradley Beal this past summer, the team seemed poised for greatness—on paper, at least. It was hard not to look at them as major contender, with many pegging them as the favorite to come out of the West this season. Expectations for the Kings, meanwhile, were clearly not as high. Still, the hope was that they could take that next step by making at least some progress on the defensive end. That hope, too, has basically failed to materialize.
The 4th Quarter Stats
Both teams are crippling themselves with their 4th quarter performances. The Phoenix Suns are dead last in the league, with a 4th quarter margin of -3.2. I cannot emphasize the dead last part enough. There is only one other team in the league right now with a 4th quarter margin lower than -1.0! Compared to this, the -0.6 margin of the Sacramento Kings might not seem like much…until you realize that the Kings are dead last in 4th quarter margin over their last 3 games at -7.7! Not exactly trending in the right direction at a critical time in the season.
On the bright side, the Kings’ -0.6 margin puts them at #23 in the league. Which is about as auspicious a basketball number as you can find.
The 4th Quarter Problem: Who’s To Blame?
It’s tough to blame the players for their teams’ performances this year—at least not the top-tier players. The Phoenix Suns failed to live up to their pre-season hype partly because they were battling injuries in the first half of the season that kept sidelining one or more of Bradley Beal, Devin Booker, and Kevin Durant. The Sacramento Kings, meanwhile, have made virtually no major roster changes since the Summer of 2022, when they dropped the bombshell deal that swapped Tyrese Haliburton for Domantas Sabonis. I’m not saying they should have (or even could have) done more since then. The point is that there wasn’t much reason to expect them to make a huge leap forward this year.
Jumping back into the stats, out of the top-7 scorers in the league right now, these two teams claim three of them: Kevin Durant (#4 with 28.0 points), Devin Booker (#6 with 27.5 points), and De’Aaron Fox (#7 with 27.2 points). Domantas Sabonis has had an iron grip on the rebound throne this year, leading the league with 13.5 per game. Oh yeah, and he’s leading the league in double-doubles and triple-doubles, sitting at a sneakily impressive #5 spot amongst the league’s assist leaders. He’s trailing only Tyrese Haliburton, Trae Young, Luka Doncic, and Nikola Jokic. There are other bright spots on both sides, but just to cap things off: Devin Booker is 11th in assists, Jusuf Nurkic is 7th in rebounds, and De’Aaron Fox is once again leading the league in 4th-quarter points.
Wait, the 4th quarter. Right. That’s what this is all about. So, let’s see. De’Aaron is 1st with 8.1 4th-quarter points and KD is 6th with 7.5. But…that’s basically where the magic ends. After that, you have to go pretty far down the lists of individual stats to see players on either team. Add to that a Swiss-cheese-grade defensive performance for each squad and you have a pair of 4th-quarter turd sandwiches.
Rightly or wrongly, when the star players perform well and the team doesn’t, it’s inevitable who the fingers of blame get pointed at. The head coaches.
Suns Coach Frank Vogel
To the extent that either team’s coach is in the hot seat, Frank Vogel is definitely in the hotter seat. Quite simply, he’s coaching a win-now team. Mike Brown is not. He’s also facing some of the same issues that led—again, fairly or not—to the end of his tenure with the Los Angeles Lakers. The Lakers, too, were a win-now team. They, too, had undergone some seismic roster shifts to make room for a big-3 (LeBron James, Anthony Davis, Russell Westbrook) that was supposed to put them over the edge and bring them back to the NBA Finals. And they, too, got bit by the injury bug. Despite Jeanie Buss initially defending Vogel, the organization did pull the plug on him at the end of the 2021-22 NBA season after missing the postseason.
That Lakers roster was not Vogel’s fault. Nor were the injuries. He can’t be blamed for either factor this season with the Suns. But that doesn’t mean he’s blameless or that his job is safe. Even without Bradley Beal, and even with a lackluster degree of roster depth, a Suns team with a closing lineup that includes both Devin Booker and Kevin Durant should probably be performing better in the 4th-quarter than they have this season. Once again, the question is, could Frank Vogel be doing more to maximize this talented Phoenix Suns roster.
Kings Coach Mike Brown
If there’s one thing Sacramento Kings coach Mike Brown has been demonstrably bad at this season, it’s his management of the whistle. Most recently, he failed to deploy his final timeout at the end of the still-winnable Bulls game when De’Aaron Fox was clearly struggling to inbound the ball safely.
But that’s just one example. This team has a bad habit of going on icy cold stretches where they hemorrhage points. The 4th-quarter is where this hurts them most, but we’ve seen plenty of leads blown in the 3rd quarter as well. It’s not Mike Brown’s fault when the players can’t get their shots to fall. However, many coaches would call a timeout before things get too out-of-hand. The Kings’ coach, meanwhile, tends to let things ride out for an uncomfortable length of time. There’s something to be said about training your guys to have to figure things out on their own. But it’s tough to watch opponents impose 20-point swings before Mike Brown finally bails his team out.
Lesser in importance but still somewhat troubling is Mike Brown’s use of the coach’s challenge. His record on winning challenges has been pretty brutal. On its own, that’s not super concerning. But there’s been too many instances of him twirling his finger on calls that presented little more than a snowball’s chance in hell of being overturned, coming down the stretch of tight games where preserving a timeout would’ve been far more advantageous.
Other Factors
Basketball is a team sport. It’s very rare for one individual to be solely (or even mostly) responsible for a team’s struggles. I definitely don’t think you can blame individual players on either the Suns or the Kings for their 4th-quarter woes. The coaching is a little more concerning, but still probably not the whole story.
Phoenix Suns Management
Honestly, I might be one of the only people for whom the Phoenix Suns have actually exceeded expectations this season. During the 2023 offseason alone, they lost 11 players and gained 12 new ones. Anytime there’s a shakeup of that magnitude, I expect a significant amount of growing pains. Irrespective of the team’s early-season injury problems, I did not expect them to get off to a smooth start.
Then you start looking at the actual players that got moved. I wasn’t convinced that the scoring potential of an aging Bradley Beal would make up for all the intangibles that Chris Paul offers on and off the court. Certainly I wasn’t convinced that Yusuf Nurkic would be an upgrade for Deandre Ayton. I thought the importance of losing bench players like Cameron Payne and Torrey Craig, who were important for the Suns in their 2021 NBA finals run, was getting overlooked. Grayson Allen was a bit of a question mark to me. On the whole, I just didn’t think this team had gotten much better in the offseason.
To some extent, they proved me wrong. For the most part, Nurkic and Allen have been great fits. The starting lineup is solid. But I still question the depth of the Phoenix Suns, as I’m sure many do. Was all the wheeling and dealing wise on the part of the Suns’ front office? We’ll see how it shakes out in the playoffs.
Sacramento Kings Coaching Staff
Even if you want to blame the Kings coaching for the lion’s share of their 4th-quarter struggles—along with other issues like their trash defense—you can’t just blame Mike Brown. Take something as simple as the coach’s challenge calls. Mike Brown delivers the final judgment, but he’s relying on his staff to recommend whether he should challenge or not. And he’s relying on them for plenty of other more important contributions as well: drawing up plays, talking to guys on the bench, working with them off the court. The team’s free throw shooting percentage is abysmal this season: dead last at 73.3%. Somebody other than just De’Aaron Fox has to answer for that.
In much the same way that the Phoenix Suns lack roster depth, the Sacramento Kings may be a bit lacking in coaching depth. Look, I don’t know much about coaching in the NBA. I don’t know how to evaluate coaching performance as a spectator. I’m skeptical of anyone who says they do. But just consider the names on the Sacramento Kings coaching staff: Jordi Fernández, Jay Triano, Doug Christie, Luke Loucks, Leandro Barbosa, Dutch Gaitley, Deividas Dulkys, Jawad Williams. Recognize anyone on that list? Maybe Doug Christie, but he’s very new to coaching. I don’t want to diminish these guys’ contributions, their value, or their achievements. Players speak highly of many of them. But they’re just not as battle-tested as some of the other coaching staffs around the league. And Mike Brown can’t do everything himself.
Fatigue
Let’s be honest. It can’t be easy on the lungs or the legs to play an NBA game, let alone 82 of them. Fatigue is real. On the Suns’ side, it’s not something that gets easier with age. Devin Booker is still a frighteningly young early prime 27-years-old. But Bradley Beal is 30 and Kevin Durant is 35. All three have had to bear heavy loads during the course of their careers. On the Kings’ side, they’re possibly experiencing the opposite problem. Fox just made the playoffs for the first time last season. It was a short-lived run, sure. But it’s still a bit of extra mileage added on to a guy who had never experienced it. And he’s not the only one on the roster for whom that’s true.
Both teams also lean quite heavily on their top-tier talent. Quite simply, the Phoenix Suns are nothing without at least one of Booker, Beal, and Durant. And there’s been many cases this season where only one or two have been healthy enough to play. This forces them individually to carry even more of the team’s load. The Sacramento Kings don’t work without Fox or Sabonis. Plus, both play gritty close-to-the-basket games that take a toll on the body.
Then there’s the mental fatigue. The mid-season malaise. Mounting frustrations over all the things that haven’t gone right this season. The Phoenix Suns don’t have Chris Paul anymore. Neither team has a Draymond Green or a Patrick Beverly. Are both teams missing that vocal leader that keeps everyone locked in when it matters most?
We’re entering the 4th quarter of the season. Can these teams fare better at closing out the season than they do closing out games?
