The last time Mike Brown won the Coach of the Year Award was when he guided a then LeBron James-led Cleveland Cavaliers to a 66-16 record in the 2008-2009 season.
Upon his arrival in 2005, Brown helped guide the Cavs to their first playoff appearance since 1998. The Cavs missed out on the postseason during LeBron’s first two years in Cleveland. But in 2007, the Cavs reached the NBA Finals before being overwhelmed by the San Antonio Spurs.
In the years that followed, Brown guided the Cavs to consecutive playoff appearances and multiple 60+ wins seasons. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get the team over the hump and land the franchise an elusive NBA title.
Regardless of his ring-less stint with Cleveland, Mike Brown helped LeBron James return the Cavs to relevance in NBA circles, and is doing the same for another club out west in 2022-23.
Doing It Again in Sacramento
The Sacramento Kings finished the 2021-2022 season with a 30-52 record, four games shy of the final spot in the play-in tournament. Fast forward to the home stretch of the 2022-2023 seasons, and the Kings are not only looking at a postseason berth, but also home court advantage in the 1st round. More importantly, Sacramento looks poised to break their playoff drought which stretches all the way back to 2007.
With 67 games completed in their schedule, the Kings sit in third place in the Western Conference with a 40-27 record. The Kings are 1 game back of the two seed, and have won eight of their past ten contests. Sacramento owns the best offense in the association this season at 121.2 points per game on 50% field goal shooting.
While the Kings’ transformation has been largely credited to De’Aaron Fox and Domantas Sabonis, some of that praise should also go to first-year head coach, Mike Brown.
In his first interview as Kings coach back in June, Brown said he saw the seeds of something special on the West Coast. “The potential here, I truly believe the potential is off the charts,”. While the veteran coach was confident, few could have predicted just how much the club’s on court play would improve this season.
The Fox-Sabonis tandem turned out to be of the most efficient duos in the NBA. Fox is having arguably the best season of his career. Across 60 contests, Fox is averaging 25.5 points, 6.3 assists, 4.3 rebounds, 1.2 steals, and shooting 51.3% from the field. He’s also managed to cut down on the turnovers sitting at 2.7 per game after a career worst 3.1 turnovers per contest back in 2019-20.
Under Coach Mike Brown, Domantas Sabonis, who earned a reserve spot in the 2022 NBA All-Star Game, is averaging 19 points, a league-leading 12.4 rebounds, 7.1 assists, and shooting a blistering 61% from the field. He also became the Kings’ first All-Star since DeMarcus Cousins in 2016.
More than the numbers though, the Fox-Sabonis duo has shown maturity to their games as they’ve emerged as on court leaders for the upstart Kings this year.
While the other obvious candidate for this year’s Coach of the Year award, Joe Mazzulla of the Boston Celtics, is leading the Celtics to a potential top-two finish in the Eastern Conference, Boston has been tagged as a title contender since day 1. Meanwhile few dared to even speak about a postseason appearance for Sacramento prior to season, let alone as a top 3 seed in the West.
Sacramento owns one of the most prolonged playoff droughts in league history (16 straight seasons). Now, they are 15 games away from snapping the streak of futility, and possibly winning their first Pacific Division championship since the 2022-2023 season.
And for his efforts, Mike Brown might just become the Kings’ first Coach of the Year award winner since 1979.
-Iggy Gonzales
Photo: Keith Allison. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.