Kings no longer satisfied by ‘close’ games after squandering chance vs. Warriors originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area
SAN FRANCISCO – Close but no cigar is no longer satisfactory for Kings coach Doug Christie.
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After watching Sacramento put up a good fight Friday before being tripped up by a third-quarter scoring drought and ultimately coming up short to a quicker, more talented Warriors team, Christie made it clear his frustrations have reached their limit and there is no bittersweet feel to any of it.
“It’s been a theme [of] good enough to win but also good enough to hang in and get beat,” Christie said after the Kings’ suffered a seventh consecutive loss, a 137-103 beatdown at Chase Center. “For me, that’s all bitter. There’s nothing sweet about it, man. There’s absolutely zero sweetness to that. We’re not playing the game to hang in there. We’re not playing the game to play for 45 minutes. We’re playing the game to play for 48 minutes.
“The mental toughness that it takes in that moment, we have to find that and it’s in there. You just have to go through it and find it.”
Part of the issue, according to Christie, is that the Kings aren’t doing a good enough job of separating their struggles on one end of the court from the other. Mistakes made on offense tend to bleed over to defense, and vice versa.
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“That’s the mental toughness because one thing should not affect another. I get it in life, but in sports you got to be tough enough to say, ‘You know what, that’s OK. Hey everybody, let’s get together. Let’s lock down. We just need one stop.’ And then go down, get organized and get a bucket, take a deep breath and go at it again.”
To be fair, the Kings were outplayed by the Warriors at just about every turn, yet were in position late in the third quarter to swing momentum in their favor.
Instead it was Golden State that grabbed the reins and started to pull away, going on a 15-0 run over about four minutes to change the game from close to blowout status.
“The first half we felt really good,” Kings guard Zach LaVine said. “It was a two-minute, three-minute stretch in the third quarter … and we didn’t get anything going. That was the ballgame. We didn’t recover.”
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Like his coach, LaVine isn’t content with what the Kings are putting out.
“You don’t get points for keeping things close in this league,” LaVine said. “You’re supposed to keep it competitive and when you get it down the stretch you figure out how to win.
“We haven’t done anything but the opposite of that. We keep it close and we end up feeling the same way in the fourth quarter and coming back into the locker room.”
