SACRAMENTO – For a team that has expressed a desire to be more physical on the court this season, the Kings got pushed around easily and frequently during Sunday’s lopsided 105-85 preseason loss to the Portland Trail Blazers.
It got so bad that coach Mike Brown scrapped plans to play his starters at the end of the game and instead let the reserves finish the afternoon on the court.
Afterward, Brown clung to hope that the Kings could somehow find a silver lining amidst the wreckage they left on the floor.
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“Getting beat by a young team because of how hard they played, how physical they played, was a great learning experience,” Brown told reporters at Golden 1 Center. “I wanted to play our starters at the end of the game tonight so that they could try to feel what it’s like to play in a whole game, but they did not work with me in that situation to be able to play. And we’re down by 20 so I’m not going to risk that in a preseason game.
“You have to give Portland a lot of credit just on how hard they played tonight.”
The Trail Blazers did play hard and the Kings failed to handle what was being thrown at them.
Sacramento got manhandled in the paint, allowed Portland to grab 47 rebounds (12 on the offensive end) and got pushed around with very little resistance for much of the afternoon.
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Not exactly the type of effort fans were hoping for with the season-opener less than two weeks away.
“I think we just got outworked both offensively and defensively,” De’Aaron Fox said after Sunday's loss. “That’s a younger team and they’re picking up full court, they’re getting in our paint. They touched the paint too much for us, and then they get on the free throw line. And then that makes kick-out 3s a lot easier.”
Portland definitely had a much smoother flow to its offense than Sacramento did, even though the Trail Blazers were minus two starters while the Kings were mostly at full strength.
But it was the Trail Blazers who played better, out-hustling the more talented Kings and making more plays.
“Bottom line, Portland played better than us,” Brown said. “They were aggressive getting downhill and we were just fouling and sending them to the free throw line. Their ball pressure and physicality sped us up.”
The Blazers bullied the Kings into 27 turnovers that led to 33 points – nearly one-third of Portland’s total scoring.
While Brown was quick to credit the Blazers, the Kings’ coach is fully cognizant of how his own players factored into that.
“That might be a record for us, I don’t know,” Brown said. “We can’t turn the ball over the way that we did. I told our guys we tried so many home run plays, whether it was scoring the ball or passing the ball, that they’re aggression and their physicality just knocked us off pace a little bit.
“The tough part about it too was they were really aggressive in the lanes. To start the game we might have had three backdoors that were wide open that we didn’t see. Then we started trying to make the pass when it wasn’t there.”
A lot of Brown’s frustrations came as a result of the overall way that the Kings handled Sunday after what he believed were two solid physical efforts in their first two preseason games.
“Lot of credit to Portland but I do think our guys didn’t do a good job coming to play today,” Brown said. “They’re physicality was at a higher level than ours and it got us on our heels. The more we were on our heels, that’s the more confident they became with it.”
Brown didn’t seem overly concerned, noting that it was just one preseason game. But he doesn’t want his players hiding from it, either.
“We shouldn’t dismiss this,” Brown said. “We can’t dismiss how hard they played tonight compared to us and we can’t dismiss the 27 turnovers because lot of them were self-inflicted. We can’t dismiss our inability to keep them out of the paint. We have to make sure we understand this is part of our growth and let’s be better the next time we step on the floor.”