The Sacramento Kings showed on Tuesday what a difference a year can make. The result was the end of the Golden State Warriors’ season.
The Kings defeated the Warriors 118-94 in the 9-on-10 matchup of the NBA play-in tournament, a year after falling to their Northern California rivals in Game 7 of the first round. Their reward is a game on Friday against the New Orleans Pelicans, who lost to the Los Angeles Lakers earlier Tuesday.
It was a game where you couldn’t blame the Kings fans for being nervous. Much has been made of the Warriors’ decline since winning their fourth title of the Stephen Curry era, but they still maintain mountaintop status.
The Kings clearly don’t have that. Instead, they had a young core in their second year of respectability that was in danger of stagnating after a 46-36 regular season.
Some of those concerns may have disappeared in the first quarter, as the Kings jumped out to a 10-point lead and then to a 16-point lead in the second quarter. The Warriors looked slower and their shots weren’t falling. Of course, tension returned as the game approached halftime, as the Warriors cut the lead to four points.
That lead dropped to just one early in the third quarter, but then the Kings woke up. A 12-2 run gave them another significant lead, and they kept hammering from there. De’Aaron Fox and Keegan Murray led the way, with Domantas Sabonis facilitating and Keon Ellis making the three seconds at the right time.
Ellis’ performance was particularly significant considering who he replaced. Sacramento lost Kevin Huerter to shoulder surgery late last month and promoted Ellis to the starting lineup. That would be Ellis, who went undrafted and spent most of his rookie season in the G League before signing a two-way contract last offseason and sliding into the team’s rotation this year.
That’s kind of what was different this time for the Kings, but honestly the more drastic change was on Golden State’s side.
Where do the Warriors go from here?
Let’s say this clearly: When you have four big players in your rotation who are over the age of 33, losing in the bad part of the play-in tournament is no way to raise hope for the future.
The Warriors looked slow and sloppy on Tuesday. Worse, they just looked old. Stephen Curry was rough by his standards, posting 22 points on 8-for-16 shooting with four rebounds, two assists and six turnovers. Klay Thompson was rough in every sense, with 0 points on 0-for-10 shooting. Draymond Green was relatively quiet with 12 points and six assists. Chris Paul had two points and was minus-15 in 18 minutes.
The team as a whole shot 10 of 31 (32.3%) from deep with 16 turnovers.
Golden State’s main directive in recent years has been to find younger talent to offset the graceful aging of their aging stars. Andrew Wiggins was supposed to maintain All-Star form, but hasn’t. Jonathan Kuminga and Moses Moody haven’t become playoff-caliber rotation players. Brandin Podziemski and Trayce Jackson-Davis are just rookies.
Whatever the Warriors’ long-term plans are, they fell apart on Tuesday. Now come the tough questions, the toughest of which will be what to do with Thompson. The five-time All-Star has looked extremely limited this season and is a pending free agent. Without much cap space next season, an exit seems likely.
The bigger question is what else the Warriors will have to do to turn Tuesday’s slump into another data point into a downfall.
The Kings face the Pelicans on Friday, but it remains to be seen which version of the Pelicans they will get.
It could very well be a version without All-Star Zion Williamson, who left New Orleans’ fourth-quarter loss earlier Tuesday with what head coach Willie Green called soreness in his left leg. Williamson, who has a significant injury history, will undergo imaging on Wednesday.
The Kings will need all the help they can get as they went 0-5 against the Pelicans in the regular season.
