Three years after making the playoffs together and contesting a beautiful, ultimately futile first-round series against the defending champs, Mike Brown and De'Aaron Fox are going to the NBA Finals. All they had to do was flee Sacramento.
As the San Antonio Spurs and New York Knicks gear up for what should be a thriller of a Finals, the world will dissect the two team's strengths and flaws, weigh what a title would mean to each franchise, and study their conference-winning compositions. It's that final bit that will raise the curious matter of how each team's marquee offseason addition—defined somewhat expansively, though the Spurs of Feb. 2025 were more or less already in their offseason—was collaborating with the other's just 18 short months ago, on the sorriest-ass franchise in all of North American professional sports. If Fox and Brown were so important in helping, respectively, the Spurs and Knicks get over the hump, how could it all have gone so wrong in Sacramento? How should Sacramentans feel knowing that their once-proud, unceremoniously ditched team leaders found success the instant they left town? What does the twinned triumph of Fox and Brown suggest about the ways basketball and fandom function?
The story is a simple one: Fox and Brown were not in a position to succeed in Sacramento. The pair covered up deep fissures in the Kings' roster, which at the time of Brown's firing, between Christmas and the New Year in late 2024, was a worse version of the already-flawed group that lost to the Golden State Warriors a season-and-a-half earlier. The team had zero good defenders, one wing player, a vacuous iteration of DeMar DeRozan, and a single functional big man, Domantas Sabonis, who himself could neither shoot the basketball nor block shots. The sporadic victories they came by were largely the product of Fox's individual genius, and though Brown organized the team decently well, its flaws were obvious and terminal. The Kings were playing yesterday's hoops. The contract extension they bent over backwards to get Sabonis to sign was an albatross the moment pen touched paper.
Given more functional ownership, these flaws didn't have to be fatal. Even setting aside the fact that no sane organization would be fooled into giving up a pick swap for DeRozan, the success of the Beam Team showed that Fox and Brown could anchor a successful team, given the right supporting pieces. Instead, Vivek Ranadive saw a 13-18 team and decided that the problem was the only good parts of that team and that the solution was a more hands-on approach from an owner who has only driven his team further into baroque ruin. Brown was fired after a harrowing loss to the Detroit Pistons, and the organization's posture towards Fox shifted into a bizarre adversariality, openly blaming him for front office's own stupid decision to fire Brown.
That front office couldn't even handle the inevitable Fox trade as anyone with a passing familiarity with NBA team-building would have advised them to. Instead of accepting reality, getting worse, and hunkering down for the future, they chose to chase the receding horizon of false glory and trade for yet another former Chicago Bull with a dead-end skillset: Zach LaVine. It did not work. The horrifying, melted version of the team that exists today is a monument to hubris and mismanagement: While Fox was making the all-star team and organizing a group of young whippersnappers into a Finals squad, the Kings were releasing statements clarifying that their apparent tanking maneuvers were simply the honest errors of an awful team.
Harrison Barnes is also a bit player on the Spurs, due to the Kings' inexplicable decision to trade him for DeRozan, who is older and less suited to the modern NBA. I suppose there's a lesson here that a smart team-building strategy is to simply identify which NBA teams are delusional or dysfunctional and conduct as many transactions with them as possible.
My point is, I don't think any Kings fans whose fondness for their team survived the 16-year playoff drought and its associated false highs and benthic lows even have the emotional license to feel regret in a situation like this. The good times were real, but they were an accident of history, the short-lived spring roughage that explodes up after a forest fire, only to be quickly eclipsed once the real trees start growing back. When Kings fans see either Brown or Fox lift the trophy, they should know that was never, ever going to happen in Sacramento, and they should feel not sadness but joy. What a privilege it is to be able to cheer for players who came into the league with circumstances to overcome from the first minute they step onto the floor.
Confining oneself to only caring about the on-court fortunes of one team at any given time, and forgetting about or turning on those who leave those narrow confines, requires a force of self-denial, strained in those who cheer for actually good teams, Herculean in the case of Kings fans. I loved watching Fox play for the Kings. Am I supposed to turn into a hater, seeing only the flimsy parts of his game now that he plays for the Spurs? Should I feel a perverse sort of regional ownership over his skills since he honed them in Sacramento? No, because I'm not stupid. I feel the same way toward Brown. Moving from Sacramento to New York to find yourself is a well-trod path.
These two were such important figures in each other's basketball lives: Brown building a legitimate offense around Fox and empowering him to be the best player on the court; Fox and his All-NBA season proving that Brown was more than a LeBron James and Steph Curry merchant. There's a pleasant symmetry to the circumstances of their redemptions, with both men under serious pressure the second they landed in San Antonio and New York. But what's pressure when you've done the impossible and succeeded, even for a moment, in Sacramento?
