Mike Brown the latest coach to be scapegoated by Kings owner

Brown won Coach of the Year after the 2022-23 season, when the Kings finished third in the Western Conference and made the playoffs for the first time in 17 years. But that didn’t buy him much job security after failing to advance out of the play-in tournament last season and a 13-18 start in 2024-25.

The final straw may have been the Kings’ recent homestand, during which they lost all five of their games. That dropped the team to 12th place in the Western Conference. The slide was especially bad, as the Kings dropped back-to-back games with the Los Angeles Lakers, a team they’d dominated in Brown’s first two seasons.

But the Kings still have a positive point differential, and Brown is by all accounts a respected coach and defensive expert. Perhaps he had lost the attention of players, but it feels just as likely that Ranadive is again scapegoating a coach for the organization’s failures.

In the 2014-15 season, Ranadive’s second year as team owner, he fired Michael Malone, 24 games into the season. Malone has gone on to wild success as head coach of the Denver Nuggets, winning a title in 2023. Ranadive’s teams have yet to win a single playoff series.

In a league where over 50% of teams make the playoffs each year, Ranadive’s Kings have managed to do it just once since 2013. Meanwhile Ranadive has continued to meddle, appointing his own daughter as general manager of the team’s G League franchise and suggesting harebrained ideas like the Kings playing four-on-five on defense.

At a certain point, perhaps when the team is faced with hiring its eighth new head coach, the organization should display self-reflection and wonder if it’s the owner that’s the problem, not the man on the sidelines. This time, Brown is taking the fall, but there’s no reason to think the team’s owner is any wiser than his fired head coach.