After a Brief Flurry, Kings Return to Form

The Sacramento Kings, who were showing signs of life in December after losing 13 of their first 14 games, are going downhill again.

The Kings won five of seven games from Dec. 4-18, including an upset victory over powerful Portland that started their first three-game winning streak since April 1989.

Then came four consecutive double-digit losses to sub-.500 teams. The Kings lost to Seattle by 35 points at Sacramento on Dec. 20 and followed that with a 28-point loss to the Sonics, a 10-point defeat to the Los Angeles Clippers and a 16-point loss to Denver, only the Nuggets’ second road victory of the season.

After watching rookie first-round draft picks Lionel Simmons, Travis Mays and Anthony Bonner shoot a combined 13 for 35 from the field against the Clippers, Coach Dick Motta said: “Something’s got to be wrong with Bonner. He was just walking. Mays was walking and I think Simmons was really tired.”

It will be interesting to watch the career of Seattle’s Shawn Kemp, the fourth domestic NBA player to come to the NBA without playing in college.

The first three -- Moses Malone, Darryl Dawkins and Bill Willoughby -- had widely divergent success. Malone is a future Hall of Famer, Willoughby was a bust and Dawkins falls somewhere in the middle of those two.

Kemp, in his second season, has been playing well since moving into the starting lineup following the trade of Xavier McDaniel to Phoenix.

Seattle won six of its first nine games after McDaniel was traded, and Kemp, who has become a fan favorite with his slam-dunking ability, averaged 17.6. He was averaging 13.4 points when McDaniel left.

“The rebounding, the blocked shots, they’re all there,” Sonic Coach K.C. Jones said. “He still needs to develop more of a court sense, which is the same thing that Moses Malone, Bill Willoughby and Darryl Dawkins needed at this stage when they came out.”

Due to the dramatic increase in 3-pointers in the past few seasons, the NBA has doubled the number a player has to make to qualify for the 3-point percentage championship from 25 to 50.

Stu Jackson, fired as New York Knicks coach on Dec. 7, applied for -- but didn’t get -- the Seattle television job vacated by John MacLeod when he replaced Jackson.

Celtic rookie Dee Brown, a Florida native who went to college at Jacksonville, is having trouble adjusting to the cold weather in Boston.

“The other morning I had ice on my windshield and I had to scrape it off with a spatula,” Brown said. “That’s all I had.”

Perhaps the biggest surprise among this year’s rookie crop is 24-year-old Andy Toolson of Utah, who spent the last two years on a Mormon mission in Chile following his senior year at Brigham Young.

He signed with the Jazz as a free agent last summer after being encouraged to try out by Danny Ainge, who is married to Toolson’s cousin.

Toolson may be paving the way for Brigham Young’s 7-foot-6 freshman, Shawn Bradley, who also has said he will leave basketball for a two-year mission.