Instead of Showing Grit, Kings Offer a Whimper

We can say this much without the slightest fear of being contradicted: A full regular season and seven playoff games behind them, the Kings can still surprise you.

They laid a shocker down on the floor of Arco Arena on Friday night. Come to think of it, what they laid was an egg the size of Dover, Del. Was that someone tuning his Stradivarius in the upper deck, or was Sacramento so tight the players squeaked when they ran down the court?

Who are these guys, and what have they done with the team that went 33-8 at home this season? Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, the Kings were effectively aggressive and passionate and clutching and pawing and all the kinds of things that people like Chris Webber were asserting they had to be after those first two playoff losses in L.A.

This morning, after that 103-81 group bludgeoning by the Lakers, Sacramento is 0-3 and out, and you don’t need us to tell you. Heck, you don’t even need the bloody playoff probability chart. All you really need to know is that, in the Phil Jackson era in Los Angeles, the Lakers haven’t lost even three games in a row, much less four.

But that’s a discussion for another day. Today we are free to concentrate on the utter shock of it all--not losing to the Lakers, but going out with such a whimper.

It’s as though the entire franchise has awoken to find it has become a film negative of itself. What once was aggression has veered hideously into the land of Out of Control.

All season long, Rick Adelman’s team fed off its emotion; almost every good thing that has come out of this very, very good season was related in some way to the Kings’ ability to make their pure emotional volatility work mostly to the good.

Suddenly, it’s the worst ailment ever conceived. You’ve seen carnival-midway rides that were more in control. On the street, the word is that Adelman’s team isn’t fired up enough to take on the Lakers, but at courtside the view is entirely different: These guys can’t rein it in long enough to get anything done.

“I don’t think it was intimidation, I really don’t,” Adelman said afterward. “I thought they played hard, but it was almost too much emotion.”

Too much emotion? Did it ever seem possible while the Kings were going through the ordinary schedule, dispatching the Vancouvers and Golden States of the league? This team’s XFL nickname would’ve been He Stoke Me. It was all emotion with these guys.

Friday night, it was a four-letter word. Given a fat chance in the first half to jump up and take control of a game neither team seemed to really want, the Kings delivered botched play after botched play.

The Lakers play with a modicum of emotion and a whole plateful of solid work, and even at their ugliest they know how to stay in a game until things get better. Not to confuse issues, but it’s possible one team is better than the other one here.