Beam Team’s Esteemed Dreams Once Deemed Reamed, Now Redeemed With New Regimes

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 February 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.