Kings get worked in the second half, fall to the Lakers

The Sacramento Kings entered halftime of Tuesday night contest looking great, with a 59-50 lead over the Los Angeles Lakers.

Then, in the second half, the Kings did what they so often do: completely disintegrated and barfed all over themselves en route to a 117-92.

The Lakers outscored the Kings by a whopping 22 points in the third quarter and 34 points total in the second half. The Laker offense was able to score at will off of Kings turnovers and that helped them put the game out pretty much out of reach by the end of the third quarter.

This Kings team has a propensity to completely collapse on both ends of the floor at times, and that’s exactly what they did Tuesday.

As has been the case so often this season, when the Kings don’t make their three-pointers, they lose. On Tuesday, the Kings shot 6 for 29, which comes out to just 20.7%. For a team with a shortage of good three-point shooters, this feels like a problematic strategy and a big part of why the Kings are bad.

Rookie Davion Mitchell had yet another horrible game offensively, shooting 3 of 14 from the field and just 2 of 8 from three. It’s hard to diagnose exactly what’s wrong with Mitchell’s offensive game right now, but it can’t get much worse than what we’ve seen recently.

On a positive note, Richaun Holmes was fantastic on Tuesday, scoring 27 points on an uber-efficient 12 of 13 shooting. It’s clear that Holmes’ energy is invaluable to this team. The other King that showed out was Chimezie Metu, who had a great first half and solid overall performance scoring 14 points on 7 of 10 shooting.

Now at 8-14, the season is quickly slipping away from the Kings.

The Kings won’t have much time to dwell on this loss as they will be back on the court tomorrow night in Los Angeles to face the Clippers.