Pistons need to crown Kings after miserable effort

Tonight at 10:00 pm (ET) the Detroit Pistons continue their West Coast swing against the Sacramento Kings.

The Pistons, playing on the second night of a back to back, will face the 18-28 Sacramento Kings in Sacramento. This is the second game of the trip for the Pistons.

The Basics

• The Kings are coming off of a close loss to Houston while the Pistons got shellacked by Golden State last night. Except for Rodney McGruder and Isaiah Stewart, it was a bad night for everyone.
• The Kings will be much better rested with two days off between home games.
• The Kings have the 21st ranked offense, scoring 109.1 points per 100 possessions
• Sacramento sports the 27th ranked defense by allowing 112.9 points per 100 possessions
• The Kings are top-ten in the NBA in their pace of play
• Sacramento is a bottom 5 rebounding team in the league, especially struggling on the defensive glass. That is good news for a Pistons team still short-handed in the middle.

The Kings are having a rough season, they were once again hoping to be in the playoff mix but are currently sitting outside even the play-in. Sacramento has the longest streak of not making the playoffs (16 years) of any team in the NBA.

De’Aron Fox is good, but he hasn’t taken the leap that the Kings hoped he would ,after getting a huge contract. His name is in the mix among rumors of a trade for Ben Simmons.

They are a goofy team, in that any number of their players are solid players that other teams would want, and, yet, they seem unable to fit together in a cohesive structure to make them greater than the sum of their parts.

They seem to be a team primed to make a big splash trade in an effort to shake things up.

Despite all their shortcomings, the Kings butchered the Pistons in Detroit the last time they played, so the Pistons have no right to take them easily.

Problems for Detroit Pistons

• The trouble is that the Pistons are on a back to back which makes it brutal to go against a face-paced team like Sacramento. Keeping energy levels high enough to compete will be a real challenge in this game.

Sacramento is not a team o nthe level of Golden State, in terms of either talent or cohesiveness. Detroit could steal one here if they can make some shots and stop passing the ball to the other team, both major problems against the Warriors.