Sacramento’s Mike Brown is NBA Coach of the Year — and it shouldn’t be close

The NBA regular season is rolling toward its end, which means award talk is heating up. You’ll hear about the MVP race primarily, but a few other awards are handed out each year that matter. Coach of the Year is one of them, and no one is more deserving in 2023 than Sacramento Kings head coach, Mike Brown.

Sacramento hasn’t finished an NBA campaign above .500 since 2005-06. That’s the last time Kings fans witnessed a postseason NBA game in their town. Brown came in and changed the culture around these Kings, and he’s done it with a relatively young team and no big superstar. They’ve got some very nice young talent and a couple of young stars, but nothing close to what Brown once had in Cleveland coaching LeBron James.

James’ coaches in the NBA never get the credit they probably deserve, especially if they had the pleasure of riding with LeBron during his prime. Brown qualifies for that distinction, having coached James with the Cavs from ’05-10. During that stint, Brown’s Cavs managed to win 50 games in four of those campaigns. In ’07, Cleveland won the Eastern Conference advancing to the Finals, where they were swept by the San Antonio Spurs.

Despite all that success, Brown has never received the admiration and acknowledgment most coaches would. You will be overlooked when coaching LeBron James, a once-in-a-generation talent. That isn’t the case in Sacramento. Regardless of how far they go in the postseason, Brown has done the best coaching job this year in the regular season.

Brown’s Kings have already clinched the No. 3 seed in the West and still have a chance to post a 50-win season with four games left on the schedule. This squad is built on youth and excellent coaching, minus a top-five player in the league. The Kings only have two players over the age of 29 on their roster. For the most part, this is a team full of 26 and under players. Young teams don’t usually go deep in the NBA playoffs, and they certainly don’t win titles, but just getting to this point is a huge step forward in Sacramento.

This franchise barely cracked 30 wins in the previous three seasons. They had a span from ’09-15 where they couldn’t get to 30 victories even once. The Kings have had a long history of losing, and besides a few years in the early 00s, this has been a losing organization since moving to northern California in ’85.

So, what Brown has accomplished in one year with this young team should be appreciated and celebrated. That fan base has suffered a long time and deserves some reward. New York Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau was awarded coach of the year honors in ’21 as the No. 4 seed when he probably shouldn’t have won it. Mike Brown earned this year’s award, and the voting shouldn’t be close.