How the Kings could imitate the Warriors’ blueprint to winning NBA championships

A theme emanating from the Kings’ first-round playoff series against the Golden State Warriors was the shared respect each organization had for the other.

That’s partly due to the overlap of personalities in key positions. Kings coach Mike Brown was Steve Kerr’s top assistant for six years. Assistant coaches Luke Loucks and Leandro Barbosa, a former Warrior, served on Kerr’s staff as well. Harrison Barnes played for Golden State for his first four NBA seasons, including the club’s 2015 championship team, the first of the current era.

Sacramento took on a Warriors-like pace-and-space approach to offense, running an evolved version of what Golden State popularized over the last decade. But beyond those organizational ties, the Kings could look to the Warriors’ blueprint as a source of optimism for what could be coming over the next few years.

The Warriors, of course, didn’t become championship contenders as soon as Stephen Curry laced up his Nikes (and later, Under Armours). Curry didn’t make the playoffs for the first time until his fourth NBA season, and won his first championship in Year 6, which De’Aaron Fox just completed.

Golden State’s first trip to the playoffs with the current core came in 2013, when the Warriors upset the No. 3 seed Denver Nuggets in the first round before losing to the eventual Western Conference champion San Antonio Spurs in Round 2. A year later, the Warriors bowed out in Round 1 after a seven-game slugfest against the Los Angeles Clippers, who were led by Chris Paul and Blake Griffin.

“It’s part of it,” Warriors forward Draymond Green said in the aftermath of Sunday’s Game 7. “You have to go through that to ultimately reach where you want to go.”

A season later, the Warriors won their first title after experiencing two years of postseason growing pains.

That idea echoes what two-time MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo said after the Milwaukee Bucks beat the Kings in March at Golden 1 Center.

“It’s a matter of time,” Antetokounmpo said. “They’re going to figure it out and be a very, very good team. But they need to go to the playoffs. They need to win a series, lose a series, play a Game 7, win on the road, and that’s going to give them experience. And they’re going to be a really, really good team in the future.”

Fox, 25, perhaps took the biggest and most-needed leap of any Kings player in their rise toward becoming a Western Conference power. He made the All-Star team for the first time and was named the NBA’s Clutch Player of the Year. He proved he could be the focal point in one of the best offenses in basketball and has the potential to become one of the best guards in the NBA, just as Curry did when the Warriors first broke into the playoffs in 2013 and 2014.

“This is just a building block,” Fox said this week. “You want to be one of those teams who, like the Warriors, who lost to the Clippers, the last Western Conference team they lost to, and after that just kind of started the dynasty.

“Being able to feel what the playoffs are like, you don’t want to go downhill,” he continued. “We were able to play a team that just won a championship, pushed them to seven games. and their experience, and quite frankly Steph, showed us what it’s like, what it takes to really get there. You just want to take that and run with it. You want to apply everything they were able to do to us physically, mentally as far as not having so many defensive lapses, and we want to build off that.”

Brown has said throughout his first season with the club turning things around quickly and becoming a playoff-caliber team is the easiest part of the process. The challenging part, in his mind, is taking the next step and becoming a championship-level contender that can sustain year over year.

“This summer is going to be huge for us,” Brown said. “I am proud of everybody. I am proud of what we accomplished in year one. But we got a lot of work to do. It’s only going to get harder from here, and that’s the one thing you hope everybody realizes — that it’s not going to be easy going forward. We’re not sneaking up on anybody. People are going to come at us giving their best shot. ... But I feel we have the group to embrace that challenge and go get it done.”

The NBA is a star-driven league and the Kings likely can’t count on being able to bring other stars to Sacramento, which means Fox must continue to ascend and build off all he accomplished this season. His 192 points in his first career playoff series were second in league history, behind only LeBron James’ postseason debut in 2006, when Brown was his head coach with the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Brown has coached some of the biggest stars in the NBA, including James. He was on Gregg Popovich’s staff that won a title in 2003 with Tim Duncan and David Robinson. Brown coached Kobe Bryant in 2011-12 and five games into 2013. Then he worked with the Warriors, where he helped Curry, Klay Thompson, Green and Kevin Durant win championships.

All of which gives Brown a good idea of what it will take for Fox to take the next step as a player and turn into the leader of a championship-caliber team.

“When you’re young, sometimes you have a tendency to say ‘OK, I’ll turn it on here, I’ll turn it on there,’” Brown said. “The great ones are on all the time, whether you’re playing against the team that’s in the 15th spot out of 16 teams in the West, or you’re practicing, you’re having a shooting competition against a rookie and another guy that doesn’t play much. ... Or you’re in the gym by yourself, working out.

“That competitive spirit is always there, and not just when you feel it’s needed or others feel like it’s needed,” Brown continued. “And that, at times, truly takes a little bit of time to grasp or comprehend. But even looking at a guy like Steph or a guy like LeBron. Initially, they were competitive ... but eventually they got to a point where it doesn’t matter who’s in front of them. It doesn’t matter the situation.

“It’s about me doing this all the time, because I know when I’m like this, I’m getting better. I’m becoming elite like only a few people out there have ever reached. But more than that, my teammates feel it, and they feel it all the time. And when they feel it, the pressure’s on for them to be as good as they can because they’re going to follow my lead on anything else.”