If you want to know why Mike Brown was able to turn the Kings around in his first year with the team, look no further than his ability to get players to buy into his disciplined coaching philosophy.
Star point guard De'Aaron Fox and his wife Recee Fox sat down with NBC Sports California's Deuce Mason and Morgan Ragan on a recent episode of the "Deuce and Mo" podcast, where they explained why it was easy to go all in on what Brown was preaching.
“He is very militant,” Recee said. “He comes from a military background. He approaches the day like a professional, so everybody else follows his lead and falls in line. He’s so tough, he would not do well with a soft player.”
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De'Aaron has had four different head coaches during his six years with Sacramento, but he knew immediately that something was different with Brown.
“I got exactly what I wanted,” De'Aaron said. “I love Luke [Walton] but he’s more laid back, probably needs an older team, guys who have been there and done that. Dave [Joerger] yelled, but not as much.
“My whole life, I played for coaches that would get on you for almost every little thing. Like playing for Cal, Cal will break you if you can’t take it. When he would yell at you, he wants to see the fire. To a point, he’s testing you. We loved that about Cal, so whenever we got Mike, and that’s the way he was from the first day of training camp, I knew it was going to be different.”
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Any good relationship between player and coach is built on strong communication, and Brown’s aggressive usage of timeouts to sort things out was something that stood out to Recee.
“My favorite thing is the timeouts,” Recee shared. “Fix it before it goes down. I live life like that. If we have a breakdown in communication, we are going to sit there, and we are going to talk about it until we figure it out.”
Brown has established a culture that is here to stay. His tough, hands-on approach was exactly what was needed to turn around a franchise that had been struggling to find its way for nearly two decades before he had arrived.