View From The Other Side

It’s an understood fact by now that the Kings are cool. They do cool things, and they do things cool.

They can turn a routine basketball possession into a stunning three-alarm fire drill, and they can evaporate a 10-point lead in as many seconds. Through it all, the beautiful and the profane, they have adopted the collective posture of a group that isn’t going to be rattled one way or another.

If the Kings were morphed into a composite individual, it’d be a college junior with his hands stuffed in his jeans pockets, baseball cap spun backward, shades locked and loaded, practically daring you to say something that could possibly shake him up.

It’s an image born of countless real-life player reactions, from facial expressions to postgame comments, and it fits. It is very casual, very unconcerned and extremely cool.

And it is also, without a doubt, the very first thing that has got to go this week. Assuming, of course, that anyone involved wants next week to remain on the radar screen.

You can turn over the numbers and splice the video until your eyeballs bleed, and the crowning fact of the Kings’ 117-107 playoff-opening defeat by the Lakers won’t change: L.A. played the game with a sense of urgency that Rick Adelman’s team hasn’t mustered in what seems like weeks.

It’s a subtle difference between playing hard and playing urgently, but against the Lakers, the Kings somehow managed to split that difference.

What Sacramento needs is the kind of savage, harassing, smart-fouling defense that forces O’Neal to the free-throw line 15 times, not five. It needs the kind of fanatical, last-game-of-your-life effort that would never allow an opponent to grab 25 offensive rebounds, as the Lakers did Sunday.

What the Kings need is everything, but most of all the clear, unfiltered sense that the moment is now. Time to lose some cool, before the season’s on ice.