Kings Rumors

The Kings have offered incumbent head coach Mike Brown a three-year, $21MM contract extension that would keep him under team control through the 2026/27 season, reports Shams Charania of The Athletic (via Twitter). The deal offered by Sacramento could be worth up to $27MM with bonuses, per Charania.

Brown, who is seeking something in the neighborhood of $10MM annually, has not agreed to the offer thus far, Charania adds.

As Kurt Helin of NBC Sports notes (Twitter link), the offer represents half the per-season value of Clippers coach Tyronn Lue‘s just-signed five-year extension (which is said to be worth nearly $70MM) and is for two fewer years.

Sacramento has gone 94-70 during its two regular seasons under Brown, and has made the postseason both times, though the team didn’t get a full playoff series this spring.

Brown was named the league’s Coach of the Year (for the second time in his career) for returning the Kings to the playoffs for the first time in 16 seasons during a charmed 2022/23 run that saw the team finish with a 48-34 record and the Western Conference’s third seed. The Kings fell in seven games to the sixth-seeded Warriors last spring.

In 2023/24, the 46-36 Kings were merely the No. 9 seed in a more crowded West and did not advance beyond the play-in tournament, although they did beat the No. 10 Warriors in their first play-in game.

Prior to his Kings tenure, Brown was the associate head coach for Golden State from 2016-22, wining three titles under head coach Steve Kerr. Before that, he served two stints as the head coach of the Cavaliers, making one Finals appearance, and coached the Lakers. He boasts a 441-286 overall regular season record as a head coach, plus a 50-40 playoff record.

The Kings and Mike Brown have had discussions about a possible contract extension for the head coach, but there’s a “gulf” between the two sides, according to Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN, who reports (via Twitter) that Brown and the Kings have decided to table those extension discussions.

Brown received a four-year contract when he was hired by Sacramento during the 2022 offseason, but only three years of that deal are guaranteed — the fourth is a mutual option, meaning both sides would have to opt in. That option wasn’t exercised, according to James Ham of The Kings Beat, so Brown will be on an expiring contract if he and the Kings don’t reach an extension agreement by the start of the 2024/25 season.

Brown has led the Kings to a 94-70 (.573) overall regular season record since taking the reins from Alvin Gentry. He guided the franchise to its first playoff berth since 2006 and won the NBA’s Coach of the Year award in 2022/23.

Sacramento was eliminated in the first round of the 2023 postseason, however, and didn’t make the playoffs in Brown’s second year. Despite winning 46 regular season games in ’23/24, the Kings finished outside the top eight in the conference and were eliminated in the second game of the play-in tournament.

Since Brown’s hiring, a number of head coaches around the league – including Monty Williams, Erik Spoelstra, Gregg Popovich, Steve Kerr, and Mike Budenholzer – have signed lucrative multiyear deals worth eight figures annually. According to Ham, Brown is set to make less than $5MM this season.

Recent reports from The Athletic and Yahoo Sports have suggested that Brown’s next deal seems likely to be worth at least $10MM per year, but it sounds as if he and the Kings have a gap to bridge in their negotiations. There’s nothing stopping the team and its coach from reopening their contract talks at any time, but Wojnarowski’s report suggests that’s unlikely to happen in the short term.