Klay overshadows Davion’s career night in Kings’ loss originally appeared on NBC Sports Bayarea
A historic night from rookie Davion Mitchell wasn’t enough for the Kings to beat the Warriors Thursday night as they were shut down by Klay Thompson and their Northern California rivals at Chase Center.
Mitchell, who has now scored at least 15 points in five straight games, finished with a game-high and career-high 26 points on 11-of-17 shooting from the field and 3-of-5 from behind the arc. He also had eight assists.
But the Kings just couldn’t keep up with one of the hottest teams in the league and lost by a final score of 126-114 in San Francisco.
Sacramento turned the ball over six times in the first quarter and was down by 19 at the half.
But something sparked in the third quarter and the Kings outscored the Dubs 29-21 before heading into the final 12 minutes.
A strong effort from the Kings brought them within seven at one point in the fourth, but that’s the closest the game got as Golden State was able to pull away and secure the win.
“The first quarter we had a lot of mental mistakes and usually those mental mistakes with as good of a team like that leads to threes, dunks, things like that,” Mitchell told reporters after the loss. “And they go on a run and then we’re kind of playing catch up throughout the whole game. You see that in the third quarter, we did that. We did a really good job of getting stops in a row, we didn’t make mistakes where they got a lot of runs, we got a lot of stops. We kind of played half-court basketball with them and things changed throughout that game.”
And even 25 points from Harrison Barnes and 18 from Maurice Harkless was no match for the Splash Bros, who combined for 43 points.
Thompson started the game shooting a perfect 7-of-7 from the field, including 6-of-6 from deep. He finished 8-of-11 from the field and 7-of-9 from the 3-point line. Meanwhile, Steph Curry added 20 points on 7-of-11 shooting from the field and 4-of-7 from the three.
Mitchell talked about the difficulties of guarding the Warriors.
“Everyone moves without the ball,” Mitchell said on Thursday. “They play as a unit, they pass the ball, it’s not just a one-man show. I think today it was a lot of mistakes where we got caught on not switching, leaving guys open we shouldn’t, that’s just a really good basketball team. It’s kind of hard to guard that team.”
After shocking the league and upsetting the Brooklyn Nets in a 112-101 comeback win at home on Wednesday night, the guys showed they can fight.
And maybe it wasn’t the same outcome on Thursday, but similar to the day before, they didn’t give up.
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“I think every day we’re getting better,” Mitchell told reporters. “In the Brooklyn game, we came back. We turned things around. Today, we got ourselves in a really deep hole, we couldn’t get back from it but our competitiveness, we came back, we played hard, we didn’t quit. On some of the road games, it just felt like we quit throughout the game. Especially the Boston [Celtics] game. But today we didn’t quit, we kept playing throughout the whole game.”
“The fight was there, the competitiveness was there,” Harkless said. “Guys playing hard, that was there. I think at the very least we should be able to do that every night and then live with the results. I’m not really into moral victories, but you look at a game like tonight. We weren’t really out of the game. We didn’t lay down. We didn’t quit. We kept trying to put ourselves in a position to win and unfortunately that didn’t happen tonight, but I think if we just come in with that same effort, that same attitude and mindset, we’ll be in a lot more games moving forward.”
The 13th-place Kings will host the 14th-place Oklahoma City Thunder on Saturday at Golden 1 Center.