When Los Angeles Lakers fans hear the name Doug Christie, they do not think happy thoughts as he was a long-time rival of the team while playing for the Sacramento Kings in the early 2000s.
Christie is still involved with the Kings to this day and recently became their interim head coach after the organization decided to part ways with Mike Brown.
Christie, who began his playing career with the Lakers in 1992 after going to school at Pepperdine, reflected on what it meant to him to make his head coaching debut in L.A. at Crypto.com Arena.
“It was funny because when I left my room, I always go back to make sure I don’t forget anything. So I went back and as I looked, I just looked out the window and was like ‘Wow, yeah.’ This is Los Angeles, there’s a lot of history here. There’s a lot of history in this building, in that hallway,” Christie said before Saturday night’s game.
“And for it to be this team, yeah, it’s… wow. It’s big time and for me to be with my team, I mean, we are in Hollywood, so you couldn’t write up a better script I don’t think. How it turns out, whether it’s a love story or a horror story, we don’t quite know yet. We’ll find out tonight in a little bit.”
The hallway that Christie is referring to is of course the one where he and Rick Fox tried to chase each other to fight after getting into it and eventually ejected in a preseason game between the Lakers and Kings.
Unfortunately for Christie, his coaching debut ended up being closer to a horror story as the Lakers beat the Kings for a fourth time this season, earning a season swept over their division rivals.
Regardless, it is cool to see Christie finally getting this opportunity with Sacramento and it will be interesting to see if he can turn around what has been a disappointing season for them to this point.
Lakers among teams interested in Kings star De’Aaron Fox
Before the Kings fired head coach Mike Brown and turned things over to Doug Christie, rumors were already swirling surrounding their star player De’Aaron Fox.
If Sacramento does look to trade him, the Lakers are unsurprisingly among the teams with reported interest. It remains to be seen if L.A. has enough assets to get a deal done and even if they did, it’s unlikely that the Kings would want to trade their biggest star to them.
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