With 9 minutes to go in the third quarter, Kings’ guard Terence Davis II was called for a questionable foul on Raptors guard Fred VanFleet.

As he was driving to the basket, VanFleet nailed De’Aaron Fox with a shove. At that point, coach Mike Brown had had enough.

Trained lipreaders could see what the Kings’ coach was saying was not family-friendly. Brown was quickly ejected and associate coach Jordi Fernandez took over.

Mike Brown was ejected after this call … pic.twitter.com/57UBlyToqL

— Kings on NBCS (@NBCSKings) December 15, 2022

Tracking NBA coach ejections isn’t as easy as finding a player’s point average from 20 years ago. But, this could be the first time since 2013 that Mike Brown was ejected from a game. At the time, he was the coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers.

The Kings would go on to win Wednesday’s game, with several players saying seeing their coach get ejected sparked a fire in them.

“[De’Aaron] Fox got fouled obviously and it wasn’t called and we were getting hacked the whole game and not getting any calls,” Malik Monk said in a postgame interview. “So Mike just had to take one for the team and it bringed the energy up and we just fed off that.”

Center Domantas Sabonis echoed those same remarks, saying they “had to do it for him.”

“He’s a great coach and one of our best players got a tech, and wasn’t getting fouls,” Sabonis said postgame. “Fox was playing really hard all game and then he [Mike Brown] has our back. So that was big time. I feel like that kind of changed the whole mood.”

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