Doug Christie brings a new voice to the Kings, but will it be enough?

LOS ANGELES — “The first thing is: We have enough.”

That was the message that new head coach Doug Christie had given to the Kings’ players after taking over the big chair in the wake of Mike Brown is fired. Christie emphasized that several times Saturday night: “And this is a message that I said to them — there’s enough in this locker room.”

Christie brings a new voice to Sacramento, but he takes over the same roster — one very light on plus defenders.

It was evident from the opening tip of Christie’s debut game as a head coach – the Lakers scored 40 points on 73.9% shooting in the first quarter Saturday night. In the third quarter, when the Lakers leaned into a reverse pick-and-roll, they scored 42 points on 75% shooting.

“I mean, everything felt great, except for giving up two 40-point quarters and getting dirty way too much,” DeMar DeRozan said of the first game under Christie.

“Obviously, giving up two 40-point quarters is never going to help you win the game,” added De’Aaron Fox.

Like the last five games Brown coached, the Kings lost Christie’s debut, 132-122.

With these six straight losses, the Kings have dropped to 13-19 on the season. Sacramento is 12th in the West and staring at the play-in — and in the deep Western Conference, a team likely needs to be above .500 just to be in the top 10 and reach the play-in.

Already six games under .500, there is no grace period for Christie or this team to break in the new coach.

“I’m not accepting a grace period, I expect to win every time we step on the ball floor because there’s enough in the locker room to make that happen,” Christie said.

Is there?

Offensively, the Kings are again top-10 in the league. Fox, DeRozan and Domantas Sabonis form a trio of bucket-getters that can put up points against any team.

However, the team is 17th in the league in defense this season — and that ranking was a credit to Brown, a defense-first coach who prioritized that end of the court. The Kings were middle of the pack defensively last season (14th) and ranked 24th in the league, the season their top-ranked offense led them to the no. 3.

This isn’t a roster with many plus defenders: Keon Ellis off the bench is a sure thing, Keegan Murray is good but asked to cover the opponent’s best perimeter player every night, and Fox is solid. That’s about it, though, and Sabonis isn’t a strong drop-back rim protector.

“It’s going to start on the defensive end,” Fox said of turning the Kings’ season around (comments that carry weight because of the rumors he might ask out of Sacramento). “We’ve been top-10 offensively most of the year, so that’s not where our problem lies at the end of the day. At some point, we have to be able to buckle down and get stops when we have to.”

Getting stops also gives this team a chance to run — something else Christie has prioritized. He wants these kings to return to play sooner.

Sacramento is 25th in the league in percentage of offense starting in transition and only average (16th) in pace. Against the Lakers, the Kings played closer to their old selves — on what would have been a top-10 percent offense starting in transition — and that was against a Los Angeles team without LeBron James trying to slow down the game.

Christie hinted at other changes he might like to make, but there’s only so much he can do.

“Here’s the thing, we’re in the middle of the season. There’s not going to be any drastic changes,” Kevin Huerter said. “It can’t be that we don’t have enough practice time or training camp to do that. I think you saw us get back to our tempo and something that I think we’ve been trying to play with all season. .. so it was great to see.”

Christie’s pregame theme wasn’t about changing the lineups or the X’s and O’s. Focusing on the stakes, he said: “We compete at an extremely high level – that’s one thing we won’t compromise on.”

The effort was there on defense for the Kings, but the execution needs work. A lot of work.

Changes must come quickly. Firing Brown in the middle of the season was a clear sign to the players that the Kings want to turn things around and win this season.

“It was a message that was very clear yesterday was that we don’t see this as a lost season,” Kevin Huerter said. “We’ve got to right the ship, we’ve got to turn it around. We’ve just lost number six away from home so there’s definitely no grace period.”

Christie agrees, going on to say, “There’s enough in the locker room to make (wins) happen.”

Is there? Christie will have the opportunity to prove his point and win the Kings’ head coaching job permanently in the coming months.

But on the night of his head coaching debut, this looked like the same Kings on defense, and that may be a problem beyond any coach’s ability to solve.