Giannis Scores 29 as Heat Hold Off the Kings 114-108 and Sacramento Sinks to 1-9

The box score says Giannis Antetokounmpo carried the Miami Heat on Sunday night in Sacramento. Twenty-nine points, 14 rebounds, 14 of 23 from the field. But anyone who watched the last six minutes at Golden 1 Center knows the truth was messier than that — and a whole lot more interesting.

Miami had done the hard part early. The Heat led by 16 in the third quarter, Klay Thompson was raining in three-pointers, and a Sacramento team missing Domantas Sabonis with a sore left knee looked exactly like a team that had lost eight of nine. Then the Kings, of all teams, found something. A 14-0 run in the second quarter had already shown they could punch back, and in the fourth they did it again, tying the game at 95 with just over six minutes to play. The building, quiet for most of the night, suddenly had a pulse.

That is when the game turned into a referendum on Giannis Antetokounmpo — the player, the shot selection, and the free-throw line.

The Greek star spent the evening living in the mid-range, a place defences are usually happy to let him shoot from. On this night he punished them for it, stepping into pull-up jumpers that kept finding the bottom of the net. Two of them, in the final 95 seconds, were the difference: a 16-footer with 1:35 left, then a step-back 14-footer with 59 seconds to go that pushed Miami ahead 112-105 and finally broke Sacramento's resistance. Davion Mitchell's calm free throws in the last 24 seconds closed it out at 114-108.

But the same player who sealed the win also nearly gave it away. Antetokounmpo went 1-for-7 from the free-throw line, turned the ball over five times, and at one stage missed both ends of a trip to the stripe that would have iced the game — only for De'Andre Hunter to drill a 30-foot three at the other end and keep the Kings alive. Kings head coach Doug Christie could not resist a jab afterwards, pointing at the shot profile and saying his team would live with Giannis shooting contested mid-range jumpers. "Tonight, he knocked them down," Christie said. "I'll watch him next game, and he probably won't."

Miami did not need to apologise for the win. Thompson finished with 23 points on seven three-pointers, Bam Adebayo added 18 points and eight rebounds, and Mitchell ran the show with 17 points and 11 assists — his sixth double-double of the season. The Heat shot 18 of 43 from deep, built a 68-59 half-time lead behind a 13-4 run to close the second quarter, and improved to 4-6.

For Sacramento, the numbers were bleak and the story was familiar. Rookie Darius Acuff Jr. was superb again — 32 points, 10 assists and five rebounds — but the Kings fell to 1-9, matching the worst 10-game start in franchise history, and lost a fifth straight game at home. The club also announced during the game that it had traded second-year wing Nique Clifford to the Oklahoma City Thunder, another signal that a season barely two weeks old is already being reshaped.

The Heat fly on to Utah on Tuesday. The Kings, meanwhile, are running out of ways to explain a start this bad — and running out of time for the explanations to matter.