Once again, they're the vagabond Kings – about to flee the most stable home they have ever known.

The Sacramento Kings' likely move to Anaheim would be their fourth relocation since joining the NBA in 1948. That's apparently a record for mobility in North American major league sports.

It speaks to the futility that has dogged the team for most of its history. Rarely loved, often ignored, the Kings failed to catch on in Rochester, N.Y., Cincinnati and Kansas City, Mo., before coming west.

Their 26-year run in Sacramento is their longest anywhere – in many ways, the franchise's golden era. For years the team played to passionate, sellout crowds in Sacramento, and it was a serious contender a decade ago.

Now, with attendance down and the team losing, wanderlust has reappeared. The Kings' owners, the Maloofs, face a deadline of next Monday to file for relocation.

This week will be an important one for the team, and for Sacramento. The Maloofs are expected to brief their fellow NBA team owners at a board meeting in New York on Thursday and Friday. Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, meanwhile, will ask the NBA to keep the team here.

While the Maloofs aren't commenting, their reasons for exploring a move should be depressingly familiar to residents of Rochester, Cincinnati and Kansas City: small-market economics, an inadequate arena and an inability to compete consistently against the elite teams.

Former owner Gregg Lukenbill offers another reason for the team's footloose ways: the NBA's refusal to aid struggling franchises with extensive revenue sharing, as football does.

"The common denominator is the way the NBA is run," said Lukenbill, who moved the team to Sacramento from Kansas City in 1985.

That, plus bad luck and bad decisions that have followed the team.

As the Rochester Royals, they blew a chance to sign future legend Bill Russell out of college. A big game in Cincinnati was bumped to a college fieldhouse because of the circus. The roof caved in on Kansas City's arena in 1979, forcing the Kings to spend most of the year in a building half the size.

Often the team has been treated like an interloper, even in terms of identity. In Kansas City, the Royals changed their name to the Kings to avoid confusion with the city's baseball team. Now they're likely to become the Royals again, in deference to hockey's Los Angeles Kings.

"They have just never seemed to find the best and healthiest home for the franchise," said Paul Swangard, a University of Oregon sports business expert. "They just seem to go to the next green pasture."

Humble beginnings

The Kings aren't sports' only nomads. The Oakland A's and Atlanta Braves have moved twice. So have the Oakland Raiders, St. Louis Rams, Arizona Cardinals and Los Angeles Clippers.

But the Kings are about to set the record. Since 1900, according to Wikipedia, only one major league team can match them for meandering: the NBA's Atlanta Hawks, who have moved three times since starting in Moline, Ill. The Kings' move to Anaheim would snap the tie.

Alongside Moline; Fort Wayne, Ind.; and Syracuse, N.Y., Rochester, in the heart of the upstate New York snow belt, was right at home in the early, barnstorming days of the NBA, a league of small gyms and small towns.

The Royals began as a semi-pro team, playing opponents like the Harlem Globetrotters. In 1948, they joined the fledgling NBA. Their home was 4,200-seat Edgerton Park Sports Arena.

Their owner and founder, Les Harrison, also coached the team. In 1951 the Royals won the franchise's only NBA title, beating New York.

But already the team was in financial stress. Attendance came to just 2,000 or 3,000 for most home games. Without revenue sharing, those meager ticket sales made up the bulk of the Royals' revenue.

In 1956, Harrison passed up a chance to draft Russell, picking the forgettable Si Green instead. One likely factor was money: Russell demanded $25,000 and threatened to play for the Globetrotters, according to Rochester History magazine. He wound up leading Boston to multiple titles.

The Royals did move to a bigger arena. But they could no longer compete in a league that was increasingly cosmopolitan, dominated by the New Yorks and Bostons.

"It was just a matter of time before we had to give up," Harrison said years later.

The Royals finished in last place in 1957, and Harrison announced the move to Cincinnati shortly after the season ended. "The trend of the National Basketball Association is toward larger, major-league cities," he said.

Next stop, Cincinnati

Cincinnati was bigger – but not big enough, apparently.

The 11,000-seat Cincinnati Gardens was rarely filled for Royals' games. Within a year, Harrison tried to sell out to a Rochester man, to move the team back. The NBA blocked the deal, and new owners in Cincinnati stepped up.

The team became a contender for a while, thanks to the league's old "territorial" draft system, which gave the Royals the rights to area college stars like Oscar Robertson.

Even so, the team gained little respect. A second-round playoff game against Boston in 1963 summed it up.

Owner Louis Jacobs didn't think the team would get that far in the playoffs, and booked the Shrine Circus for the Gardens. The game was moved to a 3,500-seat fieldhouse. The Royals lost the game and eventually the series.

"That's still brought up today, like they didn't have faith in the team," said John Perin, a Cincinnati sports historian.

The team left in 1972. The new home was a hybrid, Kansas City and Omaha. The renamed Kings failed to make an impression on either city.

The Omaha experiment lasted three years, and Kansas Citians were preoccupied with the Chiefs and Royals. It didn't help that the NBA's popularity was at low ebb.

"It wasn't the hottest league in the world at the time, and the Kings were for the most part a middle-of-the-road franchise," said Gary Heise, a longtime Kansas City sports executive.

He said suspicions arose when a group led by Lukenbill, a Sacramento developer, bought the Kings in 1983.

Lukenbill insists he tried to keep the team in Kansas City. But the city wouldn't give him the lucrative lease at Kemper Arena he needed to make the team viable, he said.

"I was stymied politically by the city," he said. "They didn't really care if the franchise stayed or not."

Lukenbill announced the Kings' relocation to Sacramento on Jan. 21, 1985. He knew Sacramento was another small market, but thought its state-capital status would help make it work.

"I believed Sacramento was a positive, being a native Californian," he said.

But the team struggled on and off the court, and Lukenbill sold out in 1992.

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