How bad are the Kings? Let’s count the miserable ways and place the blame where it belongs
I’ve reached a crisis point in my torturous, soul-crushing journey as a fan of the Sacramento Kings.
I know, I know. It’s a crisis every year being a Kings fan. We’re always on the razor’s edge of anguish. We’re always Charlie Brown running to kick the football in hapless belief that our team will finally start to win after 15 years of losing.
Fifteen. Years. Of. Losing.
But then, as sure as the sunrise, we realize too late that the ball has been pulled away from us. Our hopes for the Kings prove to be as emotionally sensible as forcefully kicking at thin air.
We always fall to the ground in a heap, swearing to never get suckered again ... until the next time.
It never changes.
It never improves.
The only luck we’ve ever had is bad.
Like so many others who pray and plead in purple, I’ve lived with this hurt for years.
But something in me broke in the last few weeks, as the Kings were dominated by weak teams like the Detroit Pistons, Washington Wizards and Minnesota Timberwolves. They finally won Sunday in Dallas, 121-107, before returning home to play in front of fans Tuesday at Golden 1 Center for the first time since 2020.
Don’t let that final score fool you. This is the NBA, even bad teams such as the Kings (23-34) can trounce OK ones such the Mavericks (30-26). Even though the Kings led all the way, they did manage to cough up a 21-point lead as the Mavs, at one point, closed within six.
So they finally showed some competitive fire. Finally. Don’t fall for it again. It’s just another football they’re going to pull away.
The unacceptable displays during that losing streak coincide with a milestone in Kings basketball history that once was a source of pride but now may be evidence of a curse.
Kings curse
Ten years ago on April 13, 2011, we went to the old arena thinking it would be the last time we saw the Kings in Sacramento. They were poised to move to Anaheim. All hope seemed lost. I sat in the rafters, drinking bad beer and commiserating with fans who wept when that game ended.
The Kings put up a brave fight against the playoff-bound Los Angeles Lakers. Most teams would have rested their stars for the playoffs in the last game of the season but the late great Kobe Bryant played 38 minutes. Bryant simply would not let us have a feel-good moment saying goodbye to our team.
He hit a cold-blooded 3-pointer with less than five seconds left to force overtime. Bryant scored 36 points to lead all players in scoring that night. Lakers 116, Kings 108.
As we now know, that wasn’t the last night of the Sacramento Kings. We got a reprieve, the team stayed, the community rallied and a new Kings ownership group was formed with Vivek Ranadivé, a guy we had never heard of, at the top. No one really cared or paid much mind to who Ranadivé was back in those days. All that mattered was that the Kings were staying in Sacramento.
And for a few years, Kings fans viewed that night as the darkness before the dawn. That night was a source of pride and community spirit, that time we thought we had lost before we eventually won by keeping our team.
But now, 10 years later? It’s a reminder of sustained futility despite our hopes for better. I used to think of that anniversary with pride and happiness. Now it makes me angry.
I can’t believe we’re still this bad. I posted that on Twitter, prompting fans to echo disgust.
How bad was the losing streak? Before Sunday’s win over the Mavs, the Kings had dropped nine games in a row for the second time this season. A nine-game losing streak was last accomplished by this franchise in 2009. Two nine-game losing streaks are as bad losing 10 in a row.
A 10-game losing streak is the low-water mark for the Kings in Sacramento. It’s happened in 1991-92 and 1989-90, the Kings season that coincided with my arrival in Sacramento.
The Sacramento Kings were only a few years old back then. Sacramento inherited a woeful franchise from Kansas City. The first Arco Arena was like a glorified warehouse and the second wasn’t much fancier, despite how much we loved it.
The team was like a little startup, the losing was to be expected and this Bay Area transplant remembers being impressed by how passionate the fans were in Sacramento. I remember my wife being impressed by John Stockton, the now Hall of Fame point guard for the Utah Jazz.
I remember noting that the Jazz were a powerhouse despite playing in a small market in Salt Lake City. The Kings, also a small market, were nowhere near the Jazz in talent and that is still true today. It’s still stinking true today.
Truthfully, I couldn’t tell you who the Jazz owners are unless I looked it up. Their focus seems to be basketball and they have been able to re-invent themselves and stay competitive. The Kings haven’t, save for an eight-year window from 1999 to 2006 when the Kings came so close to a championship. And then it all fell apart.
From Maloofs to Ranadivé
The Maloof brothers, the previous Kings owners, ran out of money. Jim Thomas, the Los Angeles real estate guy they bought the team from, also had money problems. So did the first Kings ownership group led by Gregg Lukenbill.
But money, or a lack of it, is not the problem now. On March 26 it was announced that BowX Acquisition Corp., Ranadivé’s special purpose acquisition company, had entered into a special merger with WeWork, the flexibile space provider, in a deal that values WeWork at $9 billion.
“This company is primed to achieve profitability in the short-term, but the added long-term opportunity for growth and innovation is what made WeWork a perfect fit for BowX,” Ranadivé said in the news release announcing the deal.
The Kings are valued by Forbes Magazine at nearly $2 billion, a huge jump from the $534 million Ranadivé’s group paid for the Kings in 2013. Forbes noted that while its been a “brutal run” on the court for the Kings, the franchise has been “an innovator off if it. It partnered with Intel last year to launch the NBA’s first research and development site at Golden 1 Center to test the next generation of immersive fan experience technology.”
Ranadivé is the loudest voice in the room on leveraging technology, making the franchise a winner in that respect. But when he is the loudest voice in the room on basketball?
This curse of losing by the Kings has been haphazardly crafted one horrible decision after another, in a vacuum of leadership and in a wasteful executive structure where no one has been secure in authority. There has only been one constant: Ranadivé.
He is presiding over his eighth losing season in a row, surpassing the seven sorry seasons of losing that marked the end of the ownership group by the brothers Maloof.
We used to employ gallows humor during the Maloof era by joking that every Kings pratfall resulted in Kings fans getting “Maloofed.” What do we say now? Are we being “Viveked”?
The Kings are about to tie an NBA record of consecutive losing seasons at 15. We seem so far from being competitive that a record breaking 16th straight season of losing seasons is very plausible next season.
There is really no one else to blame but Ranadivé because he has been the unquestioned leader of the Kings during this ineptitude. That time has been marked by a revolving door of coaches and executives that Ranadivé has empowered and then undermined. The rumors about his meddling in the basketball operations of the team persist to this day and, if anything, have only gotten louder.
He is said to constantly be pitching ideas to his employees that make no sense and waste time. People working for him have learned to humor him hoping he will forget about one idea and then jump to the next. That’s not even mentioning the low lights: Firing Michael Malone as Kings coach in 2014. Giving former GM Vlade Divac a four-year extension in 2019 and then undermining him mere months later.
Let’s not review recent Kings draft picks. It’s just too painful.
This is a very successful man who was vetted and approved by the NBA. He’s spoken eloquently about civil rights. When I’ve been with him, I’ve liked him. He is very charming.
He could be an inspirational figure. But the Kings are a basketball franchise, not a high-tech company, and under Ranadivé the basketball stinks.
Feel bad, we share the pain
Here we are again, with an ownership that doesn’t produce a good product.
Everyone I know is crestfallen about this. A very important person in our region started our conversation the other day by saying he is very depressed about the Kings. What pains him is seeing rookie sensation Tyrese Halliburton (3 points in 16 minutes Sunday) seem to flag in recent weeks. The light seems to have gone out of his eyes as the losses have piled up. Opponents have a clear lane to the basket and speculation about how much longer coach Luke Walton will last persists.
You can fire another coach but that’s not going to change things. I don’t want to savage Ranadivé and fans don’t want to boo him when they return to Golden 1 Center this week, but they will.
And if they do, they will be entitled.
This community went all out to keep the Kings. They don’t deserve this and they will be justified for raining boos on the man who is responsible.
This column was changed April 20, 2021, to correct the possible destination of the Kings in 2011.
This story was originally published April 20, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
