As Kings losses mount, Sacramento fans rally around fundraising effort

It started as a simple, perhaps half-baked tweet.

Will Griffith has written nearly 13,000 tweets in his years on Twitter. As co-founder of The Kings Herald, a fan-run website that covers the Sacramento Kings, Twitter is home base for Griffith. He tweets a lot.

The Kings’ season was sliding away last week. They’d lost four straight games and Griffith was tired of all the same conversations about trades and the coach. So he tweeted: “I’m not paying for merch or the home games and instead, I’m going to donate $10 for every Kings loss this season to a local charity.”

What started with a semi-serious tweet quickly evolved into a charity drive that has raised at least $1,500 for Sacramento-area nonprofits.

“It started off as a bit of a strike with a twist,” Griffith said Wednesday. “I think we’re sucking in more and more people because they realize it’s more than that. Dog shelters and lupus foundations are benefiting from this. It’s not some lone idiot spending his money to give a middle finger to the Kings.

“The basketball is almost secondary, because when the Kings lose, everybody else in Sacramento wins one way or another. It’s taken a lot of pain and frustration and turned it into something positive.”

It’s just as well that the basketball games are secondary. We don’t need to belabor the point for Kings fans, but the season has slid down the tubes in January. The Kings were on a seven-game losing streak entering Wednesday’s tilt with the Brooklyn Nets. Fans want the team to trade almost every player and tank the season in order to get a good spot in next summer’s NBA draft.

Sure, wins would be nice; but a loss means a boon for whichever local nonprofit Griffith features in a tweet after the game.

Griffith named his effort “Operation: Money for Charities and Nonprofits as Incompetence Restitution.” The acronym, MCNAIR, is for Kings general manager Monte McNair, who is under fire from fans to do something, anything really, with the Kings’ roster.

Griffith is quick to say the name is not a shot at McNair, but an easy, cheeky reference to the Kings franchise as a whole.

After a loss, Griffith tweets out a picture showing his donation to a local charity. Fans get into his replies with pictures of their own receipts. Griffith tallies up the total on a notepad. It’s a swirl of feel-good cheer amid a Kings season that hasn’t provided much to cheer for.

The first night, after a loss to the Hawks, raised $330.50. The second night, Griffith raised $413.43. The third night, Griffith tallied about $530. And it could be even more than that, as not everybody reports their donations to Griffith. There is an unconfirmed report that more than $1,000 flooded into the Food Literacy Center after the Kings’ most recent loss. After a different loss, Kings fans broke the donation button on the Child Abuse Prevention Council website because it couldn’t handle the influx of clicks.

The flood of goodwill has, at times, made Griffith and others emotional. Their team might be very, very bad, but the people of Sacramento are capable of being very, very good.

“I was shocked. I can be kind of a petty person. I’m not above getting down in the dirt (on Twitter),” Griffith said. “(That first night) I got choked up. I turned to my partner and said, ‘I’m doing it and it’s not just me.’ It was a surprise to say the least.”

Longtime Kings fan and former season ticket holder Jill Adge is one of those fans leading the surprise. She hosts a podcast about the Kings, “SportsEthos Sacramento Kings.” Adge said Griffith’s nonprofit push is a fitting tribute to the city of Sacramento and the Kings’ fans.

“I think it captures Sacramento fans pretty perfectly,” she said. “... This year, you’ve seen numbers be down (of fans in the crowd at games) and whether that be because people are upset at the team, be it COVID, or all of the above, this is a way people can still support Sacramento without it having to have a label on it.

“It just goes to show that we know (the Kings aren’t good), but this is a way we can still do something good out of it.”

Devin Blankenship, who worked in media relations for the Kings from 1999 to 2013, has seen the power of Sacramento fans before. He was there in the early 2000s and said the atmosphere in the city was electric when the team was winning games and a championship contender. International media personalities flocked to Sacramento to write stories about the team. Sacramentans felt like they were in the place to be.

He was also there when the Maloof brothers tried to move the team to Seattle and witnessed a fan uprising that helped quash the plan.

Blankenship has donated to the fundraising effort every night. He’s just a fan now. It’s all he can do to take the narrative back on a season gone awry.

“It’s such a helpless feeling being a fan, you feel like you can’t do anything, and I just thought Will really tapped into giving the fans an ability to take the narrative back,” Blankenship said. “If the team is not gonna generate good headlines, then the fans are. The Kings’ brand, let’s make sure we say this, this is the best part of the organization. It doesn’t surprise me at all. The fans are incredible.”

With apathetic results on the court and the Kings playing to an arena that sometimes looks half full, it would be easy to say the fans have given up on the team. Griffith says his fundraising efforts prove the opposite.

“There’s a lot of talk that the fanbase is dead,” Griffith said. “The apathy is so much they’re never getting it back. Even I myself fell into that. You get frustrated and you quit. I still see it every single day on Twitter, people doing that.

“What this did though, to me, it proved we didn’t go anywhere. Sacramento as a whole has a heart. As soon as they had a chance to rally around something positive about the Kings, they jumped on it. … To me, we just want something to believe in. That’s all Sac wants to do. They would rally behind a motocross team if they presented it the right way.”

As of Thursday morning, the Kings still have 29 games left in the season. That’s $290 of Griffith’s money in donations if, God forbid, they lose every one of them. That kind of run would set an NBA record for futility and it’s beyond unlikely to happen. Still, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. After a recent loss to the 76ers, a Philadelphia beat writer tweeted that fans in his area could donate to the cause. That’s fine with Griffith. Whatever works.

“I will take your pity money,” he said. “If it’s going to charity in Sacramento, I will take any trash-talk money you want to send.”

How to donate

Follow him on Twitter (https://twitter.com/WillofThaPeople) and send him a picture of your donation to the charity of the night. Not on Twitter or you want to keep your donation private? You can email a picture of a donation receipt to donations@kingsherald.com and your good deed will go toward the cause.

This story was originally published February 3, 2022 at 5:00 AM.