Living the Beam: How the Kings’ laser celebration gives the team — and Sacramento — a boost
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Is the beam more than just a meme?
The Sacramento Kings, a franchise entrenched in the longest playoff drought in NBA history after missing the postseason in each of the past 16 seasons, may finally be finding their footing.
The Kings, now #BeamTeam, are 11-9 after whipsawing the Indiana Pacers Wednesday night, 137-114, breaking a three-game losing streak.
If you didn’t watch the game, weren’t monitoring your phone, didn’t hear your neighbors’ cheers, you tapped into one of ways to find out: You just looked up and saw the purple light. You can add this to how to speak Sacramento: Kings win, Light the Beam.
The Golden I fans know it now, and chanted “Light the Beam” early in Wednesday’s game. Guard Malik Monk, with 50 Cent on hand, got the honors and fired the now-famous purple beacon straight up the sky over DoCo.
After each Kings victory this season, staff at Golden 1 Center have blasted that ray of light toward the heavens using a quartet of high-powered lasers. The beam is the Kings winning bat signal, an attention-getting symbol of the fun of winning brightening the humble skyline of downtown Sacramento.
“I just like the notion that this just goes into outer space,” Kings owner Vivek Ranadivé said in a Nov. 17 interview with NBC Sports California. “It goes farther than the human eye can see. As a tech guy, having four lasers beaming into outer space is kind of cool.”
Monk joined what is already a traditional ceremony. After home wins, a Kings player or personality gets the honor of hitting the almost-comically-large purple button that lights the beam, after briefly addressing the crowd.
Usually, it’s a player who’s coming fresh off a big performance.
It’s a simple concept, but one unique enough in the NBA that it’s given the squad a welcome moniker.
So the Kings are now the Beam Team.
And the crowd loves it.
Kings’ winning ways illuminated on big stage
The Kings have had success earl. 2022-23 season included the team’s first seven-game winning streak in 18 years.
Plenty has contributed: New coach Mike Brown, who departed his role as an assistant coach with the reigning champion Golden State Warriors; big man Domantas Sabonis and sharpshooter Kevin Huerter, each acquired this calendar year in separate trades; and fleet-footed point guard De’Aaron Fox, looking more like an All-Star with each game.
Last month, the Kings entered perhaps their biggest spotlight of the past several years, with a Nov. 15 home contest against the Brooklyn Nets marking Sacramento’s first home game to be nationally televised on TNT since 2018.
They incinerated the Kevin Durant-led visitors, 153-121.
Terence Davis, who dropped 31 points, got the honors.
“Light the beam!” he bellowed into the microphone from the sideline, twice, to end his postgame interview.
The Beam Team screams only grew louder from there: Wins over the San Antonio Spurs on Nov. 17 and the Detroit Pistons on Nov. 20 put the finishing touches on a 4-0 home stand in which the Kings posted a stunning 136 points per game.
With less than 2 minutes left and the Kings putting the finishing touches on the win over the Pistons, fans at Golden 1 could be heard loud and clear on the TV broadcast as forward Harrison Barnes padded the lead with free throws, roaring the now-familiar refrain ushered in by Davis and others: “Light the beam.”
Sabonis pulled beam duty that evening, after posting 15 points with 13 rebounds in a 137-129 victory.
The squad soared in the official NBA.com power rankings, from 26th after Week 4 to 12th after Week 6, where they stayed in Week 7. The Kings briefly owned the league’s highest-scoring offense, though have since dropped to No. 2.
Kings beam is a merchandising dream
Impound Comics made the quick decision in mid-November to get in on the beam action.
Following the Kings’ big win over the Nets on Nov. 15, crowds outside the arena began the three-word chant.
Eighteen hours later, the downtown comic book store began selling purple T-shirts with “Light the Beam Sacramento” written in white lettering, Impound owner Brent Sands said.
An initial order of 100 shirts sold out very fast. The next 500 arrived this Wednesday, Sands said, just in time for another home game.
“We kind of just did it as a test, to see if anybody would care,” Sands said. “And they definitely cared.”
The Kings Herald, an independent fan blog, put “Beam Team”-themed merchandise up for sale the same day as Impound. Other unofficial, fan-crafted gear has popped up on websites like Etsy. Some of the most dramatic include depictions of purple lasers shooting out of Fox and Sabonis’ eyes.
The Kings now want to codify the rallying cry. The organization on Nov. 21 filed an application for a trademark on the term, “BEAMTEAM,” a search of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s registry shows.
If acquired, the trademark would give the Kings legal dominion of that nickname in basketball-related contexts.
Sands, who opened Impound Comics at Downtown Commons in the summer of 2021, likened the beam movement to the “Beat LA” chants that rang out at Arco Arena during the now-infamous Kings-Lakers conference championship series in 2002.
Sands said he can’t recall any Kings phenomenon quite like the victory beam in at least the past two decades.
How the beam came to be
The team first made the announcement of the beam on Sept. 16, aka “916 Day,” a celebration of Sacramento’s area code.
But the lasers sat dormant during an 0-4 start. They were first lit Oct. 29, when the Kings beat the Miami Heat at home.
As the wins piled up, Ranadivé explained that he wanted to create a unique spectacle.
He gave credit for the victory beam idea to John Rinehart, the team’s president of business operations.
The idea took inspiration from another franchise that has struggled for more than a decade: Major League Baseball’s Los Angeles Angels, who light the halo on the “Big A” sign outside Angel Stadium after every win.
Rinehart and other business operations staff were not available for interviews about the beam this week, a team spokesperson said.
Meet the man behind the laser
The beam that emits from Golden 1 Center was made by a California-based company called Nu-Salt Laser, which calls the product its “Laser Space Cannon.”
The space cannon, per Nu-Salt Laser’s website, is a 1,000-watt RGB laser that is “six times more visible than the brightest ordinary searchlight.” The one at Golden 1 Center is made up of four lasers atop the arena’s main entrance, according to the team.
“This was a product that I invented about eight years ago, and it was to create a beacon of light in the sky that would draw people in and gather their attention,” Nu-Salt Laser owner Tim Anderson said in an interview.
Nu-Salt handles indoor and outdoor light shows for a variety of venues, mostly in California. For years prior to the installation of the grand victory beam, the company has run laser shows inside and on the facade of Golden 1 Center, Anderson said.
Anderson and his wife, who run Nu-Salt Laser out of their home and shop in Folsom started working with the Kings in the 2015-16 season – the team’s last at Arco Arena, known at that time as Sleep Train Arena.
It was a good partnership, Anderson said – but like many others, one derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which halted Kings home games starting in March 2020 and kept home attendance limited for much of 2021.
“COVID slowed everything, put a stop to it.”
Kings officials re-approached Nu-Salt Laser this year on Sept. 16 – 916 Day – and had the company conduct a demonstration, Anderson said.
The lights impressed, and the victory beam was born.
As for the logistics of actually lighting the thing, during home games, Nu-Salt Laser will have someone inside the arena and someone on the roof, with radio communications so that the operators can switch on the lasers at the appropriate time.
After a home win, that happens as soon as the honored sideline guest hits the giant button. For road wins, Nu-Salt tries to light the beam as soon as the game goes final. (Saturday the Kings play the Clippers in Los Angeles. They’re back home Sunday against the Chicago Bulls.)
Anderson said Nu-Salt Laser has 13 of its lasers installed inside Golden 1 Center, which are often shot off during halftime displays, as well as four in the front that it uses to “laser trace the architecture.”
One cannot simply shoot purple lasers into the sky on a whim. Aiming a laser at an aircraft is a federal crime, after all.
Like any venue operating an outdoor laser pointing skyward, the team had to get permission from the Federal Aviation Administration, to ensure the beam does not disrupt airspace. Under this authorization, Golden 1 Center keeps the beam on until midnight.
Bring on the beam memes
The beam has snowballed into an undeniable phenomenon in recent weeks, fueled by the Kings’ winning ways, the team’s exciting offense and – well, it’s a giant laser. What’s not to like?
The Kings fan page on Reddit (still sardonically topped with the header, “Welcome to Basketball Hell”) has been flooded for weeks with memes riffing on the beam.
Naturally, most are sci-fi-themed.
In one Star Wars GIF, Starkiller Base is labeled “Golden 1 Center” as it shoots gigantic purple lasers, blowing up planets marked with logos for the four teams the Kings had most recently bested.
In a similar GIF, one user interpolated the Kings logo atop Star Trek’s USS Enterprise as it blasted purple phasers at another cluster of team logos.
‘Beneficial to everyone’: DoCo loves the beam
The recent streak and beam festivities provided a “complete transformation at DoCo,” said Sands, the Impound Comics owner. They’ve boosted crowd size and lifted spirits, he said.
“Having a good basketball team is the economy of downtown. The better the odds of them actually becoming a playoff team ... it’s beneficial to everyone.”
Before Monday’s home contest against the Phoenix Suns, which the Kings lost 122-117, Sands said Downtown Commons and his store saw “by far a bigger crowd” than on a typical Monday.
“As long as they keep winning ... honestly I think, even if they don’t keep winning, it’s kind of a new beacon of hope.”
This story was originally published December 2, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
