Honoring Kings That Made Sactown Relevant

Via FanHouse, Kings Blog reports that the team will retire Chris Webber and Vlade Divac’s numbers on March 31. The date is no accident; that’s when Peja Stojakovic, also a member of those classic teams, will return to town with the Hornets. Those Hornets that seem to have every kind of god, luck, and basketball cliche on their hands, while the Kings will be known forever as something between chokers and just plain unlucky.↵
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↵But Kings Blog sets this up as “remember[ing] the good times,” which since today’s Kings are sorry beyond belief, is a safe, little gesture. What’s more, I suspect history will think on those Kings teams fondly, the way it does the Run-TMC Warriors. So they didn’t win a title. So their best player, who revived his career there and became an MVP-candidate, lacked that necessary ingredient to close out games (if that traditional formula ever applied to them, anyway), and instead had to delegate to Mike Bibby. And what if they never got past the Lakers, threw some games away, and had to deal with immeasurable sadness -- them, their fans, and all those around the country who had become fascinated with them.↵
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↵Those were good times. Heart-wrenching ones, yeah, but those teams were damn relevant. They made the franchise matter, made a lot of other teams think outside of the box (before the Suns), and were as consistently fun to watch as any playoff team during those years. And, while getting close is agonizing and murder and suffering and eternal purgatory and all, up until that point it’s a lot of fun. So Sacramento Kings of the early 21st century, this one’s for you. I don’t usually tune into number retirement ceremonies, but I won’t miss this one.↵