Sacramento Kings

The Sacramento Kings are a professional basketball team based in Sacramento, California. The Kings are a member of the National Basketball Association (NBA).

Franchise history

The franchise that would become the Sacramento Kings initially started in the city of Rochester, New York, as the Rochester Royals of the National Basketball League.

At the conclusion of World War II, the United States lacked a major professional basketball league. The National Basketball League decided to fill that void by stepping up from a regional semi-pro league into the nation's premier professional basketball loop. One of the top professional teams in the country was the Rochester Pros, an independent barnstorming team run by Lester Harrison. They were invited to join the NBL for the 1945-46 season. The team, which had long been known as the Seagrams before briefly adopting the nickname "Pros", held a name-the-team contest and selected the nickname "Royals".

Success for the Royals was almost immediate. Founded in 1945 by owner/coach/general manager Les Harrison (Hall of Famer) and his brother and co-owner/business manager Jack Harrison, the team won the NBL championship in 1945-46. The team was led by Bob Davies, Al Cervi, George Glamack, and Otto Graham, a future NFL Hall of Famer, who, in his only season in professional basketball, won a league championship before moving on to football and leading the Cleveland Browns to ten straight championship games, winning seven.

The following season, NBL Governors voted that the regular season "Pennant Winner" would be declared as the official NBL Champion, and the post-season would consist of a separate, non-championship tournament. The Royals finished 31-13 (.705), capturing their second NBL Championship in as many years, but lost in the post-season tournament finals to the Chicago American Gears.

The following season the NBL scrapped their one-year "pennant" experiment, and from that point forward the post-season playoffs would determine the NBL Champion. The Royals again finished with the league's best overall record at 44-16, but lost to George Mikan's Minneapolis Lakers 3 games to 1 in the NBL Finals.

In 1948, the Royals moved to the Basketball Association of America along with the Fort Wayne Pistons, Minneapolis Lakers, and Indianapolis (Kautskys) Jets. A year later, the BAA merged with the NBL to become the National Basketball Association.

The Royals won the NBA title in 1951 by defeating the New York Knickerbockers 4 games to 3. It was the last championship in the franchise's history to date.

The Royals twelve-year stay in Rochester featured the services of nine future members of the Basketball Hall of Fame, one member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and a Hollywood Walk of Famer: Al Cervi, Bob Davies, Alex Hannum, Les Harrison, Red Holzman, Arnie Risen, Maurice Stokes, Jack Twyman, Bobby Wanzer, Otto Graham, and Chuck Connors.

Cincinnati

Logo used in CincinnatiIn 1957, the Royals were moved to Cincinnati, Ohio by the Harrison brothers. The two top stars moving with the team were Maurice Stokes and Jack Twyman. Stokes' promising career ended tragically due to a brain injury that resulted from a fall during a playoff game at Detroit in 1958. Twyman became Stokes' legal guardian and remained so until Maurice's death in 1970. Twyman was the first Royal to average 30 points per game for a season. Both are Hall of Famers. The move to Cincinnati was not initially a financial success. Despite making the playoffs for the first time in three seasons the Royals would suffer another losing season at the gate. An opportunity to end all the team's financial problems seemed a certainty after the Harrison brothers brokered a deal with Rochester concessionaire Arnold Shapiro to sell controlling interest in the team to him. Shapiro then would have moved the team back to Western New York for the 1958-59 season. Under the new ownership of Shapiro the Harrisons could then have continued their roles with Les as General Manager and Jack as Business Manager. The reason that the sale and relocation to Rochester failed was because at the time the NBA was negotiating with a major television network to carry the league's games on a select basis. The league did not view Rochester as a "Major League" city and refused to grant the authorization of the sale. Without the league's OK to sell the team back to Rochester interests the Harrisons reluctantly sold the Royals to Cincinnati owners.

The team's star players throughout the 1960s were Oscar Robertson and Jerry Lucas. Robertson met with individual success, averaging a triple-double in 1961-62 and winning the Most Valuable Player award in 1964. Robertson was a league-leading scorer and passer each season. Lucas was Rookie Of the Year in 1964, led the league in shooting, and later averaged 20 rebounds per game over three seasons. Both were All-NBA First Team selections multiple times. The Royals were an also-ran throughout the era anyway. The team failed to keep promising players and played in the tough NBA East division, dominated by the Boston Celtics, even as a Baltimore team played in the West Division for three years, denying the team likely visits to the NBA Finals.

In 1966, the team was sold to a pair of brothers named Max and Jeremy Jacobs. That same season, the Royals began playing some of their home games in neutral sites such as Cleveland (until the Cavaliers began play in 1970), Dayton & Columbus, which was the norm for the rest of the Royals tenure in the Queen City.

New coach Bob Cousy, a loyal Boston Celtic, traded Lucas in 1969. Robertson was traded in 1970, and the declining team left Cincinnati shortly thereafter, moving to Kansas City, Missouri.

Kansas City/Omaha
Renamed the Kings (because the community already had the Kansas City Royals baseball team, the basketball team agreed to change its nickname, even though it had used the name for 25 years before the baseball team was established), the team initially divided its home games between Kansas City and Omaha until 1978, when it abandoned the Omaha market. During that time the team was officially called the "Kansas City-Omaha Kings". The team netted a new superstar in Nate Archibald, who led the league in scoring and assists.

While still in Cincinnati, the Kings introduced a most unusual uniform design, which placed the player's surname BELOW his number. The design remained intact through the first several seasons of the team's run in Sacramento, even when the shade of blue on the road uniforms was changed from royal blue to powder blue, and the script "Kansas City" which adorned the road jerseys was scrubbed after the move in favor of a repeat of the "Kings" script on the home shirts.

The Kings had some decent players throughout. Tom Van Arsdale, the shooting forward, "Jumpin" Johnny Green, and Matt Guokas helped Archibald in the first year in Kansas City. Toby Kimball was a fan favorite. Jimmy Walker teamed with Archibald as the Kings made the playoffs the second year. Sam Lacey, an effective passing center, became one of the most dependable players in the league. However, the management traded Archibald, and wasted high draft picks. Bob Cousy gave way to Phil Johnson, who was fired midyear in 1977 and replaced by Larry Staverman, a player on the team on two separate occasions when it was in Cincinnati and who later became the Cleveland Indians groundskeeper.

The Kings finally achieved some success in their new home when they hired Cotton Fitzsimmons as coach. Coach Fitzsimmons won the Midwest Division in 1978-79 with rookie point guard Phil Ford. Kansas City was led by shooting guard Otis Birdsong, strong on both offense and defense, all around shooting forward Scott Wedman, and passing center Sam Lacey, who had a trademark 25 foot bank shot. They also drew an average of 10,789 fans to Kemper Arena that season, it was the only time during their tenure in KC that average attendance was in the five figures. The Kings made the playoffs in 1979-1980 and again in 1980-1981, despite finishing the regular season at 40-42.

In the 1980-81 season, the Kings made a surprise run in the NBA Playoffs, reaching the Western Conference Finals. Big Ernie Grunfeld played the point in this run, as KC used a slow half court game to win the first two rounds. Power forward Reggie King had a remarkable series, dominating the opposition.

However, a series of bad luck incidents prevented the team from building on its success. Ted Stepien, owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers lured Wedman and Birdsong away with big contract offers, the roof literally fell in at Kemper Arena because of a winter storm, forcing the team to play most of the 1979-80 season at Municipal Auditorium, and the ownership group sold the team to Sacramento interests for just eleven million dollars. The general manager was fired in a bizarre scandal in which he was found to be reusing marked postal stamps. When the Kings rehired Joe Axelson as general manager, they brought back the man who had previously traded superstars Oscar Robertson, Norm Van Lier, Nate Archibald and Jerry Lucas, and used the third pick in the ABA dispersal draft on Ron Boone. Axelson would stay on after the Kings left Kansas City where, in their last game ever, fans wore Joe Axelson masks. Axelson later would say he hoped his plane would never touch down in Kansas City.

Axelson later would be the first general manager in the history of sports to fail with the same franchise in four different cities: Cincinnati, Kansas City, Omaha and Sacramento. He would not be fired for good until he rehired as coach Phil Johnson, whom he had fired in midseason in Kansas City ten years before. The Kings also had the misfortune of entering this period competing with the Kansas City Comets for the winter sports dollar, when the Comets were led by marketing geniuses the Leiweke brothers. Their final season, 1984-85, resulted in a dismal 31-51 record as fans stayed away from Kemper Arena in droves, with average attendance of just 6,410. The writing was on the wall for Kansas City.

Sacramento

The Kings moved west to their current home of Sacramento, California, in 1985-86. Much of their early tenure in Sacramento was spent in the NBA's cellar, and the team made the playoffs only once between 1985 and 1995. Some of their failure to succeed was attributed to unimaginable disaster, such as the virtually career-ending car crash suffered by promising point guard Bobby Hurley, the tragic suicide of Ricky Berry and some was attributed to poor management such as the too-long tenure of head coach Garry St. Jean and the selection of "Never Nervous" Pervis Ellison with the first overall pick in the 1989 NBA Draft.

**wikipedia.org