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In a league with short cycles like the NBA, where a team can go from the sewers to the bourgeoisie in a few seasons if things are done right, the Sacramento Kings have earned the nickname of cursed project, infinite Titanic if you prefer. . The Californians, after losing in the early hours of Sunday to Monday against the Golden State Warriors (90-109), certified their absence from the playoffs for another season and set a new milestone in terms of poor results: for the sixteenth consecutive year They will not be in the race for the title, the worst streak in the history of the NBA and the second worst in the United States today, only surpassed by the Seattle Mariners of the baseball league (MLB), who have been without options for 20 years of glory
It is difficult to find a single reason to justify the malpractice of the Kings, a team that at the beginning of the century had the almighty Lakers of Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant in the finals of the western conference and that today they do not find good news or by chance.
Since 2006, 12 coaches have passed through his bench, some renowned as Paul Westphal (he reached the 1992 NBA finals with the Phoenix Suns), George Karl or Michael Malone (current manager of the Denver Nuggets), and none of them did not even end with a positive regular season win record. In sports, everything has been tried, from veteran teams to squads made up of promising youngsters, and a mixture of both. Nothing has worked and even when it comes to selecting talent in the draft, things haven’t been much better.
It will always remain in the memory of Kings fans how the sports management, led by Vlade Divac in 2019, chose Marvin Bagley over Luka Doncic. Blagley, after countless frictions with the franchise, was traded to the Pistons in the middle of last season and the Slovenian is one of the best players in the league. Divac left the team shortly after. “It is difficult, but a lot has to do with stability. Since I came to Sacramento, it’s just me and (De’Aaron) Fox. We’re the only two people in the entire organization that are still here, and I’ve been here four seasons,” forward Harrison Barnes said after the loss to the Warriors.
the city of cows
The curses, the bad luck… The Sacramento Kings, champions in 1951, have always had problems. In 2002, with players of the stature of Mike Bibby, Peja Stojakovic, Chris Webber and the aforementioned Divac among their ranks, were about to beat the Lakers. Such was the pressure exerted during those playoffs on the Angelenos that even their coach, the legendary Phill Jackson, lost his usual temper and called Sacramento “the city of cows”, the “semi-civilization”, a mockery because the great California’s capital industry is ranching.
The tie, considered one of the best of all time, went to seven games (4-3 for the Lakers), the last four were decided in the last seconds and some of them at the buzzer, with such emblematic shots like Robert Horry’s. But it was the sixth that built the cursed mythology of the Kings. In it, with the tie 3-2 in favor of those from the capital, the arbitration was very much in favor of the Lakers, who managed to shoot until 27 free throws in the last four. “I played a game in which very strange things happened, I know what happened, I’m sure,” Webber slipped a few years ago about an alleged fix.
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