This post contains strong language. Viewer discretion is advised.

Ha ha ha. Just kidding. They're still huge fucking idiots.

The more things change, my friends, the more they stay the same.

One has to believe that the Maloofs finally decided to sell the team after exhausting their list of Maloof Money Making Ideas, ideas which I happened to find written on a Crazy Horse napkin in a stall at the Natomas Buffalo Wild Wings along with the phone number of a girl named Nitro (just in case their reading this, the number she left you was (916) 555-4%^9, so, seems pretty promising):

And so here we are, with the Maloofs selling the team to Seattle. I enjoyed that Sonics fans, about a third of whom (I'm looking at you Zombies) have spent the last few years giving a tutorial on how not to behave after a franchise is relocated, started showing up out of the ether to tell Sacramento fans, "It's okay, we'll understand if you hate us."” Like we give a fuck about how Seattle fans feel about us at the moment. Jesus Seattle, dont flatter yourself. If were going to hate you it's not going to be because of the Kings. It's going to be for the same reasons everyone else hates Seattle: for giving the world Niles Crane, the Presidents of the United States of America and Pete Carroll, Credible NFL Coach. We won't resent you for getting the Kings. We're adults. We'll resent you for getting the Kings without getting the Maloofs. You're being allowed to get drunk without ever experiencing a hangover, while Sacramento has been force fed a steady diet of Steel Reserve and Taaka vodka cocktails.

Sacramento, for the better part of the last five years, has been stuck in one of those situations where the owners of a house move to another town and rent said house to college kids. College kids who are conscientious, but only to the extent any college kid is conscientious, and most college kids consider "“if it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown flush it down"” as the apex of conscientiousness. Only in this case the problem is less the college kids living in the house and more the owners of the house, owners who happen to be far less responsible and way more into 19-year-old girls and Rohypnol than their tenants, and who have no interest in flushing their toilets, no matter what's in them. And if you've looked at the Maloofs you have to imagine whatever is in a Maloof toilet is particularly unpleasant.

We resent the owners you get versus the owners we had. Everything — that's not an overstatement — literally everything the Maloofs have touched has turned to shit: Budweiser distributorships, Las Vegas casinos, NBA franchises, WNBA franchises, Dina Lohan reality shows (I suppose something can't be turned into shit when it already is shit but you get the idea). Seriously, now that they're unemployed the Maloofs should just be hired as mercenaries by the CIA to run rogue countries into the ground. Places like Syria and Libya would have a much harder time committing human rights atrocities when the Maloofs are busy redirecting their resources to gold-plated Oakleys and Lincoln Memorialesque statues of Gavin Maloof getting blown by Tamara Ecclestone. They'd be sort of like the anti-Banes.

Whatever cold comfort Kings fans can take in all of this is pretty much exclusively related to Maloof schadenfreude, and thankfully there are cases of Screaming Eagle Cabernet of that to go around. There's that old F. Scott Fitzgerald line about how there are no second acts in American lives. Sports franchise owners have always been exceptions to this. Think about the number of objectively awful owners who have been given opportunities to redeem their franchises and by extension themselves. George Shinn. James Dolan. Fucking Donald Sterling. I realize Donald Sterling is a slumlord, and a terrible human being, but do you think any Clipper fan is preoccupying themselves with that when a team coached by Vinny Fucking Del Negro is tied for the leagues best record?!?

The Maloofs can't even be Donald Sterling.

But I don't think not being Donald Sterling bothers the brothers nearly as much as the other reality. The Reality reality. The Maloofs have now gotten exactly what they didn't want. No, not losing their NBA franchise. It's what losing their NBA franchise condemns them to. They're irrelevant. They have less a place in the popular culture than Honey Boo-Boo's pet pig, and at least that pig broke ground for gay television animals everywhere. They're only useful in their uselessness. They are being forced into the one thing they hate more than neutral smelling soaps and women with undergraduate degrees: anonymity. They must face a world where being a Maloof is no more glamorous than being a Biegler. And anyone who's seen my father and I at the Bonn Lair after 11 p.m. on a Saturday knows that that's saying something. I'm just waiting for George to attempt to find the 20-something son of a rock star that he can start dating. Though given George's dating history and general decision-making ability I feel like he's going to end up in a fairly serious relationship with a red-headed Axl Rose pube. It should be noted, Ric Bucher thinks the pube is beautiful, so back off haters, you Sacramentans, you're just all desperate haters, stop embarrassing yourselves.

However this all turns out, I said this before and I meant it, and I believe it's a sentiment shared with many people here. I'd rather have the Kings moved to Seattle and rid of the Maloofs than I would the team stay here and the city even have to sniff the brothers' literal and figurative shit-stains. That's how much I care, I think we all care, about this franchise. A care not shared by owners who have finally set the fanbase free… at the fanbase's expense.

It'll be a hell of a next couple of months. Or the next couple of months will be Hell. Either way, someone pass me that Steel Reserve.