The Sacramento Kings are continuing on the pre-Valentine’s traipse through the NBA countryside today and have stopped at a patch of wild Pop-ies with the … okay, on second thought, I’m going to stop right there. That was bad, or at least, extra bad. I’ve got that pre-All-Star Break drag that every one gets around this point in the season but woof. The Kings are in San Antonio today. The Spurs have lost eleven of their last twelve games and six of them in a row coming into tonight. It would be a pretty embarassing moment for the Kings to lose tonight, even against a team with a legend like Popovich at their helm. Okay, going to talk about something else for a second today.
Let’s talk Kings basketball blogs!
When: Monday, February 1st, 5:00 PM PT
Where: ATT Center, San Antonio, TX
TV: NBC Sports California
Radio: Sactown Sports 1140
For Your Consideration
Spur of the Moment: If you’ve read more than seven or eight words of my writing, you know that I’m a bit of a sap. Yeah, surprise, surprise – the guy that, after years of lurking, first came before your eyes asking for votes to see someone he cared about live out their dreams, who couldn’t process his own brother’s untimely demise without first see the tragic ending of Kobe and Gianna Bryant, who got so upset with his favorite childhood sports team being trash that he waxed angrily about donating to charity instead of buying tickets and merch (and accidently raised $16k and counting)… THAT guy is a bit of a sentimental fool. So don’t for a second pretend you’re surprised he has a bit to say today about Vox Media shuttering Sactown Royalty later this month.
Yes, I know that Greg covered it here a couple of weeks ago, before we knew for sure that our former home would be gone for good. I share all his sentiments – I’m sad for our friends who worked tirelessly for those sites, sad for the thousands and thousands of commenters that will be left without a sports hub dedicated to their brand of, not just basketball, but any sport they cling to for entertainment while trapped in the belly of this horrible machine.
In hindsight, we’re incredibly lucky to have gotten dropped by Vox when we did. The pandemic allowed us time to plan, time to get ourselves together financially, get support built from fans, other writers and all while basketball was on pause, for what could have (at that point) been forever. Bad basketball allowed us to hone in a little bit on what we wanted to do, what you all wanted from us, what we could and couldn’t afford to do. Imagining our group trying to recover from being dropped today? With life returning to a level of normalcy and in the midst of the best season in over a decade for the Kings? I’m not sure we’d have made it.
Sactown Royalty was… no, it still exists… Sactown Royalty IS an incredibly special place. Chase off the readers, lobotomize the comment section, ask Lakers fans to scrape away every shred of what made it a thriving place for Kings news and commentary… Sactown Royalty is still hallowed ground. We organized Here We Stay Nights, we ran off Jamal Crawford, we had coaches, GMs, reporters, hell Jerry Reynolds, reading and arguing and commenting and threatening lawsuits on the site. Sactown Royalty, even without the words of the fanbase in the comments, is a living record of all our collective grief, all our false hopes, our annual descent into basketball madness. It’s the home of CowboyRon’s hot hand, Tom Ziller’s cat, LaBradford’s credit card information, Carl Landry’s top hat, an unexpected Yeti or two. We mourned our losses, we celebrated the wins when they came and while there was the occasional threat to stab, it was the safest home for Kings fans around the world.
Going over to Sactown Royalty now is like coming home from college to find the family dog greyed and hobbled and misty eyed with cataracts. Leo Tochterman, Vince Miracle and Jordan White have done their best with what Vox has given them, namely, a scorched earth with salted top soil and moldy seed. I commend them for all they’ve had to put up with since being allowed to be Kings fans on a Kings blog. They’re the last remaining librarians in the Library of Alexandria, adding necessary books to shelves as the smoke billows up the aisles. A thankless job, that I thank them for.
Someday, hopefully a long time from now, The Kings Herald will post it’s last article. It might be a tearful good-bye from whoever the editor is then, it might just be some random preview for a game that gets scheduled previous to knowing an asteroid the size of Vox’s mistakes was falling through space on a collision course with Earth. I hope, regardless of the circumstances, we go out having earned the love, the money, the trust that you all have put into us, everyday since Kings Herald’s inception.
I know Sactown Royalty received all of our eulogies in the closing days before we left three years ago. I know this was a lot of talking about the inevitable and things we already knew, already covered. But, I warned you at the beginning, I’m a bit of a sap. Par for the course that it would take me a little extra time to process the death of something I loved.
Thanks for being here today. Long live Sactown Royalty.
Prediction
Kings win. Vox loses.
Kings: 119, Spurs:108
San Antonio is our next stop.
Face a young team that’s coached by Pop.
A win’s what we need
To hold onto our seed.
Looking past them could wind up a flop!
Shed a tear for old StR;
It was once the best Kings blog by far.
Thank God for this place
For the whole Kings fan base,
And just keep on raising the bar!
Vox couldn’t even let StR enjoy the playoffs, finally.
Vox Sux.
I bet the head honcho of Vox hates dogs, too.
Hey Jeff, it’s been a long time and the credit card information that I have no longer works. I might need a new one. My personal electric bill for my beam is too high and I fear that if I dedicated some of my Zing Vodka money I might not be able to buy more than 2% off the stocks at the store.
Thank you
Here We Pay
I think this comment was meant for someone else…?
Yeah, whatever happened to that LaBradford guy anyway?
I’ve been searching for the DMC non-high fiving double K gif – no where to be found that I can copy…
but I can find this, which is a nice tribute to the ever fun, clever wit of TKH’s own:
Mmmm. Those thick and creamy shakes…
Not sure how it ever had a chance after the first mass firings – but still sad to see.
Yo fellow Nostradumbass winner! Glad to see you around these parts again. 🙂
Hey! Yeah – I lurk from time to time but am mostly on Twitter. Just haven’t had the time to really dig in and assault people with my bad one liners like the old StR days. Lol.
We’ve seen this movie before. Twice this season, in fact, and both were feel-good movies that had Kings fans dancing in the aisles once the credits started rolling.
Great stuff as always, Will
I think I joined the StR community around 2009ish. I’m not sure when StR officially started but it seems to me it may have been born, lived, and died all without ever knowing a single Kings playoff team.
Vox blows, but we will always have Youngman!
I think STR started in the 2005-06 season, so they literally only got that first year of playoff basketball, and nothing in between. Sucks that they started with a winning season, go 16 years of no playoffs (not to mention TWO relocation attempts in that time span), and are coming to an end before the conclusion of what is likely going to be a winning season.
I don’t recall the thing with LaBradford’s credit card info, which is a painful non-memory, since it’s got to be a great story.
You put bean-counters in charge of a creative entity, and mediocrity ensues.
In an unrelated note, there are seven new Marvel movies out since the start of 2023.
I think I see what you did there!
(and I concur)
GO KINGS!
F*CK VOX!
Gotta put one of my all time favorite memories from Sactown Royalty one more time.
That might be the best one!
One I fondly remember laughing MAO over is Tom Ziller’s Kevin Martin photoshop:
From this article:
https://www.sactownroyalty.com/2008/12/30/705351/kevin-martin-will-play
I remember we had a couple years where there were threads for Star Wars Photoshop May 4th Contests. I loved seeing how people could intertwine Star Wars with Kings memes (which was much easier to do since they were a losing team).
https://www.sactownroyalty.com/2014/5/4/5681252/may-the-fourth-be-with-you-photoshop-challenge
https://www.sactownroyalty.com/2015/5/4/8542921/2nd-annual-may-the-fourth-be-with-you-photoshop-challenge
Sucks you can’t go back to the articles to see the images in the comments anymore though. 🙁
Oh yeah, they removed the comments sections 🙁 🙁
Damn, they did. My favorite once a year past time is going back to Threadiquette 2011 and reading the comments. Sadge.
I’m also finding some images on my phone responding to Ailene’s steamy hard body articles. 😉
Oh man I may still have one of those on my phone.
Guess I will finally have to go back there and make copies of all the articles I wrote during the Kings moving scare that showed why I thought the Kings were staying. Good times, in hindsight.
Pouring one out for PookeyGuru tonight.
Wow. Lotta words for STR. I never looked back. My allegiance is to the people who ran it then and run TKH now. They are who mattered, not the platform.
So how about those Spurs? My fear is that the Kings play down to their competition and it becomes an unnecessarily close game that gets stolen at the end.
The treasure trove of Section214’s Time Machine stories and sharing his memories with his Dad and his view from Section214. And I can’t get a pic of a Fusilli Jerry out of my mind.
Did that guy ever get pants?
Another mention:
The draft night threads were glorious!
I wonder when and how the “no pants” inside joke came about.
And speaking of draft day threads…was browsing through some of the archive threads of STR and this was one of the screenshot images for one of the articles following the 2016 Draft where we took Georgios Papagiannis:
They were the best. The one where PookeyGuru lost his mind was the very best. I still miss the Fan Posts. I also remember with a little pride when I hit the 10,000 comments line. Even in the depth of our suckitude they had to put up another game thread at half time because of the number of comments and it wasn’t uncommon to have a thousand comments between the two.
It was a rough crowd, whatever you put up you had to be ready to defend cuz your ass would get jumped. I’ve only been back once and saw a commenter who posts here commenting on StR and I haven’t even glanced at any of his comments once since. Good times.
Predicted final: 119-108. Actual final: 119-109.
The commentary was even more on point than the prediction.
Badge Legend