Kings vs Warriors Game 7 Preview: The Light or Flight Response

The Sacramento Kings are home, having wrested the fate of their season from the hands of the defending champions, in front of a hostile audience and the whole collective basketball world, and will now play a final, decisive 48 minutes of basketball to determine who goes on to the next round and who goes on to a lifetime of if-only’s. On one day’s rest, the Kings and Warriors will play out their final turns of an incredible two-week chess match, with surprise moves, dramatic finishes and total domination from both franchises. Can the Warriors, on tired legs and carrying the weight of a decade’s long dynastic legacy, reach down and jump start the heart of champions one more time and stave off their inevitable decline another few weeks? Or, will the Kings force the most successful franchise of the last ten years down the path of the unknowing at a crossroads of NBA history, and forge ahead to a destiny still unfinished?

Welcome to a moment that you’ll talk about the rest of your basketball-loving life.

Welcome to Game 7.

Let’s talk playoff basketball!

When: Sunday, April 30th, 12:30 PM PT
Where: Golden 1 Center, Sacramento, CA
TV: ABC, NBCSCA
Radio: Sactown Sports 1140

For Your Consideration

Winner Stay Home: In the moments between being present in my life, at red lights, between clients at work, the seconds between deciding what to eat and getting to the register to order, I’ve found myself thinking about these random assortment of objects that sit, right now, in the belly of the Golden 1 Center and the various tasks they’ll have to complete between the time I’m writing this and the time I’m reading it to check to see how close I was on the final score. Right now, there’s a microphone tucked in a box or wrapped up in a closet or already sitting out on a covered table, in the dark, engulfed in the neutral blue of a background that you can barely make out the white of the NBA logo and PLAYOFFS in big blocky letters and Presented by: who the hell ever decided to pay to sponsor this whole affair. This microphone is going to have players and coaches sitting in front of it, trying to explain what went wrong, trying to give praise to others through the pain of another season lost to time, trying to downplay the unknown that comes with the end of a season of our lives. It’ll be viewed more times in the next 48 hours than most of us will ever be seen in our entire lives, and it sits right now, in the dark with that moment fated to happen. Then the light turns green, the client shows up, my time to consume is at hand and my mind passes onto other things, until the next moment of thought. All the while that mic exists somewhere in the heart of that arena and fate rushes for it all the same.

The Kings stand now at the shore of basketball history, with ripples from the stones they’ve thrown in games one through six turned to tidal waves, the proud Warriors once amused by the rocking of their boat now 48 minutes of less than stellar basketball away from being capsized, four ‘ships safe and any hopes for a fifth scuttled on the rocks. All by a team without the experience necessary to rise to the occasion, or the respect to know their place, or the fear of the moment they now completely envelope. The Kings – masters of not only their fate but that of a dynasty that assumed better days still laid ahead.

I wonder how it felt for Kobe Bryant the day he realized that his time challenging for a title was done. I wonder how Jordan felt in his last season of the Wizards, knowing that the chokehold he held the world in was finally loosened by the passage of time. Was there a defining moment for Duncan’s Spurs, the Showtime Lakers, or the Red Auerbach-era Celtics that spelled out the end of their run? Was their demise capped with a question mark or an exclamation point? We’ve watched these Warriors erode over time, slowly losing chunks of what made them great over the years to the gravity of age and finances and time and we’ve arrived at the first moment of we might call their collapse, and maybe the last moments that they’ll ever be seen as THE Warriors. 48 minutes of basketball can remove the caps-lock, straighten the italics in the minds of basketball watchers forever.

Today a box will be opened, a door handle will be twisted, a light will take the greys away from the darkened room and exchange them for the vibrant blues and whites of a cloth background. Cords will be unwrapped and plugged in. Eventually, a man will sit at that microphone and explain what happened to anyone who will listen.

Fate will have arrived and passed and that microphone will be returned again until next Tuesday’s game, or the start of next season.

It might sit sixteen years in the dark waiting to be up at that podium again.

But, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t seen.

Doesn’t mean it wasn’t heard.

Fate has arrived for all of Sacramento and our time in the light, however short that might be, is at hand.

Prediction

The Beam Regime begins in earnest.

Kings: 126, Warriors: 118