Reminiscing about Cisco Garcia

The Sacramento Kings selected Francisco Garcia with the 23rd pick in the 2005 NBA Draft. I was pissed.

Cisco was coming off a Final Four appearance with Louisville in which he was the team’s best player, and in 5 tournament games he averaged 17.6 points, 3.8 assists, 2.2 rebounds and 2 blocks per game. But in the Final Four against Illinois, Garcia was held to just 4 points. I thought he was overrated, I thought he was little more than a gunner. And I had no idea he would be one of my favorite Kings of the era.

El Flaco reached his peak in his fourth year in the NBA, 2008-09, averaging 12.7 points, 3.4 rebounds, 2.3 assists, 1.2 steals and 1 block per game for a BLEAK 17-win Kings team. He stood out as a rare bright spot for the Kings. He was a fan favorite, and was known as a great locker room presence. The Kings were bad, and nobody was confusing Cisco for a cornerstone, but he was a nice piece to have in your rebuild.

In October 2009 Francisco Garcia’s was forever changed. While laying on an exercise ball during a workout, the ball exploded. Cisco was holding weights in his hands at the time, and the resulting fall led to a broken wrist. The Kings filed a liability lawsuit against the manufacturer of the exercise ball, resulting in a settlement of undisclosed terms. Cisco missed all but 25 games of the following year, and was never really the same player after that.

It’s a painful what-if to think about what Garcia could have brought to the Kings if he had never been injured. But he remains a fan favorite, even though he left the Kings long ago. Whenever I think of Cisco, I think of that 17-win team. The Kings were terrible, and they would remain terrible for years to come, but few players exemplify what it is to be a Kings fan favorite like Cisco. We fall in love with the players who work hard, no matter how good they may actually be.

Cisco never won an NCAA title, he never won an NBA title, and his career was derailed by a freak injury. Despite all that, if you were a Kings fan during a specific era of futility, Cisco will never be forgotten. He’s a legend of his own sort. Hopefully that brings some sort of satisfaction to him.

What does any of this have to do with the launch of the Kings Herald? Why is this day one content? Because in a three week period when we had no place to write and no sports to speak of, I was still thinking about the Kings. We began arguing about Cisco’s legacy in our Slack that was supposed to be dedicated to developing this site. I wanted to write about Cisco, and so I did. And it sat in a Google Doc until we were ready to launch. Why is this day one content? Because this is the place where you’ll find authors who are passionate fans, so passionate that they sit around thinking of Francisco Garcia’s Kings tenure for absolutely no reason. I feel pretty confident you won’t find that anywhere else.