Kings vs Warriors Game 1 Preview: Our Moment to Seize

The Sacramento King begin their first playoff run in over a decade and a half on Saturday night and will face off against a healthy Warriors squad with more than enough firepower to match them. In a season filled with cinema-quality storylines for the Kings, Sacramento will now face off against the only opponent that truly feels right for the occasion – the team the Kings owner originally came over from, the team their head coach’s career was resurrected on, the team that once unceremoniously dumped Harrison Barnes to chase championships with Kevin Durant… hell, the only team with the proximity to really pick the bones off of a Kings fanbase and enticing all youth of the area not willing to root for an irrelevant hometown team. The Warriors have been, at least for the entire tenure of Vivek Ranadive’s ownership, the blueprint by which the Kings have tried to build and rebuild their franchise in emulation of. They’ve been the dream. They’ve been the enemy looming in the shadows, waiting for Sacramento to finally be ready.

Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green are healthy.

De’Aaron Fox and Domantas Sabonis are hungry.

The series? The series, regardless of what Warrior radio personalities and twitter stans say,  is entirely up in the air.

For the first time in seventeen years:

Let’s talk playoff basketball!

When: Saturday, April 14th, 5:30 PM PT
Where: Golden 1 Center, Sacramento, CA
TV: ABC
Radio: Sactown Sports 1140

For Your Consideration

The Eighty-Third Game:  Today’s preview, as many previews before it, is not one for stats. Today’s preview is all goddamn vibes and let me tell you – the vibes in Sacramento are immaculate. Kings fans are working as go-betweens to help others afford tickets, pre-playoff parties at the Golden 1 Center with hope flowing like a river between the rocks of humanity, Warriors fans so nervous about this series they’re already sliding on the mask of cool indifference while they dispassionately tweet hundreds of times a day to Kings fans who just simply assume aloud that Sacramento has a shot.

Good.

Let them be scared. The first step in the grieving process is denial, and while the Warriors fantastic run over the last decade has been a sight to behold, nothing lasts for ever. Nothing is evergreen. No dynasty, no matter how many steps ahead management and coaching may seem, lasts forever… and the entire Bay Area knows it. It may not be this series – the defending champs deserve the respect of being the favorites until they’ve proven otherwise, but someday soon the day will come when the Warriors fall short. Steph Curry’s immaculate jumpshot will rim out, Klay Thompson’s fourth quarter legs will give out, Draymond Green is going to podcast his thoughts on the second round instead of screaming them at a referee while playing in them.

That may not be the way this playoff story starts for the Kings, or ends for the Warriors, but that inevitability is closer than it has ever been –

And everyone knows it.

Today’s not a day for stats. We can twist those any which way we please. We can argue with radio personalities and their clinging groupies about clutch time and road records and championship pedigree translating into series wins when everyone and their mother is healthy, but, honestly, I don’t care. The ball goes up, a few whistles get blown and a final buzzer sounds. Anyone whose imagination is too limited to see how this Kings squad, this year, can win four before this Warriors squad, this year… anyone who refuses even the possibility is disingenuous and can be ignored.

There are so many questions we’re going to get to answered in the coming weeks: how does every player on this Kings squad do under the brightest of lights? Is there another gear to be reached offensively and especially defensively with this Kings squad? How far are we away from a real contender – not a playoff contender, but a tried and true championship contender? Why not now, why not us?

Here we all are, in the hours before the culmination of a moment we’ve only been able to dream of for the last sixteen years, our captivity in the NBA cellar assured to end and honestly, the only way I see it ending is in triumph. No, we may not win a Larry O’Brien trophy.  There’s plenty of reasons for analysts and talking heads to crunch the numbers and assume the Kings may not make it out of this round. It should be understood that at the end of the proverbial day, the Kings – their players, coaches, ownership, management and especially their fans, may have strapped their hopes and dreams for this team to wings of feathers and wax. We may have climbed too high, experienced the trappings of a good team too quickly – the Kings with their Coach of the Year, Clutch Player of the Year, dual All-Stars might have flown too close to the sun. Pundits, Twitter users with names like CurryMamba24, and that guy at work HR is always talking to all seem to think Sacramento did.

Sure, it may actually be the collective fate of our city to crash hard into into the ocean, to shatter our hearts into sixteen seasons worth of pieces on the water below, be left to drown in the takes of the naysayers and non-believers as the rest move on without us.

But for all the righteous confidence, in the backpats and told-you-so’s, those same folks who doubted us, will forget they also once said that escaping the bottom of the NBA was impossible for Sacramento. They’ll forget they ever thought turning this franchise around was an unworthy endeavor. They’ll say they knew this Icarus of a team would perish but…

They’ll never know what it was like to feel this type of free.

They’ll never be able to say we didn’t fly.

The sun in the sky is warm and the wind is strong at our backs, and regardless how far we fly or how high we get before the fall – we’ve already won.

Prediction

Kings in four, you Tesla-worshipping, Sam Bankman-Fried defending, Juicero-investing, superstar-man-of-the-people-but-hates-affordable-housing jersey buying, WAAAAAAARRIORS fans.

Kings: 143, Warriors: 131