The Portland Trail Blazers are in town and the Sacramento Kings must find a way to complete two solid halves of basketball, which my recency bias and time on Twitter tells me is IMPOSSIBLE. Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum roll in to remind all those that have forgotten that Luka isn’t the only draft pick the Kings flubbed – all while Skal Labissiere and Hassan Whiteside also have decided to poke their heads into this game – entirely thinking they’re in the same “should have been us” group as Dame and CJ but really, really aren’t. The Kings on the other hand have to rebound from an abysmal performance in Phoenix (We call that the ol’ Jennifer Lawrence) and they’ll be doing so without Marvin Bagley III, who banged up his thumb in the meaningless last few minutes of a blowout loss and is now out for the next 20 games our so. Harry Giles won’t be playing in his stead tonight as he’s still recovering from being completely healthy since May. Sidenote, I can’t believe you all nicknamed Harry and Marv “The Wet Bandits” after the two burglars from Home Alone and didn’t think they were going to suddenly get knocked out a bunch by freak and mysterious injuries from out of nowhere. Let’s talk Kings basketball.

When: Friday, October 25th; 7:00 pm PST

Where: Golden 1 Center, Sacramento, CA

TV: NBCSCA

Radio: KHTK Sports 1140 AM

For Your Consideration

A Taste of Bummer: This might seem like a question without a solid, definable answer but… what the hell happened on Wednesday night?! I spent the whole evening listening to a fascinating lecture on Shelagh Delaney and walk out to college freshmen on fire and the gutters of J Street running swift with the tears of the fandom! It was like that opening scene from the 2004 version of Dawn of the Dead – save that you replaced Sarah Polley with a Nick Frost sized Simon Pegg and swap out zombies trying to eat with fans trying to fire the brainless. I’d say swap out the burning cars and chaos for something but I live right off of Watt. To those who came unprepared for the apocalypse, I wag my finger at you. Even if we ignored the recent history of the NBA, there’s almost a decade and a half’s worth of proof that when it comes to the Kings, the thing that would hurt you the most, is the thing that is going to happen. Let’s get scientific here and call it Sactown’s Razor: when choosing between two potential outcomes, the Kings prefer to take the one that will piss us off the most.

Opening night sucked and Phoenix deserved that win. Bagley’s injury doesn’t help stir up any calm feelings about getting swept by the Clippers in the playoffs. Ahh what a sweep it might have been. Mike Tyson once said that “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” and the Kings just got Mikey’s best one-two punch. The simple fact is, the Kings play in the most top heavy division, in the most talent laden conference, in most competitive basketball league on Earth and do so without a true superstar, a whiz GM or a top tier coaching staff. I think a lot of this panic stems from the fact that fans don’t have a plan: we can’t lean on a Pippen now that Jordan’s out for a few games. We can’t look and say “oh our GM’s got something up his sleeve!”. We just shouldn’t look over at the coaching staff at all right now. Seriously, I think one just winked at us.

For us camels, it’s a tough straw to pull seeing the tiny needle the Kings had to thread fall into the haystack thus breaking our backs. We good with the metaphors? I’m plum out.

The Kings you thought you knew are gone and, for now, The Kangz are back. Plan your life accordingly.

Prediction

Dame takes it as a diss that I didn’t talk at all about Portland as the home opener tonight and so he writes a diss track about me. Someone points out I already called myself “a Nick Frost sized Simon Pegg” and that I was listening to a lecture on Shelagh Delaney the other night instead of watching the game and … seeing as how I’m now bullet-proof from further insults, he quits the rap game forever. He also scores 27 points. CJ McCollum smiles his way to 20 and Hassan Whiteside scores 16 for the Kings, confused entirely as to why he’s wearing a Blazers jersey.

Kings: 118, Blazers: 115