Sacramento Kings donate former practice facility to use as field hospital in coronavirus fight

The Sacramento Kings are donating their former Natomas practice facility to be used as a surge field hospital to treat patients afflicted with COVID-19, the team said Friday.

Right next door to the facility is the former Arco Arena, where work has started to turn the longtime home of the Kings into a 360-bed hospital for COVID-19 patients that will be operated by the state.

The Kings are also donating $250,000 to community organizations providing food services and other essential needs of vulnerable people in the Sacramento area.

And the Kings will donate 100,000 medical masks to state and local agencies that need them.

The donations come as the Sacramento region and the state brace for an expected surge in COVID-19 patients. And they come as hope dims that NBA games will be played before crowds of any size anytime soon due to shelter-in-place orders in California and throughout the nation.

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The Kings donated 5,000 pounds of food to the Sacramento Food Bank shortly after the NBA season was put on hiatus, but team officials said they felt the need to do more as the coronavirus crisis worsened and as the need intensified for major local businesses to step up and help more.

“We owe a huge debt of gratitude to all the medical professionals and front line workers risking their lives every day and making tremendous sacrifices to protect us and provide essential services,”said Vivek Ranadive, Kings Chairman and CEO, in a prepared statement.

“Our community has always come first and that is more important than ever now.”

The Kings last gathered as a team on the bizarre night of March 11, when a scheduled home game against the New Orleans Pelicans was postponed just before tip-off with a crowd already seated at Golden One Center.

Before the game, the NBA had announced the suspension of its season as the federal government and state governments had determined that large crowds could no longer gather safely without spreading the disease.

The plan was that the Kings-Pelicans game would be the last on the NBA schedule before the suspension, but Pelicans players refused to come out for warmups or play the game. It had just been announced that Rudy Gobert, a player for the Utah Jazz, had tested positive for COVID-19 and a referee who had just been exposed to Gobert — Courtney Kirkland — was at G1C to work the March 11 game.

Since then, the Kings have largely shuttered G1C and maintained only “skeletal staff” onsite, said Matina Kolokotronis, chief operating officer of the Kings.

She said many part-time Kings employees have gained temporary employment with Raley’s and other Kings advertisers and partners.

“Vivek called me and said, ‘What about offering the arena?” Kolokotronis said.

“He asked how we could use our platform to do good.”

Kolokotronis said she personally contacted Gov. Gavin Newsom with the offer and it was accepted quickly.

“These days, our state’s soaring spirit is on full display – with Californians from every walk of life standing together, even while staying at home,” Newsom said in a statement Friday. “The State of California is working with the Kings to repurpose the team’s former home to help treat COVID-19 patients and meet the coming surge in demand for hospital space. This facility, which for decades brought joy to the lives of Californians, will now be in the business of saving lives. I applaud the Kings and all the federal, state and local officials who worked in concert to make it happen.”

Kolokotronis said Turner Construction, the same company that built G1C, is working to transform the very floor where the Kings played from 1988 to 2016 into the ground floor of a functioning hospital.

This was the same floor where the greatest moments of the Kings occurred, including the eight-year run of winning seasons from 1999 to 2006 that very nearly brought an NBA title to Sacramento.

Kolokotronis said she had those moments in mind — and countless concerts and civic events — when she considers what the former Arco Arena, also known as Sleep Train Arena, will be used for now.

“When you’re at the arena where there were so many iconic moments and now we have this happening … it’s very powerful to see.”

The Kings’ old practice facility, which was completed in the early 2000s by the team’s previous owners, the Maloofs, will also house patients, the Kings said.

Patients could be treated at the former Kings facilities as soon as April 14, Kolokotronis said.

Dr. Richard Pan, the Sacramento assemblyman, said that using Sleep Train Arena and the Kings old practice facility to treat patients was an important step toward keeping California from being overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients as New York has been.

“Flattening the curve (of COVID-19 cases) doesn’t mean there isn’t a curve,” Pan said. “Hopefully, we won’’t break our health care system but we will probably stretch it...We need to get places like Sleep Train ready now,” he said. With estimates that California COVID-19 cases could surge in late April and into May, Pan said just having the Kings facilities available before that was a huge plus.

“You don’t want to be figuring that out where to treat patients later,” he said.

The donations of the sports facilities for medical use by the Kings are a welcome sign of community involvement for a franchise that is arguably the most well-known Sacramento business.

After the 2018 fatal shooting of Stephon Clark by Sacramento police, the Kings were praised nationally for responding to the tragedy by hosting civic events to promote healing. While flanked by his players, Ranadive spoke of the “horrific tragedy” and how the team would commit itself to help in its aftermath.

The Kings had been relatively quiet as COVID-19 spread until Friday’s welcome announcement. In many ways, the fortunes of the Kings and the City of Sacramento are linked.

The city borrowed against future revenues from its parking operations to finance the deal. It used bond proceeds, along with donations of city-owned real estate, to contribute a total $255 million to the arena project. That was about 40 percent of the eventual cost. The Kings are making lease payments on the building that, after 35 years, will cover about 60 percent of the city’s debt payments on the parking bond.

This public/private partnership has led the Kings to construct a hotel behind G1C and refurbish the old Downtown Plaza into what is now known as Downtown Commons, or DoCo.

On nights where there were games and concerts, DoCo was alive with activity. The Kings were making strides and the partnership between city and team transformed downtown.

Now, because of the coronavirus, the arena and DoCo are largely empty. And all that is left for the Kings to do is to try help the city that helped them stay in business in Sacramento.