Sacramento Kings fans: ‘The most faithful fans in all of the United States’

Sacramento Kings fans had suffered through 16 seasons without making the playoffs. Saturday, that stretch officially ends as they step on the Golden 1 Center floor to play the Golden State Warriors.

They can rejoice that this drought is over.

The lifelong fan

Paul Roberson is a lifelong Kings fan who wants the disloyal fans to leave the cowbells in the cupboard. Roberson, 31, lives in the Pocket but grew up in Rosemont and has been suffering, he said, for the entire 16-season playoff drought, like a true lover of the team.

“Real Kings fans are loyal — that’s why we’re so excited,” he said. “I have some friends that switched up, they became Warriors fans. You know, stay over there. Stay over there. ... Don’t come back.”

He was so young when he went to his first game that he doesn’t have a clear memory of it. “All I remember was the bell — how loud it was,” he said, recalling the arena pulsing with hundreds upon hundreds of cowbells.

He remembered darkly the 2002 Western Conference finals, when the Lakers beat the Kings in a seven-game series. “A sports team can ruin a whole city,” he said. “Us losing, I feel like it just tore us down — that’s why it took so many years to build up.”

Less than five months after the series, Roberson, then 10, was watching the game on TV on Oct. 25, 2002. Mere minutes into the first quarter, the Lakers’ Rick Fox elbowed Kings defender Doug Christie, knocking him to the floor. Christie popped back up to confront him, and Fox pushed him in the face.

Then, Christie simply punched Fox right in his handsome jaw.

“He was no punk,” Roberson said. “That was one of my favorite moments.”

This season, the team has brought the city together, he said. “It’s been cool because I can see the community. … Everybody’s happier. It just helps Sacramento.”

In addition to the magic that head coach Mike Brown seems to have brought to the team, Roberson said, “We got great players. Selfless teammates. You can tell that they love and care for each other. I can tell the locker room is a brotherhood. ... We don’t have a K.D. (Kevin Durant) or a LeBron (James)— we don’t need that. We got a team that works together.”

—Ariane Lange

The faraway fan

Jasjit Singh Banga was 14 and living in New Jersey when he started staying up past 1 in the morning to watch Sacramento Kings games on TV in the 2001-2002 season. Banga hadn’t lived in the capital region since 1990, when he was 2. His family uprooted and moved to Wharton, when he was still too young to even form memories of his time living in the Central Valley.

And yet, he said, “I feel like I left my heart in Sacramento.”

Distance be damned, Banga believes he’s watched just about every Kings game for the past 21 years.

“I grew up, everybody telling me, ‘Why aren’t you a Knicks fan or a Nets fan?’ It’s like, I only like Northern Cali teams,” he said. “I’ve always been true to the city I was born in.”

It was not exactly a family affair: His cousins in Sacramento loved the Kings, but his parents were uninterested, and his two brothers — one older, one younger — root for the Phoenix Suns and the Brooklyn Nets, respectively. Growing up, Banga watched most of these late-night games alone. His brothers would goad him about being a Kings fan.

“They’re like, ‘Why are you watching the game? They’re not gonna win,’” he said. “I’m like, ‘Shut up, leave me alone.’”

Though his brothers don’t feel this way, Banga can’t let the Kings go. “I don’t change where I come from,” he said. “I come from a city that supports their team regardless of whatever the record is.”

He was watching when Kings lost to the Lakers in the seven-game series in the 2002 Western Conference finals. While Game 6 is the most controversial because of the referee calls, Banga hated Game 4.

The Lakers beat the Kings 100-99. Banga was so angry when Robert Horry — Big Shot Bob — hit L.A.’s winning three-pointer that he threw his sandal at the TV and almost broke it. (Luckily, the TV didn’t fall off the cabinet, and he didn’t get in trouble.)

“Watching them through the years, I had my heart broken,” he said. But, he added, “This is the team I love. This is the state I was born in. So for me, it’s a miracle to finally see us as — nobody expected us to be the No. 3 seed in the West. … This is the first year since 2001-2002 we have a fighting chance in the playoffs.”

It’s a source of vindication for Banga, who has started every season during the playoffs drought with a renewed sense of hope. He believes that the fans will be “making a statement with the crowd we have behind us, with the city that loves us, because we are the most faithful fans in all of the United States. … This is a blessing.”

His favorite memory is a recent one: Banga got a ticket to the Kings-Nets game March 16, heading straight from work to his seat, in the middle section by the away bench, behind the rim. “This opportunity,” he said, “only comes once in a lifetime.”

He’d stuck out as a New Jersey teen wearing Chris Webber sneakers, but that night, he was surrounded by his people.

“Just watching the team, the chemistry we had,” he said, “just everybody going crazy after the game. Everybody was yelling ‘light the beam.’ And it was just so surreal hearing other Kings fans saying ‘light the beam, light the beam’ all the way away from Sacramento.”

—Ariane Lange

Two generations of Kings season ticketholders

Ray Yund, 31, is a lifelong Kings fan who credits his father, Doug, with instilling his love for the team. Starting when Ray was about 4, the father-son duo would frequent Kings games in the upper deck of Arco Arena. Ray grew up during the team’s “glory years” when players like Peja Stojakovic and Jason Williams reigned supreme. He was barely a teenager the last time his team made the playoffs.

“No matter what, the fans have remained loyal and have always been loud and supportive,” Ray said. “And finally, we are back in the playoffs.”

The Yunds’ connection to the Kings stretches back long before the team arrived in 1985.

Before the Kings came to Sacramento, and even before their stint as the Kansas City Kings, they were the Cincinnati Royals. And although he mostly paid attention to the Bengals and the Reds growing up, Doug remembers cheering for the Royals. One of his childhood neighbors was a Royals player.

Doug’s family moved to Carmichael from Cincinnati in 1975, and by the time Doug was a senior at Sacramento State, his hometown basketball team had followed him to Sacramento. After graduating and starting his own contracting business, he bought season tickets for the 1995-96 season in the upper deck of Arco Arena.

That year, the Kings faced the Seattle SuperSonics in the 1996 playoffs. The first two games were played in Seattle, but when the team came back to Arco, the fans gave them a hero’s welcome.

“The crowd gave them a 10-minute standing ovation. That crowd was just crazy,” Doug said. “Just being in that sort of environment, you know, something great happens, you turn around and you high-five everybody around you. You have no idea who they are, but they’re there with you as a fan of the same thing.”

One of Doug’s favorite Kings memories was watching the team take down the Lakers at Arco Arena during the now-infamous 2002 Western Conference Finals. Thanks to a business connection from the contracting world, he and his wife sat courtside for the second game. The Kings were nursing a first-game loss on their home court from two days earlier.

Thankfully for Kings fans, Lakers star Kobe Bryant was off his game after he allegedly ate a poisoned bacon cheeseburger from room service at the Sacramento Hyatt Regency. At the time, rumors flew claiming someone had intentionally poisoned the star.

“The frenzy of the community, of the fan base, all that just really feeds me,” Doug said. “I mean, I’ve been known to get emotional when they’re singing the national anthem and everybody’s singing together.”

Ray vividly remembers the fight to keep the Kings owners from moving the team to Seattle. For three years, he and the rest of the Kings fandom feared they would lose the only professional team in town.

He was a senior at San Diego State when the final decision came out. He remembers shutting himself in his dorm room away from his roommates. He sat on his bed watching the press conference on a laptop.

When NBA Commissioner David Stern announced the Kings would stay in Sacramento, Ray couldn’t hold back his tears of joy.

“I was so emotional,” he said.

Only two weeks later, Ray graduated and returned home to Sacramento for the city’s celebration. He bought his own set of season tickets after he landed his first full-time job. He had to give them up in 2020 though after the birth of his second son and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ray holds a fond nostalgia for the Arco Arena – the roar of the crowd, the wooden floorboards that created the signature “Arco thunder” when fans stomped. But after games, if the Kings managed to pull out a win, the fun died when you left the arena.

“There wasn’t anything to do there. You’d just go back out into the huge parking lot and drive past all the weeds and stuff,” he said. “Now in downtown Sacramento, if you want to celebrate, there’s going to be thousands and thousands of people going everywhere.

“I hope we can continue to build memories and build lore and legend in that arena, and actually in Sacramento proper.”

Even though Ray couldn’t afford the $500 per ticket to get inside Golden 1, he hopes he’ll get down to DoCo for a victory celebration and beam lighting after a game. He’s crossing his fingers for a Game 5 or Game 7. Hopefully De’Aaron Fox gets his moment to shine, Ray said, because he’s stuck around through tough times and never asked for a transfer. Hopefully, they can beat the Warriors, their “big brother” who’s long overshadowed them. But mostly, Ray just wants his team to win.

“At the beginning of the season, if you would have told me that they made the playoffs, I would have been ecstatic and that would have been enough for me,” Ray said. “But now, I want to do more than just make the playoffs,” Ray said. “I really want us to win and move on.”

As for Doug, he’ll cheer the team on from home – and babysit the grandkids while Ray celebrates.

—Maya Miller

Fighting to keep the team

Nick Haskins didn’t know his first NBA game in Portland would be the one in which the Kings clinched their first playoff berth since 2006. The Sacramento native and lifelong Kings fan had only moved to Portland in early 2022 after graduating from the University of Oregon. He’d bought the tickets back in February, not knowing how important the game would be for the team he’d grown up supporting ever since he was in middle school.

“It was pretty serendipitous,” Nick said. “It was really special.”

Before and throughout the game, Nick was texting back and forth with his father, Chris. His dad was the reason why he became a Kings fan in the first place, he said and the two of them shared a special bond over the team. Growing up, while the rest of his friends were obsessed with stars such as Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan, Nick was steeped in his dad’s knowledge of Kings lore. They had season tickets in Section 215 at Arco — seats that Chris was able to keep after the arena was demolished.

“I felt like, you know, this connection to the team,” Nick said. “Even if they weren’t making the playoffs, they were our guys. And they were the underdogs almost every time.

“It’s something special to root for a team when you know that they might not win every game.”

Although Chris paid attention to the team throughout the ’90s and 2000s, he really became a “crazy” fan during the fight to keep the team in Sacramento. As a member of the group Crown Downtown, he helped organize sellouts at Arco Arena. That’s when he bought his season tickets, and he attended countless city council meetings to try and keep the team in town.

And eventually, after years of fighting and lobbying and pleading, they stayed.

The front page of the Sacramento Bee — May 16, 2013, to be exact — featured a photo of him with Nick, and a sign that reads “HERE WE STAY” that now hangs in his office. He’s added an “-ed” to make it say “STAYED”.

Despite all his effort to keep the team here though, Chris dropped his season tickets. He couldn’t justify spending the money – and the commute from El Dorado Hills – on a team that was so volatile.

He won’t deny that this year’s team is special, and he’s watched every game on TV, with the volume cranked up and his cheers even louder. But he can’t bring himself to go to a home game. He’s too afraid that the team he poured so much of himself into will suddenly slip back into its old, losing ways. Walking out of Golden 1 Center with 18,000 other people under a beamless night sky would just be too painful.

“I didn’t feel like I needed to go to a home game to be invested,” Chris said. “Because I’ve always been invested. You know, once you’re a Kings fan, you’re always a Kings fan.”

He probably won’t make it to a playoffs game in person. But he’ll be watching closely on TV from his Kings cave at home, alongside his dozens of bobbleheads and Kings pennants.

“It just doesn’t matter how they do,” Chris said. “We kept our team, and we made the playoffs. We win.”

—Maya Miller