the sacramento kings experience

the sacramento kings experience

[Music] a choice. What if you could make a choice to change everything? Have you ever watched your favorite team throw their chances away over and over again and thought, “Come on, I could manage a team better than this.” Well, let’s see about that. Replace your favorite team with the Sacramento Kings and replace your hopes and dreams with nothing. Welcome to a one-of-a-kind YouTube experience where you yourself sitting right there watching this video will get to make your own decisions that alter the course of Sacramento Kings history. One choice then another then another can have the power to take you anywhere from sorrow to success, from devastation to dynasty. You will decide who to draft, who to sign, where your team should relocate, and more. With multiple different end paths and more than 30 total unique videos for you to watch, the possibilities are ripe. How it goes is all up to you. No one else to take credit and no one else to blame. At the end of each video you watch, you’ll be faced with a franchise altering decision with a couple of options to choose from. Whatever choice you make will take you right into a new video and you’ll see just how that worked out for you. On the top of every video will be a marker letting you know if you’re on the real life Sacramento Kings path or if you’ve wandered into hypothetical whatif territory. The choice is yours. With that, let’s learn a little about the early history of your new basketball team to give you some background knowledge before your first choice. Of course, to begin, we will be starting off with the real life creation of the franchise that one day would become the Sacramento Kings. You are not a coach or GM or even owner. You are simply the alldeiding overseer of this NBA team. But you didn’t start like that. Cuz before there was 30 NBA teams spread across the country, there were zero NBA teams spread across the country cuz the NBA didn’t exist. And even in those dark, empty basketball times, you were there. The Kings are the NBA’s oldest franchise as they retrace their steps all the way back to the Rochester Seag. The serums technically outdate the NBA itself by almost 30 years, and they have celebrated their own 100year anniversary. Named after a popular Canadian whiskey, they became a basketball team in 1923, if you could even call it basketball. players were often referred to as cagers. That’s a pretty funny name. I wonder where it came from. Because they played in literal cages. A sort of chicken wire mesh cage enclosed the court and there was no out of bounds. The first ever recorded dunk in basketball had happened just 6 years earlier as a result of Mr. Jackless getting bored, climbing up one of these cages, waiting next to the hoop, and having a teammate throw him the ball, which he then dropped into the basket. You could also call it first alleyoop. Basketballs still had laces on them like a football and every single made basket which were rare was followed by a jump ball at midcourt. The one consistent of the game, basically the one thing that stayed true since James Naymith invented the sport was the hoops were 10 ft high. The serums were the only whiff of NBA history that Rochester has ever seen. One of their best players in the early years was a local high school star, Les Harrison, who played for the very real sounding East High School and quote unquote won a championship. That’s all the information you’d get. Well, not quite. Who was the championship against? You could never possibly guess. The ever so dangerous West High School. A matchup for the books. Les Harrison in time would go from standout player to captain, coach, manager, chief scout, and effectively the owner and operator of the entire Rochester basketball team. It’s a very weird piece of NBA history. A name like the Rochester Serums is now only recognized among historians of the sport and diehard Kings fans. Most don’t like the name upon first hearing it because of the corporate sponsor. And I’m honestly just grateful that hasn’t become a trend because it seems like the path we’re heading down. You turn the TV on, see the Los Angeles Paramount Pluses playing in the Staples Center while being bombarded by 13 YouTube TV ads on every square inch of the court. Only one of those isn’t true yet. Just like the team, the serum beverage company no longer exists. Rather than decades of incompetent decision-making, the alcohol giant was brought to its knees by one trust fund kid. In 1857, the company was founded by a man. In 1982, another man, the grandson of the family the company now belonged to, came to work at Seagum after his attempted film career failed. The only remnant from the big screen is a 1982 movie called The Border starring Jack Nicholson, which was an infamous movie theater flop. 12 years later, he was named the company’s CEO. Upon taking the honor of running a 137year-old company, he made one simple vow. Seagrant will not take any action that will undermine our financial strength. Period. Well, the company doesn’t exist anymore. So yeah, the kid would instantly begin a course of action that he thought would revolutionize the company. They began diversifying, paying little attention to the alcoholic beverage game that had made them huge. In 1995, just a year after he took the CEO position, Serum made a huge move with an 80% purchase of MCA Inc., a media conglomerate. A year later, they would reinccorporate and be named Universal Studios. That’s a beautiful sounding deal on paper, but to afford it, the kid had to sell Seagum’s 24% holding of DuPant Chemicals. This massive chunk represented 70% of Seagum’s business at the time. DuPant jumped on the opportunity to buy the shares back. Instantly, Seagum’s market share price dropped 18%. The Dupont stake was sold for $9 billion. In just 2 years, that same stake was worth $15 billion. In 99 they acquired Polygram and they also finished off a years’sl long reselling of their Kico oil shares. In the year 2000 after his adventures into the film and music industries proved unsuccessful the serum company needed a merger to stay afloat. They did find one with French conglomerate Vventi but it was more of them being absorbed and after the deal serum effectively did not exist anymore with Vventi’s name being the one put on all joint business ventures. Their more popular drink labels were sold off in a flurry of exchanges to multiple different companies, including Captain Morgan Rum, which went to industry giant Diagio. And if you’re curious, the company’s Yoko Ono, the kid who brought him down and broke him up, is no longer a CEO or a founder or a president. He’s an executive chairman at Fubo TV. The not so mighty have truly fallen hard. When the company did exist though, they were known by many for their outrageous and often extremely successful advertising campaigns. The biggest one ever may have been through the 70s and early 80s when they partnered up with 7Up to create the 7 and 7 advertisement. It encouraged a mixed drink of serum 7 Crown whiskey with 7Up lemon lime flavored soda. The drink became extremely popular, a generational staple for the time, and is still a well-known bar order today. Another of their campaigns did involve sports, giving trophies to the best athlete across seven different sports every year. Becoming mildly popular, serum created an algorithm that could be used for all sports that would assign a number one to 100. Basically, a full and complete indicator of how good that player season was. They normally played safe, giving the award to whoever that league crowned as MVP. But it drew the most eyes in the 1982 hockey season. Wayne Gretzky, for all intents and purposes, broke their system entirely. When they plugged his season stats into their calculator, they were given a final result of 104.16. According to the serum algorithm, the great one was better than perfect in 1982. They published this as his official grade, noting for non-hockey fans that it was basically the equivalent of 3,000 rushing yards or 85 home runs in a single season. But before all of those ones, serum had maybe their most unique advertising campaign start in 1924, also in the sports world when they became the official sponsor of a basketball team in America in the middle of prohibition. [Music] They chose to advertise their company that sold alcohol in a country where it was currently illegal. And that gives you a picture on how unserious a lot of people took drinking being outlawed. Professional leagues were existent here and there, but popped up and disappeared rather quick for the most part. One that formed in 1935 was known as the Midwest Basketball League. And a couple years later, after a name change to the NBL, would eventually see extreme success, then be intentionally forgotten from history. We’ll talk all about that. But Sacramento wasn’t there to kick things off. For a long while, over two decades, the serums simply sat and played anyone that would agree to a game against them. Sometimes in Rochester, sometimes they’d travel. They would occasionally join some of these other super small and forgotten leagues, but it’s really difficult to pin down exactly which ones based on how little recorded they are. You could count on seeing them at least once a year at the annual World Professional Basketball Tournament held in Chicago for the best pro teams in the country. Sorry, the historically accurate way to describe them would be the greatest quintets in the cage world. Cages themselves are being weeded out of the sport at this point, but the cager term or calling it a professional cage league was really popular and would last for decades longer after this. Through all those early years, a common opponent was the Harlem Globe Truckers, who they would usually lose to, as well as the original Celtics, who while having no relation to Boston, are one of the more well-known pre-NBA pro basketball teams. But the serums would also play and often beat plenty of teams from that growing professional league, the NBL. Even the closest thing there was to an organized league like this one allowed NBL teams to play against non-league teams. And there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the serums were on par with most pro basketball teams in the country competition-wise. This clipping from a 1942 paper details the serums beating the NBL’s Oshkosh Allstars in a close game. This very year, those Oshkosh Allstars would win the NBL championship. Another interesting tidbit is that the serums won this game as part of a tournament that took place in Rochester. This was the semi-final game and in the finals the serums would also win against the New York Renaissance or the Rens. They were another really popular pre-NBA team that alongside the Harlem Globe Trotters were basically two of the only spots that gave Africanameans the chance to play competitively. And while we’re over analyzing this newspaper, the third place consolation game of the tournament pitted those Oshkosh Allstars against the Philadelphia Spas. I bring this up for the sole reason of telling you that the Spas used to not have their own stadium and would travel wherever they could to play. They were also made up of predominantly Jewish players as very early basketball was somewhat seen as a Jewish sport. So for a time this basketball team’s official real name was the Wandering Jews. [Music] Oh, and of course there was the obligatory cigarette ad in the bottom right corner of this paper. Okay, we’ve analyzed it enough. I think in the 1943-44 season, a decade after prohibition had been undone, you could drink again, the city of Rochester saw a sort of large local push against alcohol and newspapers began not advertising liquor companies. The city was clearly serious about this because it was more of a crackdown than they did when alcohol was constitutionally illegal. And because of this, the team name underwent sort of a silent change to some different name. What exactly they changed to, we’re not 100% sure. Newspapers from around the time refer to them separately as the Rochester Pro Club or the Pros or the Eber Grams and the Rochester Royals. Names just weren’t really official at the time, especially for a team that didn’t belong to any league. And one like the pros was basically used for every team across all sports. The very next year, the National Basketball League announced an expansion from six to eight teams. They were actually adding three new ones because one of the six had folded before this season. That being the Pittsburgh Raiders, a name that feels weird for a football fan to read. Les Harrison jumped on the opportunity. Him and his brother put together what was seen at the time as a very hefty fee of $25,000 to join the league. When they paid it successfully, they joined at the same time as such spectacular counterparts like the Youngstown Bears and the Indianapolis Cowskys. The league was already full of legendary quintets, including the Shabboan Redskins, the Cleveland Alman transfers, and the one we do know today, the Fort Wayne Zer Pistons. Over time, they made their way to Detroit and dropped their owner’s last name. Mr. more for less Harrison decided on the New York Royals name officially upon entry then quickly changed it to the Rochester Royals. The reason for his change of heart is unknown, but he would later site two reasons for going with the Royals as the mascot. One, the city was home to historical figures worth honoring, including Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglas. And two, he thought it sounded regal enough for a professional sports team, one that would win many, many championships. That idea aged well. And in the Rochester Royals first NBL season, that sentence wasn’t sarcastic. They won the league championship. They walked through the playoffs with a 6 in1 record and did it behind a legendary collection of players, often referred to as a team. Alongside their throne, they earned the crown of the biggest blowout in NBL history this season when they beat those Youngstown Bears 70-27. Harrison deservingly received a lot of credit for recruiting guys from the Army and Navy fresh out of World War II to his basketball team. Here’s a few of them. George Glac has almost been fully forgotten to time due to reasons we’ll touch on later. And that’s a shame. Do you know why? Because George’s nickname was the blind bomber. And George led his professional basketball championship winning team in scoring while kind of almost being blind. I’m telling you, early basketball was less realistic than a Disney movie. He lost like half to threequarters of his vision in a childhood football accident. George made up for his disability with dual abilities in his right and left hands. A fully ambidextrous player described as so nearsighted that the ball was often merely a dim object. And apparently he never looked where he was shooting. He just depended on his sense of distance and direction. The guy would basically look at the lines on the ground to know where he was on the court and know exactly how to shoot the ball from there without needing to look. It was good enough for a team high 12.3 points per game in that 1946 championship season. While a low number, the team averaged just 56 points a game. So, a very rough comparison to what that’s worth today can be made by just doubling both numbers. And I hate to only care about points here, but buckets were all they kept track of in the MBL. There is no rebounding or assist numbers. Alongside George on the ring-winning team was Red Holesman, who would stay with Rochester for a while as a decent piece, but gain a lot more fame as the future New York Knicks championship winning coach. Al Servy and Bob Davies rounded it out and might be the most recognizable basketball names from the squad, both in the Hall of Fame, with Davies being a franchise legend. even well through the NBA days. But my favorite name here is a Hall of Famer from a different sport. NFL legend and forward pass revolutionire Otto Graham played his one single season of professional basketball this year and played a real part, averaging five points a game while playing all but two games on the season. His presence on the team is interesting as he too was one of Les Harrison’s prized recruits fresh out of the war. But the only reason that Otto was available at all was because of another impressive recruiting job. Paul Brown of the football Cleveland Browns had persuaded Otto away from the NFL and to join his rival startup league, the AAFC. It would be a successful decision for both of them as the Browns dominated the AFC and eventually were brought into the NFL where they continued dominating there. But as it was just coming together, the AAFC was not set to start play until the fall of 1946. As an athlete of his time does, Otto Graham simply decided to fill the 8-month gap in his life with professional basketball. Some may look at the short time between naval service in a world war and redefining the quarterback position in pro football as a chance to relax. Auto Graham may laugh at some. The Rochester Royals winning at all in their first year was an affirm suspicion. The proof that there were better teams elsewhere, whether they be in other pro leagues or standalone teams, was not surprising. The Harlem Globe Trotters were still one of the best teams in the country and would occasionally play against NBL teams. In fact, mere days after Rochester won the NBL championship, the Royals played an exhibition game against the Globe Trotters and lost. Racism in the sport in this time can be characterized by what’s known as the secret game. Just 3 years before the Royals championship win, the popular Duke School of Medicine basketball team played a game against North Carolina Central University’s all black starting five. occurring in the South in 1944. The game was entirely kept a secret from the public out of safety for players on both teams. It was literally illegal to participate in the game under Jim Crow laws at the time. North Carolina Central walked through a very good Duke team or what we thought was a very good Duke team, winning 88-44 in what is considered one of the first segregated sporting events ever in the South, even if the South didn’t know about it. After the game finished, players from both teams just started shooting around together and talking. Someone suggested they play another game, mixing up the teams, and that’s what they did. This time, the only difference between them was shirts versus skins. When the story was first broken publicly on a widescale level, the original author referred to the humanity laced contest as a segregationist’s worst nightmare. [Music] And the Rochester Royals themselves played a part in the basketball color barrier. The year after they won it all, they signed an African-American player to their roster by the name of William Dolly King, who was formerly a member of the New York Renaissance team. He was one of the first black players to ever play in the NBL. And while he’s sometimes cited as the first, it’s extremely difficult to pin down information about the early NBL to confirm this. Their recordeping was just horrible. We do know that he played just one season for the team. Nevertheless, Dolly King played a part in helping break professional basketball’s color barrier, but for reasons we will touch on later, the NBA completely ignores his career. The next season saw continued success for the Royals franchise. The team’s core four stayed together for just another season before George departed and the rest stayed, but it was still a good team. Davies even brought home the league MVP honors. Unfortunately, in their second straight championship appearance, they ran into the always spinning Chicago American Gears, led by the greatest player in the world at the time, George Mike. This guy was pretty good, and the team won the championship, so they were all right, too. But their owner thought they were really something special. He pulled the gears out of the NBL and threw together his own professional basketball league called the PBLA with an awesome twist that he owned all of the teams himself. Shockingly, somehow cuz the world isn’t fair, the league lasts less than a month. Poor George Mike, having been the most valuable pawn, so queen in all of this got thrown into a dispersal draft for the NBL last year. The worst team in the league was the horrific Detroit Gems at 4 and40 on the year. This is worse than any NBA team ever has been. Shockingly, they didn’t fold and they came back for another year, but new owners moved them to Minneapolis and named them the Lakers. It was technically a continuation of the same franchise, meaning one of the most successful teams ever. also had probably the worst single season ever to start. But again, that season is not counted as official NBA stats today. We’ll get there. So, with the first pick in the dispersal draft, the Lakers obviously took George Mike. And what happened next? Well, wait a minute. We don’t know what happened next cuz what happened next is up to you. You have the situation. You have the background. It’s time for you to step up and make your first choice for the team. It could set you up for the future or send you on a path towards irrelevance. Early professional basketball is a minefield and one wrong step can blow you up. This is your current team. You know they can win it all. They have it in them. Hell, they’ve already done it before. But last year, they came up just short. In this era, you know what you need. We’re in the land of the big man. A dominant center who can hold the post and affect every shot coming in can be the difference for any team. Your two best scorers last year were both under 6 ft and the closest thing to a great offensive big you have is 6’6. That simply cannot compete with the George Mikins of the world. So here’s your choice. willing to spend some money, you’re going after a big. Through the league, there’s two options that rise to the table in terms of effectiveness and staying realistic. Your first choice, a 23-year-old big, standing at 6’9″, 200 lb. He’s out of Ohio State University where he put up great numbers. Took him to back-to-back final fours and he spent the last two years dipping his feet in the National Basketball League playing for the Indianapolis Coutskis. In his first season, which was also the Cowsky’s first season as a franchise, they joined that same year as Rochester did. The team was terrible, sitting at the worst record in the league, 10 and 22. This big was able to put up a respectable 12 points a night. The next year they jumped all the way up to second in their division. He’s a guy who it looks like can be built around. Your other option is another post player who fills up a little more space at 610 240 and brings in a little more experience being 26 years of age. While his physicals are objectively superior, you’re not quite getting as recognizable of a name here. This guy spent his college years at Bowling Green. He even helped bring them to an NIT championship when March Madness was not the way more popular one yet. They were about even in the mid-40s. This guy was one of two stars on those bowling green teams that are probably the best in the school’s history. He jumped to the National Basketball League where he’s been for just one year up to now. He was the only shine of light last year on a Tri City Blackhawks team that was just horrible. So there you are. All the information you need, all the information you get. You think it’s easy to run a team? Let’s see your choice. And no matter which player you pick, I’ll see you on the other side. [Music]

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