You need to know two things about Sacramento Kings owner Vivek Ranadivé:
The first is that he, despite never playing basketball himself, coached his 12-year-old daughter’s Redwood City team to the national championships by utilizing a full-court press the entire game.
The second is that he loved being a co-owner of the Warriors before he sold his share of the Dubs to buy the Kings and keep the team in Sacramento.
These two things are not unrelated.
While the Kings broke ground on Golden 1 Center under Ranadivé’s leadership, the Warriors broke the code of the NBA. (And then they built their own arena in San Francisco.)
And while Ranadivé has been smart enough not to go on the record and say, “I’m trying to emulate the Warriors,” his actions have spoken louder than words.
Ranadivé’s first move as the Kings’ owner was to hire then-Warriors assistant Michael Malone as head coach. His first free-agent signing was former Warriors forward Carl Landry. Over the last decade, the steady migration of people from the Bay to the Valley has included countless former Dubs, as Ranadivé has searched for the right executives, coaches and players to recreate Golden State’s success in the capital city.
After a decade of failures and follies, Ranadivé’s Kings are now the worthy scions of the Warriors. A first-round playoff matchup between the two teams — one the established dynasty, the other the league’s feel-good surprise — will show us just how far the Kings have come.
This is the first time these two franchises will meet in the playoffs. This, even though the Kings are the NBA’s oldest team, boasting a five-city lineage that goes back to 1923, and the Warriors were one of the NBA’s original franchises, moving to California from Philadelphia in 1962.
The two teams have been Northern California neighbors and division rivals since 1985, yet this is the first time the two teams will meet in the playoffs.
In fact, the lineage of ineptitude for both teams was so long that the two franchises haven’t even been in the postseason at the same time since the Warriors won their first California title in 1975. The Kings were Kansas City’s team that year and for another decade after.
Before the Dubs’ recent run of greatness, whatever success the Warriors and Kings had was fleeting. That success also served to make the other Northern California team jealous.
The Warriors’ late ’80s, early ’90s run was juxtaposed by some sorry basketball in Sacramento. Then the roles flipped in the late ’90s, early 2000s, when the Kings repeatedly knocked on the door of winning a title, but came up tantalizingly short each time.
Then came 16 seasons of missing the playoffs for the Kings, punctuated by the constant threat of relocation.
And while the Warriors weren’t much better early in that stretch, when the team was sold to Joe Lacob, Peter Gruber, and Ranadivé, things started turning around in the Bay.
That said, it must be noted that buying a team that employed Steph Curry was a massive boost to the group.
Ranadivé — like Lacob — is a tech entrepreneur. He still lives in Atherton. He believes in data, collaboration and moving fast.
The 12-year-old girl’s team was the perfect encapsulation of his values. There was a market inefficiency in how the game was being played — why weren’t teams using the whole court? — and he unrepentantly exploited it.
The Warriors did the same thing with Curry. Why weren’t teams shooting more 3-pointers?
The Kings have been looking for their own Curry since Ranadivé took over. Too many players, including Steph’s brother, Seth, have been blasphemously cast in the role to count.
But it wasn’t until the Kings brought in former Warriors assistant coach Mike Brown that Ranadivé’s vision of Golden State 2.0 came to life.
The Kings might not have a Curry, but point guard De’Aaron Fox, with his blazing speed and penchant for hitting the clutch shot, has proven worthy of the faith the organization has put in him to run the show.
And you can see the similarities with the rest of the squad. Center Domantas Sabonis isn’t the all-time great defender Draymond Green is, but he, like Green, is the hub of the Kings’ offense, using his smarts and passing ability to break down defenses.
Kevin Huerter is the Kings’ Klay Thompson facsimile — a catch-and-shoot savant. Malik Monk is their mercurial but incendiary reserve giving shades of Jordan Poole.
And then there’s Harrison Barnes, who was cast away by the Warriors when they signed Kevin Durant, only to find his way to the Kings in 2019 and re-signed with the team the following offseason.
By utilizing those players and putting them in an offensive system predicated on constant movement, cuts, and screens — the Warriors’ way — the Kings posted the best offensive season in the history of the NBA.
And while the offenses are a bit different, and only the Warriors possess the ability to play solid defense, in a league where play can so often be rote, the Warriors and Kings both play with joy, making this playoff series an uplifting experience for casual fans across the world.
For the partisan crowd and the players themselves, the pace of this series could prove exhausting.
Following the Warriors’ blueprint, with the right pieces seemingly in place, the Kings are on the path to perennial success after decades of failure.
Pair that with the Warriors’ “win forever” mindset, and this rivalry — which took the entire history of professional basketball to develop — could be a consistent presence for years to come.
But if the Kings want to upset and upend the mighty Warriors in the here and now, they’ll need to do something bold and brash.
Might it be time to bust out the full-court press?
