The World Intrudes Upon the NBA​: Watching The Sacramento Kings in an Empty Arena, by Chuck Strom

Last Tuesday night, I took my daughter Jillian to see the Sacramento Kings play the Dallas Mavericks. She had never seen an NBA game, and the tickets were cheap for two lottery teams playing a game with absolutely no bearing on the playoffs. The Mavericks won 103-97, but the evening was most notable in that only about four thousand fans made it into the arena. I followed my usual practice of showing up when the doors opened at 5:30 PM, ninety minutes before tip-off, and we entered without incident. If we had shown up twenty minutes later, I would hazard a guess that we would have missed the game, because around that time the arena was surrounded by protesters who blocked the entrances.

This was the second game in the space of a week that was disrupted in this manner, due to the recent shooting of an unarmed suspect by Sacramento police. Tuesday night’s Black Lives Matter protest was a spillover from the nearby emergency meeting of the city council to address the situation. A lot more people showed up to the meeting than would fit in the chamber, so many of them decided to adjourn to the Golden One Center to repeat their previous performance. Whatever one might think of their position, you have to admire the protesters for their savvy in choosing an NBA arena as the place to get their point across. Their demonstration became not only a regular news story but also made ESPN and other sports media, basically getting twice the attention than they otherwise might have received. The Kings owners, following the lead of the NBA–probably the most politically progressive of all of the professional sports leagues, have been sympathetic to the protests and appear to have handled the situation smoothly up to now. Hopefully, things will remain relatively calm, but that will require a lot of patience from both the protesters and the city. Such events are never resolved quickly.

There was no announcement of the outside situation during the game, and it was only well into the first quarter that I noticed the unusual number of empty seats. I was clueless enough to think that maybe Kings fans had just given up on their team for the season and decided not to attend. It was eerie to sit in an arena about twenty-percent full, with the wide expanses of empty seats making the place seem very cavernous. At halftime, they invited fans from the upper level to come down and sit closer to the court, and Jillian and I, in decent lower-tier seats already, moved further down to about twenty rows from the court, by far the closest I’ve been to the action in an NBA game. The players gave a good effort, and there was even some extra excitement at the end as the Kings made a couple of dramatic plays in the final minute to get the score close.

It was only when we left that I learned what had happened. The arena staff blocked all but one of the exits, which the police had previously secured for safety, and funneled all four thousand of us out through the bottleneck. A quick Google search on my phone resolved the remaining mystery as we shuffled out. If I had been by myself, I might have considered making my way around to observe the protest–from a respectable distance, but with Jillian along I made the responsible decision to give the arena a wide berth as we returned to our car in the Old Sacramento garage. There were lots of police around the garage and manning the nearby Interstate 5 entrance, their presence offering a comforting assurance of our safety but also a disquieting reminder that events could have gone much worse that evening. I told Jillian that she had received her civics lesson for the day.

One other item of note. During warm-ups, I pointed out to Jillian Mavericks center Dirk Nowitzki, recounting to her the highlights of his almost certain Hall-of-Fame career, particularly his heroics in the 2011 Finals when he carried the Mavericks to a title over LeBron James and the super-team Miami Heat. Unfortunately, the Nowitzki of that series was nowhere in evidence during the game, when it was painfully evident that his injuries over the last few years had reduced him to a shadow of his former self, rarely moving faster than a jog up and down the court and hitting only two shots on the night. For his sake I hope he retires after this season, because it’s always sad when a great player stays too long.

– Chuck Strom