Exits: What didn’t pan out

The California Delta, gold, and the Kings takeaways from an accelerant season.

We got to Sacramento in a downpour. Martin was stressed and I wasn’t helpful because a migraine had been snaking around my brain since we left San Francisco, and somewhere around Napa it bit. Fangs deep and poison-loaded.

We’d circled and circled the short, neat blocks of downtown looking for a parking spot with a charging port for the Tesla nobody had asked for and the rental place gave us. By the time we’d parked, three blocks from our hotel, it was coming down in sheets and my world was on a tilt. We huddled in a doorway as Martin called the parking garage’s managing office to ask if the car, without whatever permit it needed to sit there, could please sit there for a few hours. I watched the fine sand all the street’s planters were filled with lift and go rushing along the curb, gutters choking gold.

Soaked by the time we ran through the lobby doors, I barely made it to my room before projectile vomiting all over the bathroom’s intricate honeycomb tile-work. I cleaned up, ran the shower hot, and came out to see a wide, full rainbow through the window, bearing down on the city.

Okay, I said out loud, okay. Before falling onto the bed.

Later, when my meds had kicked in enough to muffle the pain, I went back to the window — a skinny rectangle placed horizontally, and, we’d notice the next day staring up at the building while eating tacos at a place in the park across the street, just on our floor, so it was like looking out of a ship’s porthole — and peered out, down at the city. A tight cluster of medium-tall buildings mostly golden or glass and beyond them, all flat. We’d driven through hills coming in, the ubiquitous low rollers of central to northern California, covered in yellow-gold grass and black-trunked oaks, and I think I expected to see them out beyond the city. I couldn’t see the river, was facing north, and had the deeply confusing feeling of being landlocked in California — a state I’ve driven into from Nevada, flown into from Toronto, and still mostly associate with the coast.

Martin had texted that while I was out he’d moved the car to another parking tower, a square six-storey open-air building we’d tried initially and couldn’t figure out the charging ports in that I could see from the window. I went back to the bathroom for water and braced for any residual smell of sick, but only caught clean towels. When I came out again the rainbow was back, fainter against a hammered tin sky smeared over with light.

Okay, I said quietly again, encouraged enough to order a caesar salad from The Old Spaghetti Factory, which came with a small and melted serving of spumoni, for dinner.

California is golden, flooded or burning, and I certainly feel that way while I’m there.

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Sacramento owes its basketball to 3x NBA All-Star, Kevin Johnson. In January 2013, a hedge fund manager from Seattle working in San Francisco bought a controlling interest in the team with the intention of moving the Kings to Seattle and renaming them the SuperSonics. Johnson, a Sacramento native who’d spent 11 1/2 of his 12 season career in Phoenix, formed an ownership group led by Vivek Ranadive (who had to sell his previous ownership stake in the Warriors), to keep the Kings.

Johnson would go on to become Mayor of Sacramento, with a fair share of scandals and investigations including sexual assault allegations, and Ranadive would go on to pursue running the team in the abstract, as an entity not always beholden to NBA basketball in its typical sense of rules or roster formation. What glittered not quite, not yet, gold.

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Sacramento, nearly 100 miles inland from the Pacific coast, feels landlocked. Other than the Sacramento and American Rivers converging on it, the city’s surrounded by grassland and the undulating golden hills of northern California. But there were instances of flooding in the city’s history so pronounced that people got around in rowboats, the levees built and rebuilt hastily around the city’s gold rush population booms broken through by flood waters again and again. The illusion of height borrowed from the Mayacamas and Vaca mountain ranges around Napa were part of the problem, with snow melt running down the mountains mingling with the rising marsh waters of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

The Delta, formed 10,000 years ago when the glaciers that sprawled from the Sierra Nevadas up through the Cascade Range into Canada constricted, was a deep and teeming freshwater marsh that spread in sprawling tributaries from San Francisco Bay inland to Sacramento and south to Stockton, like the like nerve tendrils of a sleeping giant.

The natural fertility of the soil, which lent to the explosion of agriculture that would come to fundamentally alter the natural functions of the land, thanks to thousands of years of growth and decay of swampland plants to create a layer of rich peat, 50 ft deep. River forests of willows and thick tule, plus built up layers of sediment, created levees around the Delta’s islands, protecting them from flooding.

There were California grizzlies here — 8ft tall when standing and up to 1,000 lbs, a natural lifespan of 20-30 years — and herds of tule elk so vast that, judging from their tracts in the land, early Spanish explorers assumed they must be roving herds of cattle.

Up to 60% of the Delta flooded for two hours each day at high tide, and during spring tides or flooding the entire range went under completely. There are illustrations from then that show cargo ships coming in from the Bay with their sails drooped, winding through waters flanked by lush islands that must now be the peaks of the soft hills around the city where the giant valley oaks still stand, some 600 years old.

The grizzlies were hunted to extinction and the last of the elk, boxed in by the land being parcelled off and given away for free in exchange for its cultivation, drown in the Delta’s great floods. Redemption and renewal, not to mention a certain amount of tenacity and willful ignorance to natural laws, are these not American ideals, crystallized best in the canon of the American West, California?

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It’s hard to qualify a hunch, but maybe my proudest, puff-chested prediction of this past season was getting home from Sacramento and saying that the Kings would be not just fun, or competitive, but good. A prediction Dylan reminded me of throughout the season, up to and after they were eliminated, usually with a smile and shake of his head, said on the exhale. A prediction he initially took, understandably, with the quality of good-natured skepticism he might have used if I’d told him I’d made first contact, though compared to what I was claiming about the Kings, aliens might’ve been more believable.

Could I say why more than feeling? Not really. But out there, pre-season, for a cover story on Keegan Murray, sitting with and trailing him, watching how curious and happy his teammates seemed as they passed us mid-interview and smiled, called out, offered sunny hellos, or else walking through the Kings practice facility in its private side of the Golden 1 Center into treatment areas full of so much of the team already there, sprawled out and listening to music, watching and interested, the feeling was a strong one. It was candid, a little charged, lively and open. Even Kevin Huerter, who I’d interviewed before while he was in Atlanta and is so laid back his voice barely budges from its languorous lilt, seemed excited, noting how rare it was for star players like De’Aaron Fox and Domantas Sabonis to already be there, putting in reps at such preliminary practices.

Wasn’t that how things in Sacramento felt at first? Rare, tremulous? A fool’s gold flash. Like the barest slip or early string of losses could backslide the team into the dregs of the West, the league itself, the boneyard it’d been in for so long. And really the momentum didn’t pick up until November, with seven wins in a row. The Kings would string together 15 streaks of three or more wins throughout the season, so night and day it felt a little like delusion from the season prior, where the best they fared was one single three game winning streak in early December, when the winter rains would’ve started to dampen the city to grey.

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There was gold, that was what mattered. All the extra people panning for it, suffering from outbreaks of cholera that came with the recurrent floods, dysentery, and conditions that usually came when being stuck months at sea, like scurvy, all appeared with the rising water. It’s why fruit trees were first planted around Sacramento, to get the panners and all the workers the rapidly growing city needed to support them the vitamins they were missing.

The typically finicky trees took greedily to the nutrient dense dirt, and the seasonal floods took greedily entire orchards of trees. But irrigation, thanks to scarcely paid Chinese labourers building vast networks of levees and the year-round abundance of freshwater, was cheaper in the Delta than other parts of California, so farmland grew at the expense of the natural terrain being dredged and dried up. The gold ran out but the Delta stayed rich, with $650 million annually in profits from agriculture recorded today.

The cost, of course, comes back to the land. Reclaiming 500,000 acres of earth that was once tidal marsh exposes the peat-dense soil to oxygen, which releases carbon dioxide as the nutrients decompose in the air. Subsidence follows, leaving the land more susceptible to drought, flooding, sinkholes, erosion, and the outlying areas relying on it for drinking water, some 25 million people in the California Delta’s case, at risk of having their access threatened or dried up outright.

But there was gold then, that was what mattered.

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It felt fitting that the Kings, and Mike Brown’s, first test was going to come from Golden State, the team that took its name for the whole of the place it shares with two other franchises and sits at the mouth of the once-expansive and generative California Delta. A watershed that offered the land complete renewal, season over season, whether the people who came to divvy up the land wanted it or not.

While the collective hope of NBA fandom seemed to shore itself up behind the Kings, at the expense of the Warriors, and wanted Sacramento to go as far as its own breathless season suggested it could, watching the team take it to seven in the first round was as hopeful as it was a crystal ball to the playoffs that would come. As much as the Warriors were not entirely themselves throughout the regular season, they will always produce as a postseason enterprise. The Kings had not felt that kind of cumulative pressure from any team, let alone the only one working today who can claim institutional championship knowledge, and it showed in how their topography, the fundamental way in which they knew the bounds of the floor and how it responded to them, broke apart.

The Warriors will overwhelm in their precision, their regimented improvisation. Clockwork and automatic, nothing falls until everything starts to, and then it’s a flood. By Game 7 Sabonis was battered, Fox overwhelmed, Murray out of all the improvisation one year in the league can offer, and Harrison Barnes had drifted away, but the Kings kept their heads above water until halfway through the 4th quarter; until the Warriors unrelenting repetitions made any traction Sacramento tried to gain a scramble. Feet in mud.

Still, and down as many as 20, the Kings tread water, leaning into buoying plays, ball movement, little offensive bursts. They lost, took a long time to lose when another team might’ve kicked up their legs and let Curry’s current take them away, but the bright spots remain. What didn’t pan out is still there to sift through. Add some size, build up something better able to mitigate the deluge of volume shooting the Warriors rained, dig in on defense (25th overall is already underwater), and accept that while accelerant seasons occasionally get corrected, none of the experience gained in what were the most golden stretches of Sacramento basketball got washed away. You dry out, you start again. You work, perhaps, for something so few have been able to find. For something more sustainable than gold.