When Patrick turned 40 last year, Rob travelled to Chicago at the request of Patrick's wife for a surprise birthday party. It's rare Rob finds himself in Chicago, so he had a simple request: let's go to a Bulls game.
Would it be a good game? Probably not. Was it a historic blowout? It was.
Because expectations for both teams were so low, though, the tickets were cheap—dirt cheap. The game was in the middle of the week. Rob didn't even have to splurge to acquire seats nearly on the court itself. And because he's the King of Executive Function, Rob didn't really look at where the seats were: dead in the center, right behind the in-house announcers, and squarely in front of the stadium camera. Every few minutes, Rob and Patrick were on live TV, while the announcers yapped.
Emboldened by beer, Rob suggested they say hello to those announcers, Chicago's beloved Stacey King and Adam Amin. Last week, King passed away unexpectedly. It's an enormous loss to the Chicago sports community. King hasn't been an athlete on the court in years, but for diehards, he was a reason to cheer while in the sports darkness.
Did we have a good team? No. But we had Stacey King. That was enough.
(There is no paywall on today's article.)
Rob: There are not many deaths outside close and immediate family that would have my parents texting me at 7 in the morning. I was halfway to the shower on Monday when my dad texted me that Stacey King, the longtime color commentator on Chicago Bulls TV broadcasts, had died. Then I sat with that knowledge on my chest for a couple hours before MK woke up and I had to work out how to tell her the news.
On ESPN, Michael Wilbon made the comparison to Chicago Cubs broadcaster Harry Caray in terms of the way King's passing would feel to the city of Chicago and everyone who followed the Bulls. But to be frank, King was a better broadcaster than Carry was for the last many years of his tenure on the microphone. Vin Scully or Brewers broadcaster Bob Uecker might be the better comparison, but even those comparisons miss the mark because they were broadcasting institutions for decades. King was too young to fit that kind of role, an aging king of the booth speaking to generations of fans who had all grown up listening to him. He was only 59.
How good was King? MK and I have watched almost every single Bulls game for the last three years. They were unspeakably bad this past year, and inspired only a few brief flickers of hope across the other two. It didn't matter. King and his partner, play-by-play man Adam Amin, were so good and so entertaining that we watched the Bulls mostly to spend time in their virtual company. Listening to them banter and crack each other up was often like stepping close to a campfire on the dark, cold night that is the 2020s.
But I worry a little bit that the sheer size of King's personality and sense of humor will obscure how thorough and insightful his commentary was. He was a homer broadcaster and ex-player who never checked-out of following the broader NBA and college games. When there wasn't much worth discussing on the Bulls, he had detailed analysis and talking points prepared for whoever they were playing. It ruined us for the national broadcasts. How could you go from watching King break down a neat offensive play and the step-by-step process by which it confused a pair of vulnerable defenders, and then change the channel and hear one of the national teams ad lib their way through a game like a student quizzed on a reading they hadn't prepared? "That's what makes Antman so good, Mike! He's just a competitor!"
It was more fun watching King talk over a crap game than it was hearing a national team blunder their way through a major matchup. He was not just calling the game, he was teaching the game, from a perspective informed both by playing experience and coaching.
Now admittedly, that enthusiasm was tested over this last year or so. You could hear King and Amin struggle to find things to say about the 2025-26 Chicago Bulls after their hot start led into an endless skid to the bottom of the standings and culminated with an overdue housecleaning. We got a little foreshadowing of how King actually felt about this team when we had the good fortune to meet him after the debacle of a Pistons game we attended. I remember complimenting him, saying that he always made the Bulls interesting to watch no matter how they played. He huffed and glowered at the empty Bulls bench. "Some nights it's harder than others. I can tell you that right now." It didn't come across the way on the air until the situation was truly irretrievable.
Everyone thinks their home broadcast team is awesome, but I've listened to a bunch through League Pass and NHL Game Pass and let me tell you, mostly they're not. King and Amin were something special, and so much of that is down to King understanding that you can be funny, you can be loyal hometown advocate, and you can be smart and analytical with being dispassionate. I'm going to miss him like hell, Patrick.
Patrick: I’m with you, brother. You’d be shocked how many people came up to me over the course of Summer Game Fest and say 1) I’m sorry the Bears are going to Indiana (I still think it’s more likely they stay) and 2) I’m sorry about Stacey King. He was the kind of commentator other people knew about.
I don’t know how many people understood how good he was in recent years, though. You’ve kept up Bulls games in recent years, despite how bad they’ve been. I’ve kept up with Bulls games in recent years, despite how bad they’ve been. Sure enough, the United Center was packed every home game, no matter what. But I’ve rarely talked to people who’ve been watching Bulls games in recent years, largely driven by the way the Bulls (and other teams) have squeezed fans for money with overpriced streaming packages.
Plus, the NBA’s regular season has been a death march to the actually interesting playoffs for way too long now. You are trained to basically ignore anything happening in basketball until, what, April? It’s crazy. And by that point in the calendar, the Bulls are rarely in contention beyond a pitiful play-in game. It’s all to say that the Bulls have, in the way they’ve treated its team and its fans, contributed to a faster cultural eraser of the excellence that King brought to every Bulls game, no matter what the quality of the play.
It’s a tragedy, man.
But it’s also, in some ways, reflective of the flattening of all sports in the streaming era. It’s too hard to check in with your individual team, because of the logistical and financial hoops you need to jump through, so you become trained to see them when they just happen to be on, or when the playoffs roll around. And even if you’re lucky enough to have your team in the spotlight, no national broadcaster is going to know your team the way the local crew does. The joy of hanging with the local crew through the ups and downs of a grinding regular season is getting to know the team—and crew—in equal measure. A shared journey.
I’ll still be watching in the fall, albeit with a heavy heart. Plus, the team has some good draft picks in a draft where you’d want to have a lot of chances. But I’ll miss not going on this new journey with Stacey King.
Do you think you’ll tune in, or is this an opportunity to take an earned break from this franchise?
Rob: It's hard to say! Part of it it's like this: after I've experienced a major loss or sometimes even a major change, I have this phase I go through where I don't want it to be real. I can't quite find myself to let myself use the past tense yet when talking about someone. I want to keep the old routines, even if the person or place that gave them their shape is gone. Right now I want to say I'll still be watching the Bulls, in part because Adam Amin is half that broadcast team and I'm confident they will still be good broadcasts with a great vibe. But also I don't want to face the fact that the King years are truly over. That I'm not going to hear, "Mouse in the house: free cheese" at least once per game.
But come November or December? With football in full-swing and the Bulls in all probability having another uninspiring season? With five months of processing this under my belt? I won't need to hold onto routine as hard, because there's a point where you're just ready to let go and let something become memory, rather than your present.
And as you pointed out, the Bulls as a product don't deserve that loyalty based on the past few years. Oh, the in-arena experience is maybe one of the best in the league, and King and Amin made even the worst Bulls teams eminently watchable. But I can't fully express how completely the bottom dropped out of this team in the last year. Popular players were traded too late or given away in a fire-sale. The organization clung to a series of fatally flawed rosters whose deficiencies always showed up in the last quarter against good teams and you realized that the Bulls at their best were good enough to keep it close against good teams who were coasting. The second actual stars decided they weren't going to lose to the Bulls, nine times out of ten the Bulls got buried alive right before your eyes. Luka Doncic got mildly annoyed at Matas Buzelis back in March and dropped 51 on the Bulls. In the last five years, the Bulls have never had a player who could just answer the bell like that. Zach LaVine could rack up numbers but it was like he either had an explosive game or he served as sand in the gears of the rest of the team.
On the other hand, and here's the thing that makes me more inclined to watch bad Chicago sports than you, I miss home. We go years without making it back there sometimes, and so it takes on an outsized importance watching these games. It's like a portal opening. You see the skyline shots of Chicago or a drone camera around the United Center and you realize it's cloudy that night, or the sun is still out on a mild spring day and you can almost feel it. The local broadcast makes you feel like you're there for an hour or two and not a thousand miles away. And on a good night, as the time expired and the Bulls walked off the court with a win, King would tell you it was time to go home, wherever you were. "Drive home safely, Chicago. Beep beep."
And then the portal closes.
Patrick: It’s alright, Rob. You’ll still get those iconic shots when the Bears move to Hammond, Indiana.