Vivek Ranadive didn't stick to sports, has his defining moment as Kings owner

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Vivek Ranadive has been looking for that moment that defines him as a sports owner since the day he bought the Sacramento Kings, and for the longest time he hung his hat on two hooks:

One, helping convince David Stern to lay in the tracks that were leading the team to Seattle, and two, getting a new arena built.

But those enriched him. What he did Thursday night ennobled him.

In the wake of the police shooting of Stephon Clark while he sat in his grandfather’s backyard and Sacramento’s ensuing outrage, Ranadive was presented with a difficult situation. A protest had led to the doors of the Golden 1 Center, essentially blocking the entrances for that night’s Kings-Atlanta Hawks game, and rather than insist that the police clear the entrances so an essentially meaningless game could be played without inconvenience, Ranadive decided to err on the side of the community rather than his own perquisites.

The protesters stayed, the game was played (albeit before maybe 1,500 people rather than the usual 17,583), and after consulting with his players and other employees in search of the proper tone, he spoke eloquently and acted firmly and sensitively about the Clark's family’s pain, and the town’s pain.

This became his moment to show what he stood for, and what he stood against.

This is not typically a place to find owner praise – they act in their own self-interest to such an extraordinary degree that no caricature of them as money-eating oligarchs is accurate enough. Nor is this the place to call Vivek Ranadive a hero in a tragic time – not when the issues are so much broader and the wound done to a family and the city in which they live is still so fresh. In a practical sense, what he did was relatively insignificant.

But he gave a calming voice to a volatile situation, and more than that, he was confronted by a choice between his business and that of the town in which he does it, and unambiguously chose the second option.

In that moment, he wasn’t a sports owner, he was a concerned citizen. In that moment, he could have chosen to take care of himself and instead chose the people around him. He wasn’t “the guy who owns the goofy basketball team,” he was a Sacramentan.

And in that moment, the city needed him to be the second one more than the first. It needed to vent its rage a lot more than it needed Hawks-Kings.

Again, this is a small thing, and the people who live in Sacramento and are confronting this full-on are much better equipped to explain how Ranadive’s choice fits in the city’s greater psychic landscape.

But as a member of the entertainment world’s ruling class, Ranadive chose not to act that way. He didn’t stick to sports, and in a metaphorical way, he took his knee. That is his defining moment as an owner.

And to the extent that that sort of thing matters, he chose his moment well.

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