The Sacramento Kings have arrived in India, and other news and notes

The Sacramento Kings arrived in India, and have begun seeing the sights. While there’s no big news or story here, we thought it would be a beneficial to do a quick rundown of Kings news and notes as we lead up to Friday’s preseason game.

De’Aaron Fox’s Diary

Fox is doing on ongoing diary of his time in India for The Undefeated.

Flying on Drake’s plane, man, it was dope. It was 20 hours — it felt like 20 hours — but it didn’t feel like a normal plane, you know, your ears start poppin’, none of that stuff happened. We played FIFA, Madden, 2K, started playing Assassins Creed a little bit, it was cool. It’s like being in your living room, but you on a flight, that’s how accommodating it was. We played music and stuff, but you can’t play music for 20 straight hours.

Even when we were staying up I didn’t feel like I was tired or like struggling to stay up because it felt like you was sitting in your living room.

I slept for probably eight to nine hours. I think it was like six bedrooms, like actual bedrooms, so people slept in them. I didn’t sleep in the bedrooms, I just walked by and messed with people.

Driving through the streets of India, it’s extremely different, I’ll tell you that. You kinda see animals on the street. I mean, you see stray dogs before, but I’ve never seen a stray cow.

Buddy has a “neon green” light

James Ham reports that Coach Walton is giving Buddy Hield a “neon green” light to shoot threes.

“I’m still a believer -- let’s get good shots,” coach Luke Walton said over the weekend. “But good shots for some people now are what I always considered bad shots.”

Hield will likely have what Walton calls a “neon green light” in the Kings’ offense. It would be similar to what Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson had when Walton coached them with the Warriors.

How Vivek became the lead owner for the Kings

Sam Amick goes in depth on how the Kings ownership group came together, and how David Stern’s influence resulted in Vivek Ranadivé being the Kings lead owner instead of Mark Mastrov. Fascinating look behind the scenes. Amick quotes Mastrov, talking about how the ownership group came together and roles formed after Ron Burkle’s exit:

(But) when we got to the NBA meetings, (Dallas Mavericks owner Mark) Cuban brought up the fact that Burkle had Relativity media, and inside that he had this agency that had Amar’e Stoudemire and a couple athletes. They said, “You’ve got to get rid of that.” Then Burkle said, “I can’t; I don’t want to.” And for whatever reason, he just decided “I’m out,” which left me and Vivek standing there to fill the (financial) shoe. David Stern basically said, “I love you, Mark. I think you’d be a great lead, but obviously Vivek might be a little bit better. He’s already been with the Warriors, he’s from India, we want to grow in India, and we think he’d be a great (lead owner) for us.” So that’s how that all kind of came about. David kind of picked Vivek to be the main guy coming in, and we were able to prevail in the end.

The whole thing is an incredible read.

Harry had an MRI

Finally, Jason Anderson reports that the Kings gave Harry Giles an MRI.

“No new findings” is an interesting way to phrase it. We’ll continue to see how involved Giles is in preseason games once the team returns from India.