Courtside seats for a Sacramento Kings cost $965.00, with seats further from the benches running for $760.00 and $360.00 before you get into the economy class of $165.00 per ticket. Even at those inflated prices, the cost of admission shouldn’t entitle the bearer to blatantly abuse Kings players or coaches, but neithershould they be precluded from offering a critique of the performance in question.  Al Harrington and the Knicks embarrassed the Kings last night, 114-90, and the Sacramento Bee’s Ailene Voison witnessed the following exchange between paying customers and head coach Reggie Theus.

It didn’t take long for all the goodwill generated with the Kings’ victory over the Lakers last Tuesday to dissipate. Saturday night’s crowd at Arco Arena was uncharacteristically rutal. If you didn’t know better, you would have sworn the Kings were playing the Knicks in New York. As the Kings were being hammered 43-21 in the opening period, Reggie Theus turned toward one particularly vocal group seated behind the press table and asked, in his classic, controlled manner, “Do you guys like those seats?” That shut the guys up for a few minutes, but they were back at after intermission. They blasted the Kings for being “soft,” for that 17-3 drubbing on the boards in the first quarter, for their indefensible defense – most notably the inability to defend the three-point shot – and stayed on Theus throughout. “Thank god they sell beer,” cracked one of the fans, a longtime Kings partisan from Walnut Creek. “This is unwatchable.”

“Do you guys like these seats?”  Uh, who wouldn’t prefer obstructed view compared to nearly 3 quarters of garbage time?  Is that really the best comeback Theus can manage?  I don’t imagine he’s the sort of guy to reply with “do I come to your job and knock the dick out of your mouth?”, but perhaps in the future he can add some levity to the occasion by handing out resumes to the first few rows.