I watched the Bulls announcement drop on a Sunday morning and felt the slump crack open in my chest like the dry Oklahoma wind that used to whip through Lloyd Noble Center back when Stacey King was dropping 26 a night. Weeks of safe angles and half-swings had left me staring at blank screens, wondering if I still had the juice to throw a real punch. This one hit different. King was gone at 59, and the story everyone wanted to tell was the three rings next to Jordan. I’m done letting that narrative bury what actually mattered.
King’s real foundation was laid in college, not the NBA bench. He took Oklahoma to the 1988 national title game, then came back the next year and averaged 26 points while blocking shots at a rate that made big men in the Big Eight look like they were playing in slow motion. The Sooners retired his number 33 in 2008 because they understood something the rest of the country keeps forgetting: that roster wasn’t just a footnote to the Bulls dynasty. It was the place where King learned how to own a building.
I keep coming back to the way he played then. First-team All-American, conference player of the year, the kind of production that forced defenses to game-plan around a 6-11 kid who could step out and score from anywhere. Danny Manning and Kansas beat them for the title, but King’s Sooners were the ones who showed up with the swagger that would later define the Jordan era. The league didn’t hand out those awards for vibes. He earned every one.
The corporate types want to reduce him to “color commentator who made funny calls on Bulls broadcasts.” I’m not buying it. That voice came from the same place the college game used to reward: actual personality earned on the floor, not manufactured for a NIL deal. King’s podcast line last month still rings in my head because it exposed the gap between how the game used to feel and how it feels now. “We enjoy what we do. It’s a fun job. It never seems like work for me. Every night, I go to work, win, lose or draw, I’m having fun.” That wasn’t a soundbite. That was the same energy he brought when he was averaging 26 and the conference still thought they could stop him.
Michael Reinsdorf said it plain: “Stacey loved being a Bull. You could feel it in everything he did.” The dad in me reads that and thinks about the kids who grew up hearing King call games instead of just watching box scores scroll. Those broadcasts connected generations because King never pretended the job was bigger than the joy. Modern college basketball pretends every transfer portal move is high drama. King treated every possession like it was personal, and the fans felt it.
I ran the numbers on his college stretch again this week because the obituaries kept skipping it. Twenty-six points, conference-leading blocks, Final Four run, All-America nod. That’s not a role player who lucked into three titles. That’s the prototype for the stretch-big era we pretend is brand new. The game has nerfed interior defense since then, but King was already doing the work that coaches now beg for in the portal. He chose violence in the paint before it was a catchphrase.
Jerry Reinsdorf called him one of the unique personalities in Bulls history. I’ll go further. King was one of the last bridges between the old college game and the league that swallowed it. He came out of Oklahoma with the kind of production that would get a kid today a max extension before he finished his sophomore year. Instead he got drafted sixth, rode the bench behind the greatest player ever, and still found a way to make the organization feel like home for three decades. That arc doesn’t happen without the college foundation. The Sooners gave him the platform; everything after was just louder.
The current college landscape would have eaten King alive with NIL noise and transfer rumors. He stayed at Oklahoma, put up historic numbers, and let the work speak. No one was glazing him on social media in 1989. He earned the jersey retirement the old-fashioned way: by making every game feel like it mattered more than the one before it. That’s the part the modern game has lost, and King’s passing makes the absence louder.
I watched his career highlights again after the news broke and kept landing on the same truth. The three championships get the headlines, but the blocks and buckets at Oklahoma are what made the rest possible. Without that 1988-89 season, there is no voice that could connect Bulls fans across decades. The joy Reinsdorf talked about started in Norman, not Chicago. The energy that made every broadcast feel personal was the same thing that made Lloyd Noble Center shake when King was cooking.
People are already typing the safe tributes in the replies. Go ahead. Tell me he was just a solid role player who got lucky with Jordan. I’ll be here waiting with the box scores that say otherwise. King didn’t need the corporate gloss. He had the numbers, the rings, and the voice that outlasted all of it. That combination doesn’t come around often, and it sure as hell doesn’t get replaced by the next guy in line.
The game moves on. Oklahoma will keep playing, the Bulls will keep broadcasting, and some new voice will try to fill the space. None of them will carry the same weight because none of them built it the way King did, from the college floor up. His legacy isn’t the three titles. It’s the proof that one player’s college dominance can echo for thirty years if he refuses to treat any of it like work.
What happens when the next generation of bigs realizes the path King took is still the one that actually lasts?
