It's an uncontroversial statement that the Kings aren't very popular these days. They brought up the rear of the Pacific, again, and are near the bottom in league attendance. And there's also the little matter of the team probably moving within the next few years. The salvation of a new arena fell through in April, for reasons that promise to poison any further arena negotiations. Anaheim? Seattle? Virginia Beach? No matter what the future holds, it's hard to blame Kings fans for a lack of interest right now.


Still, it's incredible that the Kings had no online shop for nine-and-a-half weeks and nobody complained, or even appeared to realize it was gone.


We're talking about the official team store here, not the NBA.com Kings section. Every team has its own dedicated, independently run online shop. The Kings had one too, until June 15, when KingsTeamStore.com went dark.

"We had a company that was helping us with our website and these are lean times in the economy," Kings spokesman Chris Clark said. "They're in business one day, the next day they're gone." And gone was the Kings' team shop website. "In the e-commerce industry, it takes about four months to build a website from scratch, and the way the company went under it kind of left us in a lurch," Clark said. Since June, fans haven't been able to see an online catalog of team merchandise and all orders have had to be made over the phone or in person at Power Balance Pavilion.

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For those two-plus months—beginning in the NBA Finals, running through the draft, all the way up until today—clicking on the "Shop" link on the Kings' website took visitors to a black page with just a phone number, or when I checked it yesterday, an error message. Today, only after CBS Sacramento reported on the site's outage, the "Shop" link takes you to the Kings section of the NBA.com store, where all the same products can be purchased. This seems like a logical backup plan that should have been in place all along. The only possible explanation: for the bulk of the summer, no one even noticed the site's absence.

The Kings promise a new web store will be up and running within two weeks.

Fans Looking For Kings Merchandise Can't Get It Online [CBS Sacramento]