If you grew up watching Bulls basketball after the Jordan era, Stacey King was the reason you stuck around. The franchise spent stretches of the 2000s and 2010s in basketball purgatory, but the broadcast booth was never the problem. King turned routine regular-season nights into theater, and the news of his passing landed like a gut punch across Chicago and well beyond it.
Big Cat summed up what a lot of people are feeling right now.
This is one is like a sucker punch out of nowhere. In shock. Such a great person that made basketball more fun and inviting to everyone.
The tributes started rolling in immediately, and most of them looked the same: an old clip, a King call layered over the top, and a caption that didn't need to say much. The bench-mob years, the Derrick Rose MVP run, the walk-off wins at the United Center — King narrated all of it with the kind of unfiltered hype that made his catchphrases part of the city's vocabulary.
One of the legendary calls making the rounds as fans remember him.
No partnership defined King's career quite like the one he had with Derrick Rose. The two were a match made in Chicago basketball heaven — the hometown kid doing impossible things, and the homer in the booth losing his mind in real time. 'Let me step back and kiss myself' wasn't just a call, it was a whole genre.
The King-DRose chemistry, captured in one of its peak moments.
BarstoolChief reshared a DRose moment of his own and called it poetry, which feels like the right word for the whole 24-hour run of tributes. Every clip people are pulling up is some little piece of the soundtrack King wrote for a generation of Bulls basketball. Forever the voice of the Bulls. Rest easy, Stacey.