Style Points

This is not meant as an insult to the Lakers, who have been fine two-year NBA champions and the dominating force of professional basketball.

This is no impugning of the talents of the NBA’s two best players. Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal have singular talents. We have never before and may never again see a man as large as Shaq be able to move with such speed and nimbleness and strength. We have never before and may never again see a man of Kobe’s young age with such single-minded focus and maturity and accomplishments.

Still, it would be a great thing for the NBA if the Sacramento Kings were able to beat the Lakers in the NBA Western Conference finals and also whatever middling team comes from the East.

It is no accident that the Kings-Dallas semifinal series was watched by audiences more than 30% larger than have watched any of the other playoff series so far.

The basketball played by Sacramento and--not quite as well--by the Mavericks, is aesthetically appealing. It is a game of movement and skill, of great passing and jump shooting, of strength, certainly, but also of finesse.

Sacramento has a group of players who see the floor well and seem to see all the possibilities the game can offer. They see all the possibilities because so many are available to this team. “We can do so many things,” Sacramento guard Doug Christie says. “We have a lot of guys who are versatile.”

When the Kings play offense, all five men are involved. Any of five players can pass and score. Big men such as Vlade Divac, Chris Webber and Peja Stojakovic can dunk and shoot from outside. The Kings play fast, yet they play patiently. They do things by instinct, but it is instinct produced by visualizing their next move and the one after that. They sometimes seem like the chess master who never, never concedes he has been stopped.

When there are five, four, three seconds left on the shot clock and the defense is about to congratulate itself on a great possession, Mike Bibby or Webber or Christie will make a soft bounce pass to a sneaky cutter who has been forgotten by a defender who was already thinking about the next play. The Kings never give up on finding ways to score because they have so many ways to score.

It is a tribute to Shaq and Kobe, the way the Lakers play, and by necessity the way Laker opponents play.

Because Shaq is of a size and strength unmatched by anybody, a game involving the Lakers is brutally physical. Shaq is beat upon by defenders who have no other options and Shaq beats back because he can’t help it and it works so well. A man who is 7 feet 1 and weighs around 340 pounds doesn’t nudge or tap. He slams and mashes. Because Kobe is capable of improvisational greatness at any time, his less-talented teammates by nature and design will clear out the floor and watch him go. And suddenly a game invented to be choreographed movement in space, with all sorts of problem-solving challenges and opportunities, becomes static, body-crunching, 24-second snippets of plodding interrupted by a second or two of impossible heroics.

It might be effective, but it is dull.

Laker fans are living dangerously if they refuse to take the Kings seriously or if they refuse to appreciate that the Kings do some things better than the Lakers.

Does it sound silly to say that a team that plays its games in a glorified barn set in a glorified pasture serenaded by fans whose fame comes from ringing cowbells would help the NBA immensely by winning?

Sacramento, the city, falls somewhere behind Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego, maybe even Oakland, even in its own state.

Sacramento, the basketball franchise, has won one NBA title, in 1951, five years before an African American would play for the team, four years before the 24-second clock was introduced. That team was the Rochester Royals then and they beat the Minneapolis Lakers in the Western Division finals and the New York Knicks in the Finals. Each Royal earned a $7,500 championship reward.

The last time the franchise went to conference finals, in 1981, the team was known as the Kansas City Kings. For many years, when the team was in Cincinnati and had Oscar Robertson as its star, the Royals could not get past the Celtics in games with scores of 135-132.

In Los Angeles, it’s hard to accept that Sacramento is in the class of the Lakers. It’s hard in Los Angeles to take seriously the little team from up north, a team of so little accomplishment historically speaking, a team counting 51 years since its last title, against the two-time defending champions.

But as this L.A.-Sacramento series unfolds, don’t be so uppity, L.A. fans, that you don’t admit the way the Kings play basketball is fun and liberating and the way basketball should be played.

Which is not to say the Kings are better than the Lakers. They are different. They are new and maybe a bit old too. They are confident and they believe in the possibilities. The possibilities of the first pass and the second and the fifth. The possibilities of the pump fake and the pick and roll, of cutting and weaving, of shooting the jump shot and making it. The possibilities of sound defense and relentless offense.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com