If you watch a local feed of an NBA game, each of the commercials pointing you to the various ways to buy team merchandise online won't send you to the NBA.com store, but another online URL run by the team itself that hangs outside of the NBA's official tentacles. It's a nice way to keep closer tabs on who is buying what locally, presumably keeping a little more of the overall scratch for the franchise, while sending needed jobs to the sometimes-local dot-commeries that can personalize the store as the team sees fit. Nothing against what NBA.com does, but their script is the same for all 30 squads. And teams like to cater their own store to their own squad's needs. The Sacramento Kings? They needs-a the money, so much. And yet, as discovered by CBS earlier this week and blown up all over the internet in the days following , the Kings' personalized store — their official store — has been down since the second week in June, and nobody seemed to notice until the last week in August. From CBS : Since June, the link to the Kings' online store has been a black screen with a telephone number. "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.
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