What a Sea-Kings season looked like, game by game

The event page for that game said what every one of the club's away listings said: the Sea-Kings travel to Stockton to take on Team Trouble, followed by a line about the pace of ABA basketball and a ticket link. Team Trouble was a familiar opponent. In January 2018 the club had driven to Stockton Arena to face them as a 7-0 team, and in March 2018 it posted about losing a close one to them. Two years later the rivalry was still on the calendar, with the return game at Monterey County set for February 8, 2020.

Everything on this page comes from those event listings and the schedule widget on the club's home page, captured between November 2019 and January 2021. The ABA of that era published no standings that survive in a checkable form, so there are no scores here for 2019-2020 and no won-lost record. Where a date or site is missing, it is because the capture did not include it, and it has been left blank rather than guessed.

The ABA that the Sea-Kings belonged to was the 2000 revival co-founded by Joe Newman and Dick Tinkham, a league that by the late 2010s ran on very low franchise fees and a large, shifting map of regional teams, most of them a few hours' drive from each other. The club's own ABA explainer page, which credited ABALiveAction for its text, described a season running from November through April including playoffs, a set of rules meant to push pace and scoring, among them a seven-second half-court count and a bonus-point light that turned twos into threes after certain turnovers, and a two-conference structure in which teams that played twenty or more regular-season games were eligible for the playoffs. For the Sea-Kings that meant a division of Northern and Central California neighbors and a few longer trips. The opponents that appear across the club's 2019-2020 listings and its 2017-2018 posts tell you the map: Team Trouble in Stockton, the Solano Stallions, the Chico Super Kats, the Contra Costa County Delta Stars, the San Francisco City Cats, the San Jose Knights, the Oakland Bayhawks, then the Southern California pairing of the San Diego Guardians and San Diego Kings with the Orange County Nova Stars, and one out-of-state date at the Albuquerque Bull Snakes. Home games were listed as Monterey County, without a named building, which is how the club described its floor from 2017 on. The regular season was short by the standards of any league you would see on television, the calendar clustered into weekends, as it does in leagues where players hold weekday jobs, and the postseason was a set of division playoffs in early March feeding a national Elite 8 that the ABA moved from city to city each year, Texas in 2018, Binghamton in 2020.

Two more event pages existed for that season, Sea-Kings at Chico Super Kats and Sea-Kings at Contra Costa Delta Stars, but the captures that preserved them did not include dates, so they are not in the table. The club's listings used the ABA's spelling of its host city, Binghampton, which has been corrected here.

The shape of the slate is plain once it is laid out. The listed season opened on the road: Stockton at the end of December, then Solano and San Diego in January, with a San Jose Knights date on January 25 whose site the capture did not preserve. Then came February, and five listed home dates in Monterey County across five weekends, interrupted by a single trip to Albuquerque. The two Southern California visitors, the San Diego Kings and the Orange County Nova Stars, came north for a Saturday-Sunday doubleheader on February 1 and 2, which is the ABA West at its most practical: one drive, two games, two gates.

Road games to open, five home dates in February, and a season that stopped in March.

• Tip-off times ran from 2:00 pm to 5:30 pm on weekends, and 7:00 pm for the Albuquerque date.
• Event pages carried the club's tags, including Purple Heart and Honor America's Combat Wounded Veterans, alongside the game hashtags.
• The organizer on every listing was California Sea-Kings LLC, with a Monterey-area phone number.

The last regular-season listing was February 29, 2020. The next two entries, Far West Division playoffs on March 1 and March 7, were marked to be determined, and the Elite 8 dates in Binghamton were marked to be announced. None of them ever acquired a result, an opponent or a venue on the club's site. Wikipedia's article on the ABA records that the 2019-20 season ended prematurely and the playoffs were cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. When the club's home page was next captured, in January 2021, the schedule widget showed nothing at all, and the site's most recent top story was still the thank-you to fans from April 2018.

For contrast, the one season the club described in detail was 2017-2018: a 7-0 start reported on January 7, 2018 after a 142-134 win over the San Diego Surf, a self-reported 14-2 regular season closed by two home wins over the visiting Shizuoka GymRats, and a Final 8 trip to Kyle and Austin, Texas in April 2018 that began with a 120-100 win over the Port City Tornados. Those numbers are the club's, not a league's. After 2020 the Sea-Kings never played another ABA game; their next documented seasons were in The Basketball League, 2021 and 2022, where outside standings tables finally exist.

The TBL kept standings, which is why the club's last two seasons can be stated as results rather than listings. The first was ordinary: 9-11 over 20 games in 2021, third in the West Conference, a first-round bye as the second seed, then a 2-0 loss to the San Diego Guardians in the conference semifinal. The second was the best season on any outside record of the team. In 2022 the Sea-Kings went 20-4 in 24 games and finished first in the TBL's West Division, ahead of the Salem Capitals and the SoCal Moguls, swept Salem 2-0 in the round of 16, and went out 1-2 to the Moguls in the quarterfinals. The club's own site had stopped posting in June 2021, so the 20-4 year appears nowhere on it, and from 2023 the league's Wikipedia page lists the Sea-Kings among its former teams.