There was a time when the Sacramento Kings stood toe-to-toe with the Los Angeles Lakers. Led by Chris Webber, Vlade Divac, Doug Christie, Peja Stojaković, and Mike Bibby, Sacramento looked destined for the NBA Finals. The Kings had finished the regular season 61-21, the league’s best record, and many around the NBA viewed that year’s Western Conference Finals as the “real Finals,” with the winner expected to beat the New Jersey Nets. But one heartbreaking playoff series changed everything.

More than two decades on, the former Kings point guard Bibby still believes the Lakers robbed Sacramento of its best chance at an NBA title, insisting that single moment cost him a Finals run, a Finals MVP, and perhaps his entire legacy. On the Nightcap podcast, ex-Miami Heat hooper and host Joe Johnson asked, “Knowing the history of the game, y’all may have been robbed a little bit. Do you honestly think it was?”

The 48-year-old responded, “Hell yeah! Yeah, it was. You see this, man? Look, that could change my whole career. I could have changed my whole career. I was rolling at that point. Now, what if it looks like I get to the Finals, I get Finals MVP? That’s going to look a whole lot better on my resume than the s*** I got now.”

Despite the ill fate that followed the Kings in the 2002 Western Conference Finals, for Joe Johnson, Bibby & Co. were like heroes. So he added, “I didn’t think nobody could beat that Lakers, Kobe and Shaq. But, bro, when I tell you, y’all pushed them to the brink. Obviously, under certain circumstances, maybe I would have won it. But, man, that was a pleasure to watch.”

Bibby has told a version of this story elsewhere, too. On “The OGs Show” with former teammates Udonis Haslem and Mike Miller, he described watching the Lakers’ bench after the Kings won Game 5: “You could look on the bench, you can even go look at some of the YouTube stuff and just see their faces on the bench, Phil Jackson’s face, Fisher’s face… I knew it was over with.”

That confidence lasted about two days. Between Games 5 and 6, Bibby went on local radio predicting Sacramento would close it out in Los Angeles. His veteran teammate Chucky Brown, then in his 14th NBA season, wasn’t so sure. Bibby recalled the warning years later: Brown told him that if a certain officiating crew worked the game, “it’s not going to go the way we like.” Bibby, in just his fourth season, brushed it off. He probably wishes he hadn’t.

During the 2002 NBA Western Conference Finals between the Lakers and the Kings, Mike Bibby emerged as a superhero. Across 7 games, he averaged 22.7 points, 4.4 assists, and 3.6 rebounds. That’s not all. The Kings will remember Mike B for his Game 5 heroics. He scored 23 points and hit the clutch, go-ahead mid-range jumper to secure a 92-91 victory for the team, giving Sacramento a 3-2 series lead with a trip to the Finals in sight.

However, everything changed after Game 6, a game that, twenty-plus years later, is still argued about more than almost any other in NBA history.

Why 2002 is still argued about

It helps to remember what that Kings team actually was. Sacramento finished the 2001-02 regular season 61-21, still the best record in franchise history, with seven players averaging in double figures. Chris Webber led the way at 24.5 points a game, Peja Stojaković added 21.2, and Bibby chipped in 13.7. The Lakers, by contrast, were the two-time defending champions but had actually finished with the same 58-24 record as the Spurs that year and only got the No. 3 seed on a tiebreaker.

At the time, most people treated the Western Conference Finals as the real championship, since whoever came out of it was expected to steamroll the Eastern Conference’s New Jersey Nets, which the Lakers ultimately did, sweeping them 4-0.

Game 6 of the 2002 Western Conference Finals remains one of the most fiercely debated playoff games ever. The Los Angeles Lakers escaped with a 106-102 win behind Shaquille O’Neal’s 41 points and 17 rebounds, forcing a Game 7 in Sacramento. However, the ending sparked years of controversy.

Many later linked the officiating to the Tim Donaghy scandal. The numbers from that night are still jarring: the Lakers had averaged 25 free-throw attempts a game over the series’ first five games, but shot 40 in Game 6 alone, 27 of them in the fourth quarter, when Los Angeles made only five field goals but went 21-for-27 from the line. Sacramento, by comparison, attempted just 25 free throws for the entire game. Meanwhile, Sacramento’s frontcourt took a heavy hit as Vlade Divac, Chris Webber, Scot Pollard, and Lawrence Funderburke combined for 20 fouls, while Divac and Pollard both fouled out.

Even so, the Sacramento Kings kept fighting. Chris Webber finished with 26 points, 13 rebounds, and 8 assists, Mike Bibby added 23 points, and Divac posted 12 points with 12 rebounds. Michael Wilbon, writing in The Washington Post two days after the game, said he’d counted six calls in the fourth quarter that were, in his words, “stunningly incorrect”, all of them against Sacramento. He wasn’t a conspiracy theorist about it, either; Wilbon made a point of saying he didn’t believe the referees had any agenda, just that the calls were wrong in a way he’d never seen in a game of that magnitude. Even Vlade Divac, only half-joking, said afterward: “Why don’t they just let us know in advance?”

Amidst everything, one sequence stood above the rest. With the Lakers leading by one and roughly 12 seconds on the clock, 11.8 seconds, to be exact, Kobe Bryant elbowed Bibby across the face, opening a cut and sending him to the sideline bleeding. The officials didn’t miss the contact; they just called it the wrong way: the foul went on Bibby, not Bryant, and Bryant made the free throw to push the Lakers’ lead to 105-102. Many still view it as one of the most glaring missed calls in playoff history.

Donaghy himself never worked Game 6. Years after his 2007 arrest and conviction for betting on games he officiated, he alleged from prison that the league had steered the series to a seventh game for financial reasons, a claim the NBA has always denied and that has never been substantiated. It’s worth separating the two things: the officiating in Game 6 is about as widely criticized as any in league history, but the idea that it was deliberately fixed remains an allegation, not a proven fact.

Sacramento still had a Game 7, at home, with a trip to the Finals on the line. Peja Stojaković missed a badly needed three, the Kings shot poorly from the line themselves, and the Lakers won it in overtime to close out the series 4-3 and advance to a third straight championship. It’s the detail that keeps the “robbed” argument from being open-and-shut, Sacramento had one more chance to make the officiating moot, and couldn’t.

Maybe if Game 6 had gone differently, the Sacramento Kings could’ve become NBA champions and stopped the Lakers from completing that three-peat. And maybe Mike Bibby could have actually become Finals MVP instead of Shaq.

What it cost the Kings, but what it didn’t cost Bibby

Sacramento never got back to a conference finals. Chris Webber tore his ACL in the first round of the very next postseason and was never quite the same player again. The core gradually broke up, and by the 2006-07 season the Kings had begun a 16-season playoff drought, the longest in NBA history, that didn’t end until 2023, when a De’Aaron Fox-led roster finally clinched a spot. For a franchise that once had the league’s best record, it’s a brutal stretch to sit alongside 2002 in the retelling. Bibby, for his part, turned out fine.

He played 14 NBA seasons, retired with 14,698 points and 5,517 assists, made the All-Rookie First Team in 1999 and a lone All-Star team in 2003, and earned roughly $107 million in NBA salary along the way, including a seven-year, $81 million extension he signed with Sacramento right after that 2002 run. By almost any measure, it was a successful, well-compensated career. But Bibby’s comments make clear that money and counting stats aren’t what he measures himself against. A championship, and the Finals MVP that might have come with it, is a different kind of currency, and it’s the one line still missing from his résumé.

Since retiring, Bibby has stayed close to the game, coaching at the high school level, including at his alma mater, Shadow Mountain High School in Phoenix, and working with young players through development programs. He’s also currently the head coach at Sacramento State, and he occasionally turns up on podcasts reflecting on that 2002 run.

So when Bibby says one game changed his whole career, he’s not really exaggerating. He’s not claiming he’d have definitely won Finals MVP; Webber, as Sacramento’s leading scorer that year, would likely have entered a Finals as the favorite for that honor. What Bibby is describing is simpler and, given everything above, hard to argue with: a real chance, decided in the final 12 seconds by an official standing right there, that never got the ending it deserved.