The question is about the Cincinnati Royals, and Oscar Robertson pauses before answering with a question of his own:

        “Does anybody remember the Royals?”

        Their era is reduced to record books and dusty memories. Yet 30 years after their exodus, the Royals still can claim credit as forefathers of the Sacramento Kings, owners this season of the NBA's best record.

        If they'd like.

ROYALS/KINGS TIMELINE

• 1945: The Rochester (N.Y.) Royals join the National Basketball League and win the NBL crown in their first season.     • 1948: The team moves to the Basketball Association of America.     • 1949-50: The Royals become one of 17 charter members of the NBA. They go 51-17 in their first season, including 33-1 at home, but are swept in the opening round of the playoffs by the Fort Wayne (Ind.) Pistons.     • 1951: The team finishes its second NBA season with its lone league championship, a surprise after a 41-27 regular season. It nearly squanders a 3-0 lead in the finals against New York, but prevails 79-75 in Game 7.     • 1957: Franchise moves to Cincinnati.     • 1958-60: Second season in Cincinnati ends with a league-worst 19-53 record. Third season ends with a league-worst 19-56 mark, which remains the worst in franchise history.     • 1960: Royals use a territorial pick to select Oscar Robertson in the draft. Robertson becomes the league's rookie of the year in the '60-61 season.     • 1963: Team wins its first playoff series since moving to Cincinnati, beating Syracuse, then takes eventual NBA champion Boston to seven games in the Eastern Division finals.     • 1964: With Jerry Lucas named NBA rookie of the year and Robertson winning league MVP honors, Cincinnati wins 45 of its final 61 games. Its franchise single-season record of 55 victories isn't topped until 2002. Banged-up Royals fall in five games to Celtics in division finals.     • 1970: With Lucas traded a year prior, the remaking of the Royals is completed when Robertson is traded to Milwaukee for Flynn Robinson and Charlie Paulk.     • 1972: After failing to exceed .500 for six consecutive seasons, the club moves to Kansas City and is renamed the Kansas City-Omaha Kings.     • 1981: Despite a 40-42 record, the Kings beat Portland and Phoenix to reach the Western Conference finals, where they lose to Houston.     • 1985: Kings move to Sacramento. They make the playoffs their first season, then don't qualify again for 10 years.     • 1998: A 13-season stretch of 497 consecutive sellouts in 17,317-seat ARCO Arena, dating to the club's arrival in Sacramento, finally ends.     • 2002: Sacramento goes 61-21, the best mark in the NBA and best in franchise history, and has thus far reached the Western Conference finals.

        “I don't have a favorite team,” said Jack Twyman, a former Royal. “But I have a quasi-interest in rooting for them because of where they came from. I'm proud of the lineage.”

        Of note about Sacramento's appearance in the conference finals is that this is a stage the team has reached just once (as the Kansas City-Omaha Kings, in 1981) since the 1962-63 and '63-64 seasons. Those two Royals teams, which nearly dethroned the Boston Celtics, represented the high point for Cincinnati pro basketball.

        The Kings' 61-21 record this season broke the franchise record for single-season victories (55) set in '63-64 and matched last season.

        “A little blurb about that came up on TV the other night,” said Adrian Smith, another former Royal. “It made me think back to those years. I thought we had the team to play with anybody.”

        They did. Check out the talent base in '63-64.

        There were three future Hall of Famers in the lineup: Robertson, Jerry Lucas and Twyman. Smith later won All-Star Game MVP honors (1966). Robertson, Lucas, Smith, Bob Boozer and Jay Arnette were all 1960 Olympic gold medalists.

        (Wayne Embry, another strong scorer, also made the Hall of Fame, though largely on his management credentials with Cleveland.)

        In its two finest playoff runs, Cincinnati had the misfortune of sharing the same division with Boston.

        “We had wonderful timing,” Twyman said, tongue in cheek. “The Celtics won the league 11 of 13 years (from 1957-69), and the two years they didn't, Bill Russell was hurt.”

        Though there were just nine NBA teams then, Cincinnati's talent pool in that period remains the deepest in the franchise's 54 seasons.

        A few years ago, the Sacramento club picked its all-time starting five, four of whom — Robertson, Lucas, Twyman and Harold “Happy” Hairston — played in the team's Cincinnati era. The fifth, Nate “Tiny” Archibald, played his first two seasons here.

        Cincinnati was the second of four cities the team called home. The club was born in Rochester, N.Y., in 1948 and reached its only NBA Finals in 1951, winning in seven games against New York.

        Twyman, a University of Cincinnati grad who lives in Indian Hill, was playing for Rochester when the team played an exhibition at Cincinnati Gardens in late 1956.

        “It was on TV and radio and was sold out,” Twyman said. “Les Harrison, the owner, said, "I've got to get this team to Cincinnati.' ”

        Harrison did so the following year.

        The team won just 19 games in 1958-59 and the same number in '59-60. But by the nature of the NBA's territorial draft, UC's All-American, Robertson, was destined to become a Royal the following season. Drawing just 58,000 fans to the Gardens in 1959-60, the Royals welcomed 207,000 the following season.

        Robertson averaged a triple-double in his second season — a feat no one else in NBA history has matched — with 30.8 points, 12.5 rebounds and 11.4 assists. In his first five years with the Royals, Robertson averaged 30.3 points, 10.6 rebounds and 10.4 assists.

        The franchise hadn't won a playoff series in nine years, but despite going just 42-38 in '62-63, it turned the corner with an upset of the heavily favored Syracuse Nationals. Game 7 at Syracuse was a 131-127 overtime Royals triumph, with Robertson totaling 32 points, 19 rebounds, 13 assists in a game then-Enquirer beat writer Jim Schottelkotte still calls the best he ever saw.

The Big O, Oscar Robertson. (File photo) | ZOOM |

        Then the Royals turned a bigger trick: winning twice in Boston to go up 2-1 on the Celtics.

        “That was the high-water mark,” said Smith, who lives in Anderson Township. “We took it right to them.”

        Yet Royals management, also in charge of the Gardens, had booked the Shrine Circus there, so Game 4 had to be moved. It was played before 3,498 fans in Xavier's Schmidt Fieldhouse, with Boston winning 128-110.

        “I remember it to be a turning point — the unfamiliarity with the court, the smaller crowd, the frustration we had,” Twyman said. “We were disappointed in the lack of confidence they showed in the team by booking a circus for that date.”

        It was a tumultuous time. Ownership of the Royals changed twice in four days during the Boston series. Coach Charley Wolf left after the season in the midst of differences with new owner Warren Hensel.

        Cincinnati lost Game 5 but won Game 6. In Game 7 at Boston Garden, Robertson scored 43 points, still the franchise's single-game playoff record. But Sam Jones negated him with 47 points, and the Celtics won 142-131.

        “We just didn't have the bench to match them,” Robertson said. “They had a good, deep team — Bill Russell, Sam (Jones), (Tom) Heinsohn, (John) Havlicek.”

        How deep were the Celtics? Bob Cousy, Frank Ramsey and K.C. Jones, Hall of Famers all, came off the bench.

        The following season, Cincinnati added Lucas and seemed primed to topple Boston. After a 10-9 start, the Royals finished 55-25.

        But the Royals entered the Boston series limping. Lucas, kneed in the back in the previous series with Philadelphia, was moving and jumping slowly. Robertson had bruised a tendon in his shooting arm. Smith had just returned from an ankle sprain.

        Plus, Cincinnati had traded away a key forward, Bob Boozer (11 ppg), in midseason.

        And the Celtics, irritated with reminders they had lost the season series to Cincinnati 7-5, were lying in wait. As Russell put it after Boston prevailed in five games, “Never have I been with a team that wanted to beat another team so badly.”

        The biggest what-if of the '60s-era Royals involved Maurice Stokes. He was NBA rookie of the year in the 1955-56 season, and led the league in rebounds and ranked third in assists the following winter.

Wilt Chamberlain playing against the Cincinnati Roayls' Oscar Robertson in Philadelphia in 1965. (File photo) | ZOOM |

        But on March 12, 1958, in the final regular-season game of the Royals' first year in Cincinnati, Stokes hit his head on the court at Minneapolis and was knocked out. With inflammation of the brain, he later fell into a coma and wound up paralyzed, dying in 1970 at age 36.

        “We were trying to build a powerhouse, and we got a terrible blow when Maurice got hurt,” Twyman said. “Had he remained on the team, they wouldn't have been talking about the Boston Celtics. They'd have been talking about the Cincinnati Royals.”

        A seemingly exciting night, when Lucas won MVP honors at the '65 All-Star Game, turned dark when the Royals learned Wilt Chamberlain had been traded from San Francisco to Philadelphia. Now two star centers, Russell and Chamberlain, ruled the Eastern Division, and Cincinnati wouldn't get by either in the playoffs.

        “If you didn't have a center that could match those two guys, and the Royals didn't, you weren't going to win,” Schottelkotte said.

        On May 9, 1969, then-owner Max Jacobs hired Cousy as the new Royals coach. Cousy's main goal was to convert Cincinnati into an up-tempo team like the Celtics squads he had played for.

        Cousy made it clear he intended to reshape the team when Lucas and Smith were almost immediately traded away, both to San Francisco. He tried to trade Robertson to Baltimore, and though Robertson exercised his right to nix the deal, he was dealt to Milwaukee after the season.

        Prior to the 1971-72 season, the Royals were sold to a group of 10 Kansas City businessmen for $5 million. The new ownership left the team as a lame duck in Cincinnati that winter, its sixth consecutive non-winning season, before moving it west.

        The team moved to Sacramento in 1985.

        Efforts to bring an NBA team to Cincinnati have been fruitless. It's now just a long-ago chapter in the Kings' media guide.

        “The people in Sacramento probably don't know anything about that (history),” Robertson said. “It seems in basketball when you're out of sight, you're out of mind.”

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