Chicago Bulls announcer Adam Amin calls 1st quarter of season opener solo in honor of Stacey King

TORONTO — For the first quarter of Wednesday’s season opener against the Toronto Raptors, Chicago Bulls announcer Adam Amin was flying solo on the CHSN airwaves.

Amin called the first quarter in Toronto on his own to honor his former broadcast partner Stacey King. King died on June 7 at age 59.

The Bulls will honor King’s life and legacy throughout this season by wearing jersey patches and hosting a Stacey King night on Feb. 4. But in his first game without his longtime partner, Amin wanted to offer his own personal remembrance.

“We love you very much, Stacey, and we appreciate everything you did for us, everything you did with us,” Amin said in an emotional moment on the live broadcast.

“For this opening quarter of this opening game of this season we’ll leave this chair next to our broadcast position empty and we’ll give it a little bit of acknowledgement and a hat tip and perhaps a little bit of a jarring realization that he’s not with us anymore, and that’s OK, and it will be OK eventually.”

Over the past eight years, King and Amin forged a relationship that defined the experience of watching Bulls games. Amin called his first game with King on Oct. 22, 2018. At that time, King had already been a staple of the Bulls broadcast crew since the CSN Chicago days. Amin slid into the seat next to him with ease, offering a balance to the bombastic presence that drove King’s color commentary.

The pair just made sense. King drew glee from the moments when he could double Amin over in hysterics on a live call. Amin knew when to give King space to vamp, when to let the broadcast breathe with the commentator who propelled more momentum into the game. When the cameras stopped rolling, that relationship extended even further.

“There was nobody like him doing the job,” Amin wrote in The Athletic in June. “There was nobody like him in my life. A big brother, an uncle, a great friend all in one. He knew my partner and her son. He FaceTimed me from my nephew’s high school gym because he and my nephew recognized each other. He made me feel like family just by singing his song.”

After the first quarter, Amin was joined by Robbie Hummel, who called the remainder of the game. The Bulls did not fill King’s role with a permanent replacement this season, instead opting to utilize a rotating stable of talent including Hummel, Kendall Gill, Will Perdue, Bill Wennington and Scott Williams.