Stacey King, beloved Chicago Bulls champion and longtime broadcaster, dies at 59

CHICAGO. Stacey King, a three-time NBA champion with the Chicago Bulls who spent nearly two decades as the team’s color commentator, has died. The Bulls announced Sunday, June 7, that King died at age 59, and said the organization was notified by a family member. The team did not provide additional information about his death, leaving fans to focus on the two roles King held with unusual authority, as both a champion and a communicator of the game.

King entered the NBA as a prominent collegiate prospect from Oklahoma, selected by the Bulls with the sixth overall pick in the 1989 draft. He joined the roster that was built around Michael Jordan and soon became part of the stretch that defined Chicago in the early 1990s. King played on three consecutive Bulls championship teams from 1991 through 1993, a span that helped turn the Bulls into a standard for modern dynasties and gave King a championship identity that never left his public persona.

Over the course of his playing career, King averaged 6.4 points and 3.3 rebounds, numbers that reflected his role rather than his usefulness. In championship basketball, those roles matter. King was valued for size and physicality, and for the kind of reliability that can quietly raise a team’s floor. When the Bulls returned to success again in later decades, that early championship experience remained a part of how he was received, including by viewers who had not seen him play.

After stepping away from the court, King returned to Chicago as a broadcaster. According to reporting from the Bulls’ hometown outlets, he came back to the broadcast booth in 2006 and spent the next two decades becoming one of the city’s most familiar sports voices. AP reported that he was an Emmy-winning broadcaster, and that his perspective as a former player helped translate Bulls basketball for a new generation of fans. His on-air style leaned into candor and humor, but it also carried the specifics of someone who had lived through the postseason rhythm.

Bulls chairman Jerry Reinsdorf described King as a unique personality whose connection to Chicago and the organization spanned more than three decades, first as a player and later as “the unmistakable voice” of Bulls basketball for generations of viewers. In a separate interview that AP cited from last month, King spoke about the work itself with the same tone fans often heard in the booth, saying he enjoyed his job and approached each broadcast as something he was genuinely glad to do.

The immediate impact will be felt most clearly in the broadcast booth, where King’s voice has been a steady constant through multiple eras of Bulls teams, from competitive runs to rebuilding cycles. No roster or schedule decisions hinge on an announcement like this, but the Bulls and their broadcast partners will still have to address what comes next for the on-air structure that has shaped how Chicago basketball has sounded for years. For fans, the task now is simpler and heavier: remembering a champion whose personality helped make the games feel personal, right up until the last call. In Chicago, that is a legacy that does not end with the final broadcast day.

King’s death also marks a rare intersection in pro sports media, where a former player becomes more than an analyst. He became, in the way the city talks about him, a storyteller for the team’s identity. As the Bulls move through the summer and prepare for the next season, viewers will be watching not just how the team plays, but how it sounds. The franchise will have to find a new balance of knowledge, warmth, and instinct that King brought night after night. For now, the league’s basketball community is likely to treat Sunday’s announcement as a genuine moment of reflection, and not just another headline.