When Chance Comanche was pulled out of practice, his teammates hoped that it was good news.
The day was Dec. 15, 2023, and the 6-foot-10 center was having a strong season for the Stockton Kings. Born and raised in California, Comanche was a top-100 recruit in high school and played two seasons at Arizona before going undrafted in 2017. But he found a footing in pro basketball nonetheless. In April 2023, a few days before turning 27, he had played in his first and only N.B.A. game, as a member of the Portland Trail Blazers.
Now, in his second season with Stockton, the Sacramento Kings’ affiliate in the N.B.A.’s developmental G League, he was playing to get back to basketball’s biggest stage, and was one of the team’s best players.
“He was balling,” Jake Stephens, a rookie center for Stockton that season, told The New York Times in May. “We all thought he was getting an N.B.A. call-up. We thought his moment had come.”
So when Comanche left practice that day, Stephens and his teammates didn’t see the black S.U.V.s idling outside the building. They didn’t see the sheriff’s deputies, the police officers and the F.B.I. agents. They didn’t see the handcuffs.
It wasn’t until after practice that the players learned that something was wrong. They were called into a meeting room by Anjali Ranadive, the team’s general manager and the daughter of Vivek Ranadive, a co-owner of the Sacramento Kings. She and Stockton’s coach, Lindsey Harding, broke the news to the team. Comanche hadn’t been called up — he had been taken into custody.
“They told us that Chance was arrested, and that was all the detail that they gave us,” Stephens said. “Your mind immediately starts wandering, ‘What was it?’ I was thinking of something small, like parking tickets. Never in a million years would I have guessed what was coming.”
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