The All-Star game is in Las Vegas this year. For those of you who don't follow the Kings closely, this is part of a multi-year effort by the NBA to shop the team with the most loyal fan base in the league to a mob town of alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, frat boys, prostitutes, and tourists. Hey, it's good business practice to tell your best customers that you'd rather throw away the last shreds of integrity that a sport has by maxing out the credit cards of America's least responsible spenders.

I'm just wondering, where's Sacramento's All-Star game? You know, like maybe the towns that actually have a team should get a crack at a game. Why not have them all in Las Vegas...better than deciding that every NBA town gets one except us. Charlotte got an all-star game...a year after they got their second financially failing team. You're telling me Charlotte has more hotel space, more claim to host an All-Star game than the state capital of California? You'd rather host a game in the murder capital, Detroit?

I'd be OK if it were in Vegas every year. Barkley could hold an annual trundle. Jordan would probably come play just to gamble. But instead, every other city in the league gets one except us...so now cities without teams start to get one. This is just part of an organized campaign to dump on Kings' fans.

I'm what you might call a Kings dead ender. I remember the 4 first round draft picks we had in one year...all of them busts. Joe Klein instead of Karl Malone. "Never Present" Pervis Ellison 1st overall. I called Grant Napear's show. I thought Gary St. Jean would be the answer. Wayman Tisdale was my favorite player. I witnessed Walt Williams airball a fast break dunk. I had a Bobby Hurley shirt...I wore it to games even after the car accident where Mike "The Other Guy in the Poster" Peplowski saved him...you know, the Bobby Hurley who couldn't break a full court press put on by Crazy George and Slamson, the human bakery Bobby Hurley that served up turnovers at a rate that would have made White Chocolate air-machine gun a line of fans in envy.

For a decade plus, the Kings sold out games without a single winning season. Then they got good and we were the loudest crowd in league history, an environment so intimidating, opposing coaches complained to the referees. We brought cow bells. Bobby Jackson got kisses on the head during games.

One would have thought, "Hey, that's a town that loves basketball. Heck, their minor league baseball team occasionally outdraws the major league team 2 hours away. That's a customer you want to keep." But you'd be of the mindset that wants people to watch basketball games and believe in the outcome...the sort of person that would take a few less dollars to have playoff games on network television rather than, say, the Outdoor Life Network.

You see, Commissioner Sternleone and his hatchet man Big City Knick Bavetta should have tipped us off when they decided to fix Game 6 of the Western Conference championships and thereby rob the city of its only legitimate championship. We're left to point despairingly at WNBA titles, World League football titles for the Sacramento Surge and washed-up QB David Archer.

Now the league is saying we can't have an all-star game, or even our team, if we don't pony up the dough for a 3rd arena in 25 years. I guess the image the league is going for is an aging chubby Mike Bibby squandering his fortune in the Maloof's hotel-casino.


In summary, if the team is stolen from us, Sternleone's contribution to Sacramento will have been 2 husky arenas out in the flood plain near the airport, a stolen championship, some ugly uniforms, and a legacy of hatred that could spawn kamikaze units. The Maloofs have been good to Sacramento, they might be able to sneak out of town under assumed identities until they got back to their mafioso liquor-running friends. But Stern...the man would need a Pope-mobile to drive past the capital.