Originally published in Bloomberg View.

The Maloofs are out. According to the Sacramento Bee, the brothers came out of hiding long enough to to sell the Kings to a group for $535 million. The group, led by Silicon Valley billionaire and Golden State Warriors minority owner Vivek Ranadive, will be keeping the team in Sacramento. The deal is to be formally…

A person in charge of a professional sports franchise worth hundreds of millions of dollars ran away from reporters and tried to hide in a closet. That is the story you are currently reading.

The Maloofs recently announced they have a "Plan B" up their sleeves if the NBA does not approve the latest offer made by the Seattle-based ownership group with whom they have been negotiating the sale of the Sacramento Kings: they're going to make things ugly.

Chris Hansen, whose bid to buy the Kings and move them to Seattle was thwarted by unanimous vote of the NBA's relocation committee, has upped his offer significantly. He's willing to pay $65 million more for the Maloofs' shares in the Kings, an amount that would put the franchise's valuation at a healthy $625 million.

When the prospective ownership group led by Vivek Ranadive managed to convince the NBA's Relocation and Finance Committee to keep the Kings in Sacramento, we pointed out that the main incentive driving the NBA's decision was most definitely the city of Sacramento's willingness to build a new publicly financed stadium. …

So that's that. After three years of very public courtship from Seattle, three years of fans preparing for the worst, the Kings will remain in Sacramento. Yet it's the NBA that got everything it could have wanted from this whole ghoulish process.

Kings head coach Keith Smart showed off the catlike reflexes that helped him hit The Shot 26 years ago, lunging for an errant pass that had a bead on a towheaded youngster in the front row. "Earn this," he told the boy with his dying breath. "Earn it."

Three weeks from tomorrow, the NBA Board of Governors will vote on whether the Kings will be sold to Chris Hansen, who would move them to Seattle, or to a Sacramento group committed to keeping the team in town. They're bidding against each other, and no matter who wins, both cities will lose.