California Page 5 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Sacramento arena security tells Bay Area rap legend E-40 when to go
The Golden State Warriors and Sacramento Kings began their northern California playoff battle Saturday night at Golden 1 Center in Sactown, and it surpassed the hype. They were the main event during a full day of opening-round postseason matchups, and the NBA certainly did right with its scheduling,...

UConn did not get the memo about March Madness
After everything this NCAA men’s tournament has had to offer. After all the one seeds fell. After an Ivy League school made the Sweet 16. After a Conference USA team made the Final Four. After 62 other schools lost, we get a blueblood in the title game. The UConn Huskies aren’t just advancing, they’...

Light the beam: The Sacramento Kings on pace for historic offensive output
It’s well past time for a media mea culpa on the Sacramento Kings. That means myself included. Prior to the season, The Athletic’s John Hollinger had the Kings finishing 10th in the West, FiveThirtyEight’s Jared Dubin predicted they’d finish 16 games under .500 and in 12th. DraftKings, Vegas sportsb...

America owes Max Kellerman a collective apology over his Tom Brady 'cliff theory'
In the Summer of 2016, Max Kellerman predicted that Tom Brady’s skill would fall off a cliff. “Tom Brady’s just about done. It could be his next game he plays, it could be a year from now, but he is going to fall off a cliff. Tom Brady is going to be a bum in short order.”...

People were wiping out at SoFi during the college football national championship
Someone should have told the designers of SoFi Stadium that “It never rains in Southern California,” by Tony! Toni! Toné!, was not meant to be taken literally. Sadly, that didn’t happen before the college football national championship....

IDIOT OF THE YEAR No. 10: John Stockton
For a player with such a high IQ on the basketball court, John Stockton’s lack thereof when it comes to science is simply astonishing. Stockton’s public image took a hit with many in 2022 for his vaccine idiocy, especially early in the year....

Naming Pat McAfee Sports Media Person of the Year is an indictment of us all
This is not (totally) a hit piece on Pat McAfee. It’s more about how we should categorize what McAfee does, because The Athletic — you know that sports site owned by The New York Times — named him its Sports Media Person of the Year, and that implies that he’s a journalist....

The transfer window coinciding with bowl season is as profoundly stupid as it sounds
Unlike most people, I enjoy bowl season. Despite how irrelevant it is to the final outcome of the season, eclectic matchups are the best kinds of matchups. They determine bragging rights for people whose values still align with those of their conference. Programs who only schedule cream puffs when i...

Here’s how the Sacramento Kings became the NBA’s team of redemption
Kings Nation has been through the wringer for the past 16 years. The Sacramento Kings may be poised to end their postseason drought and the path forward is illuminated in a unique way by an unusual group. During the offseason, owner Vivek Ranadivé had the brightest full-color laser equipment in the ...

A College Football Playoff bid is on the line for USC the next three weeks
It’s the penultimate week of college football’s regular season, and I’ll give you four guesses as to which conference has the most ranked teams. I’d like to thank SEC fans for their quick response, but nope, it’s not them. Big Ten fans aren’t even chiming in because one of their two divisions doesn’...

San Diego State University had arguably the worst stadium opening of all-time
Triple-digit heat, but not an ounce of shade to be found. It sounds like a lyric from that Alanis Morissette song, “Ironic,” but for San Diego State football fans, it was a reality, a nightmare come to life....

Won’t someone think of the UCLA volleyball team?
Damn. What a day yesterday. Before yesterday, I would have said that UCLA and USC joining the B1G was probably the last conference realignment on earth that could happen. Oh, how a few hours and some good TV money can change everything....

MLB isn’t even pretending it wants to keep the A’s in Oakland
The A’s’ time in Oakland is dwindling. We don’t know when they’ll be gone. We just know that it’s going to happen. If team president Dave Kaval’s cryptic tweets talking about the energy from sports fans in Las Vegas last year weren’t proof enough, MLB has all but confirmed our suspicions with their ...

Is LaMelo Ball taking after LaVar in all the wrong ways?
In some families, the apple not falling far from the tree is a perfect way of describing a parent and their offspring. This seems to be the case with LaVar and LaMelo Ball, where business is concerned. ...

Who would’ve thunk? People in Oakland aren’t attending A’s games
We’re less than two weeks into the MLB season and just like everyone predicted, the Oakland Athletics are tied for first place in their division...wait, what? Yeah, it’s early, but the A’s were supposed to be the cellar dwellers of the AL West. They spent a whopping $0 in free agency and traded away...

When a Super Bowl is in town, the unhoused are unwelcome
LOS ANGELES — If you saw Eugene at a Chevron station or a 7-Eleven in Los Angeles, at first glance you might not notice anything out of the ordinary. He is a Black man with a dark complexion clear enough in the early evening light that some might ask for his skincare routine. He’s under 6 feet tall,...

Fun is a Foreigner concept to NBA
It was a good time the other night for Sacramento, where they don’t get to have a lot of basketball good times, to see future Hall of Famer Russell Westbrook come into town, shoot 2-for-14, and be lampooned on the scoreboard as the “Ice Cold Player Of The Game” while the arena DJ played Foreigner’s ...

L.A. didn’t work out, LaVar Ball has sights set on his sons taking over Chicago
Everybody knows LaVar Ball is a character who’s never short on words, but he’s also someone whose words you should be taken with a grain of salt at times. Ball’s latest plan is to have all three sons reunite in Chicago as Bulls....

Latest drama proves Bagley’s tenure in Sactown more royal pain than Kingly
It’s time for Sacramento to bag Marvin Bagley III, if the latest report about him refusing to check into Sunday’s game against Phoenix is true....
