Kurt Helin

While all the college hoops fans in Southern California were only paying attention to those teams up in Westwood and downtown, down in the LBC they've been playing some pretty good basketball too. NCAA tournament good. Playing fast and bombing threes, Long Beach State won the Big West Conference tournament, which means they get to go dancing for the first time in a dozen years, They go in as a 12 seed facing five-seed...

It seems as if the Lakers are inventing new ways to lose of late. Last night's double overtime loss to Minnesota included some beauties -- including failing to throw the ball in bounds to the open man, something successfully pulled off by junior high teams. Laker veteran Aaron McKie couldn't see Brian Cook waiting for the ball with a wide-open shot to win the game. Then, on top of it all, Kobe has been suspended...

Maybe it's time to call in a Shaman, or a voodoo priestess with a few live chickens, or go riding down a hill in a beat-up VW van with Hurley from Lost. The Lakers need to do something to break the curse that keeps raining injuries down on them the second half of this season. After two games where Lamar Odom finally started to look like the aggressive Odom the Lakers patiently have been...

Experience has taught us there is no such thing as a cheap weekend in Park City. But Laker forward Vladimir Radmanovic learned his weekend is going to cost and extra $500,000. You see, he had never been snowboarding before and thought it sounded like a fun way to spend All Star weekend with his friends. Several little problems crept up, however. First, Radmanovic had never snowboarded before and, as anyone who's done it can tell...

Last year, when the Amgen Tour of California cycling race finished in Redondo Beach, Floyd Landis was the golden boy in the golden jersey, the winner of the seven-stage race down the California coast. A couple months later he went on to win the Tour d' France. Sort of. He crossed the finish line first but may have had a little help from a needle in doing so. Landis says that is not the...

The trading deadline came and went Thursday with the Lakers' brass deciding to play the hand dealt them. Which has the fan base frustrated. Loudly frustrated. Angrily frustrated. Not so much that youngster Andrew Bynum wasn't traded for Jason Kidd -- people seemed split on that and you could make a good argument either way -- but rather that nothing happened to give a team that has lost six in a row a swift kick...

At the heart of the swirling vortex of NBA trade rumors this week is a whopper involving the Lakers -- the chance to bring in All-Star point guard Jason Kidd. It's the big topic on local and national sports talk radio, basketball message boards and barstool conversations. It's the sports talk equivalent of Anna Nicole this week. You probably don't want to be Kidd's wife, but being his teammate makes a lot of sense for...

If Los Angeles seems a little light on groupies this weekend, don't be shocked. It's just that the NBA's All-Star game, which is the brightest light of the year to the groupie moths, is just a one-hour plane ride away in Las Vegas. This is a weekend only the guys at The Smoking Gun could dream up: Take a sport where the players have the reputation for being rich and out of control, then drop...

There have been plenty of excuses: Luke Walton and Kwame Brown are out with injuries; Kobe Bryant had to miss a game because he can't control his arms; Lamar Odom is not 100% from his knee problems; it was a long eight-game road trip to cold places; Mercury was retrograde so the stars were lined up against the Lakers. Maybe it's because all the Laker players can do is "play video games and watch porn,"...

It's all about promoting stars in the NBA -- and two of the biggest collide at 12:30 (on ABC 7) when Kobe Bryant and his Lakers take on LeBron James and his Cavaliers. A match-up made in NBA executives' dreams (and their dreams all involve ratings and marketing tie-ins). What ABC talking heads will likely fail to mention is that both of these guys are scoring less than last season. In the case of Kobe,...