NBA DAILY NEWS

The city of Sacramento moved a step closer to a showdown with Seattle by reaching agreement Saturday with private investors to build a downtown arena, mayor Kevin Johnson announced, an important part of the bid to keep the Kings.

The deal with Ron Burkle and Mark Mastrov, the original lead investors of the comeback bid, and now joined by Vivek Ranadive, a Warriors minority owner, had long been expected. Putting a group together that will attempt to buy the team if NBA owners deny the Seattle bid had been expected. And, today’s deal is expected to be approved by the Sacramento city council on Tuesday. These have all been predictable layers to a process of key unpredictable moments.

The news of Saturday and the near-certain upcoming news on Tuesday set the stage for the real developments next month. On April 3, officials from both cities and each group trying to buy the Kings from the Maloof family will be in New York for presentations to owners in advance of the Board of Governors meeting. It is at the Board of Governors gathering April 18-19, after the final certain game in Sacramento on April 17, that a vote will be taken on the agreement the Maloofs reached with the Seattle interest led byChris Hansen and Steve Ballmer.

If the board – one representative from each team, usually an owner – approves the sale to Hansen-Ballmer, the Kings will be in Seattle next season, likely as the SuperSonics, and the efforts in Sacramento will be moot. But if the work of Johnson and the Ranadive-Mastrov-Burkle bid convinces the board to turn down Seattle, Sacramento would have a plan in place to buy the team and build an arena.

The deal announced Saturday  is for a $448-million downtown arena close to where the city planned to build when it reached an agreement with the Maloofs about a year ago, only to have the family back out of the non-binding agreement after approval by the city council. The vote Tuesday is also non-binding, but with no indication the package would fall apart down the line after the new investors have been involved in negotiations.

CHICAGO – At the risk of overreacting, on a night when Indiana was cleaning up the tail end of a back-to-back, on the road, playing without both David West and Danny Granger, the not-so-big “84″ that glowed from the scoreboard after the Indiana Pacers’ loss to Chicago at United Center Saturday remained a little troubling.

Against a beat-up Bulls teams missing its Defensive Player of the Year candidate (Joakim Noah) in the paint, taking on a defense that has sagged this season overall and been shredded recently for 121 points (Sacramento), 101 (San Antonio), 119 (Denver in OT) and 101 (Cleveland), the Pacers stalled out with just 84. Four shy of what they needed, way shy of what they’ll need to be logging when every team they’re facing in the Eastern Conference side of the playoffs is, well, a playoff team.

Look, the Pacers have a formidable starting lineup when healthy. They have one of the league’s bright young stars in Paul George, a legitimate center in Roy Hibbert in a league where they’re hard to find, a throwback post-up power forward in West and enough pieces (if not always consistency) off the bench to go toe-to-toe with almost anyone in the East.

Defensively, they are close to lockdown, with an NBA-best rating of 98.6 heading into Saturday’s game, the stingiest shooting percentages (41.4 FG, 32.2 3FG), disruptive coverages (opponents have passed for the third fewest assists) and size enough to grab even the streaking Miami Heat’s attention. The Pacers had been getting better, too, limiting teams to 39.6 percent shooting and 87.6 points over their most recent 20 games prior to facing the Bulls.

Offensively, though, Indiana hasn’t developed and sustained the sort of punching power it will need when facing Miami, Boston or maybe Chicago again in a best-of-seven situation. In three losses in a week earlier this month, the Pacers scored 91 against the Heat, 93 against the Lakers and 91 against the 76ers. It represented a regression to a very mean mean for them; they had picked the pace to average 98.5 points on 44.9 percent shooting since sputtering through their first 36 games at 90.9 and 42.0, respectively.

As an ensemble (i.e., superstar-deficient) team, Indiana faces questions of long-term postseason viability not unlike those heard by George Karl and the Denver Nuggets. The difference being, Denver has no trouble scoring. The Pacers, too often, struggle to put points on the board, such as in the fourth quarter Saturday. Their defense bothered Chicago into 6-of-22 shooting and just 19 points, but that went for naught when the Indy offense did even worse (4-for-20, 17 points).

Frank Vogel believes that the attack he’s seen – more often, at least – in the season’s second half is enough, with the playoffs’ opening weekend four weeks away.

“I think we do [have enough],” he said. “The first part of achieving something like the NBA Finals is believing you can do it. Are we the best team on paper to get to The Finals? No. But does that mean we can’t beat [Miami]. No it doesn’t.”

Like the Nuggets, the Pacers have no obvious “closer.” Like the Nuggets, they rely on one of those committee approaches forged out of necessity, not by choice. Vogel, like Karl, feels he has three or four scorers to whom he can turn in the clutch.

“It’s the open man, really,” Vogel said. “We have guys who have hit big shots. In some ways, that’s better. In some ways, it’s harder to prepare for that when you don’t know who it’s going to go to.”

George Hill has done it, George has done it, Granger might be able to if he ever gets back (his sore left knee might argue otherwise). But the fellow they most rely on is West, the one considered “a lion” in the Pacers’ locker room and one of the few guys who keeps LeBron James away from the “4″ spot. West has missed the past four games with a lower back sprain.

“When David’s in, he’s someone we go to late in the games,” George said. “That’s something we’ll always miss, win or loss. Still, we’ve been playing well with David out.”

What West does not or cannot do, George increasingly will be expected to.

“I feel like the depth and versatility that we have, it can be crucial come playoff time,” the Indiana shooting guard said. “Of late, we’ve been scoring in the 100s. Our winning margins have been in the 20s. That’s always encouraging. Especially starting the year off, when our offense wasn’t clicking, we always had our defense to rely on. Now our offense is starting to click, we’re starting to play for one another, our assists are going up.”

For most of the next four weeks, the Pacers will try to improve. After that, it’s less a matter of improving than of proving.

CHICAGO – Derrick Rose wants to do what’s best for Derrick Rose. He has been clear about that from the start of his long, painstaking rehab from knee surgery last spring, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

The Chicago Bulls are going to do what’s best for Derrick Rose. That has been their default position whenever the topic has come up, which only has been every day, repeatedly, for the past 10 months.

Fans of the team should want all parties involved to do what’s best for Derrick Rose. They have been bystanders, cheerleaders and skeptics through this process, investing both money and emotions into the lengthy wait, constantly weighing the short-term against the long-term and mostly coming up stumped.

So let’s make it easy for them here and now:

The Bulls should shut down Derrick Rose till October.

Enough already. The networks and affiliates have more footage of Rose working out and shooting jump shots before Bulls games, locked in eternal preparation, than they ever will be able to use. Fans who arrive early see him out on the United Center court looking so much like the guy they remember, save for the practice gear, and then – poof! – he’s gone. They and everyone else spend much of each evening there bandying about his fate, and then some of them call talk shows or post comments on Web sites and vent as if Rose has changed his name to LeBron or something.

Where Rose’s brother Reggie once laid blame on Bulls general manager Gar Forman and VP of basketball operations John Paxson for somehow contributing to this limbo with their roster management, the player himself recently thrust the timeline of his return into the hands of his deity, whose “honey-do” list already was a little long.

Sorry, but this decision – should he or shouldn’t he? – has to stay between Rose, his doctors, his coaches and the team, erring always on the side of caution.

They’re there now. Shut him down.

The Bulls have only 14 games left on their regular-season schedule. One comes tonight in Minnesota, the tail end of a back-to-back. The next comes Wednesday against the barreling locomotive that is the Miami Heat. After that, it’s down to a dozen, a small window – more of a transom, actually – for Rose to work his way into NBA game shape and pace, for his teammates to adapt, for head coach Tom Thibodeau to fight his orneriest instincts and manage Rose’s minutes for the player’s benefit rather than the team’s.

Three weeks from next weekend, the playoffs begin. Chicago is mired in that pack of five East wannabes-to-also-rans (some would say seven) who are neither good enough to seriously challenge Miami nor, with No. 9 Philadelphia sputtering at 16 games under .500, bad enough to fall out of the seedings. The Bulls look like a one-and-done team without Rose; with him, still rusty and maybe on a slightly longer minutes leash, they could push it to the second round.

That is not worth it. Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf and the Bulls’ other owners don’t need and shouldn’t want two or three extra home gates that badly. Fans in Chicago, who have deferred their gratification this long, surely can wait a little longer – they’re good in this town at the wait-till-next-year mantra. And Rose, when he does come back, needs to be on the floor as a recovering knee-surgery patient in the final stage of his rehab, not as a savior or a leading scorer or as the hero of a slick campaign of sneaker commercials.

Look, it was one thing when doctors’ pegged Rose’s return, on a purely physical timeline, at late February or early March. That left 20 or more games to adjust, assimilate, navigate some lows along with some highs.

It was different, too, when the Bulls were a team in waiting, all pieces in place, ready for Rose’s return to chase the same prize they’d have been eyeing had he never gotten hurt at all. But that team doesn’t exist anymore. Several of his teammates are broken down physically, most recently center Joakim Noahmissing this weekend with a flare-up of some persistent plantar fasciitis. Kirk Hinrich and Richard Hamilton have been eternally banged-up. Rose himself, like others who undergo ACL procedures, always figured to need a full year or more to regain all or most of his powers.

Meanwhile, some of those not hurting physically beyond the NBA norm for March have been wrung out by the heavier load they’ve lugged in Rose’s absence. And frankly, by the moving goal posts of his return. Luol Deng wouldn’t be making any All-Star teams off his low-ebb performances this month.

Bottom line: The team he would come back to isn’t worthy of what Rose would be expected, or would try himself, to do if he returned this late. Does anyone want to see the Heat’s Dobermans set loose on Rose in his uncertain state for anywhere from four to seven games? Even a feisty George Hill, a rejuvenatedDeron Williams or a tenacious Avery Bradley might be too much in a playoff situation and put Rose in harm’s way.

Compared to that, the opportunity to work his way back through eight meaningless games in October when his teammates are fresh and everyone is coming off a layoff of his own (three months if not 15) holds great appeal and all the common sense.

Shut Derrick Rose down. Now.

MIAMI – Find any team in any sport that’s won as much as the Miami Heat have the past two months and it would be easy for said team to develop a certain sense of entitlement.

That’s just the nature of the success beast, even when you are fighting against such things.

Rolling up 25 straight wins, the second-best streak in NBA history, would be cause for celebration anywhere else but here. The Heat tried that premature celebration thing three years ago and it blew up in their faces in The Finals, when the Dallas Mavericks ruined their parade plans.

So the reminders to stay humble and focused on the task at hand are already ingrained in this bunch, fromErik Spoelstra and his detail-oriented coaching staff to a locker room full of players, from superstarsLeBron James and Dwyane Wade all the way down to its most recent addition Chris “Birdman” Andersen.

“All you have to do is look at our first halves the last couple of games,” veteran forward Shane Battier said. “We have room to improve. By no stretch of the imagination are we playing our best basketball right now. We are winning ballgames, but we have a lot of room for improvement.”

Room for improvement for a team that hasn’t lost a game since Feb. 1?

Sure, whatever you say Shane.

Then again, when you have a Charlotte team with the worst record in the league coming to town Sunday as you prepare for win No. 26 in the streak, you stay focused by any means necessary.

“We have a coaching staff that will tell us,” Chris Bosh said. “We just have guys who really stay on each other and nobody gets ahead of themselves. We know that you have to stay humble. If you have success, you take it in stride.”

That doesn’t mean the Heat have shed any of the core confidence that made them champions last season.

“We expect to win every game,” Bosh said. “”I’ve always expected to win every game. And now we’re actually winning every game.”

Winning every game in all kinds of ways. The comebacks have been a bit dramatic of late. The Heat’s low energy starts are a concern, but as James put it, “I’d rather come out the way we’ve come out and finish strong than come out strong and finish weak.”

That’s sound logic when you can change a game in an instant with a play on either end of the floor. But players play and coaches coach. And no coach worth his whistle is going to suffer through the sluggish starts the Heat have without going back to his tool box to try to fix it.

“It’s an area we need to address,” Spoelstra said. “This team has shown that now for three years that when there’s a particular aspect of the game we’re not playing the way we are capable of, we address it. We show up. We work on it and we try to improve on it. Hopefully, it will change on Sunday.”

Even if it doesn’t change Sunday, it has to change. The playoffs are coming and sluggish starts won’t get it done in the postseason.