15 April 2012
POSTED: 12:05 pm PDT April 15, 2012 UPDATED: 8:12 am PDT April 16, 2012 SACRAMENTO, Calif. (KCRA) -- Sacramento Kings owners Joe and Gavin Maloof sat apart from fans at Sunday night’s game against the Portland Trailblazers, watching the game from their second-floor suite.Fans had said earlier that if the Maloofs sat in their usual seats on the floor of Power Balance Pavilion, they would be booed.Earlier in the day, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson arrived at the Sacramento International Airport to applause and high-fives from Kings fans, who said they felt Johnson had done his best to finalize a deal to build a new arena.Johnson was making his way back from an NBA Board of Governors meeting on Friday, when George Maloof, along with an economist his family hired, said that a recent handshake deal to build an arena was very risky financially and was a bad idea for the city and the team.The meeting and the public statements afterward were marked by animosity and bitterness, as George Maloof said in published news reports that he does not trust Johnson and does not want to continue negotiating with him.“I think that it’s very obvious who can’t be trusted in this scenario,” Johnson told KCRA 3 after arriving at the airport Sunday. “When you have the commissioner of the NBA, when you have the mayor of the city of Sacramento, when you have the AEG all saying one thing, and you have a party saying something different, that’s the pot calling the kettle black in this case.”The mayor said that city leaders will now have to find other ways to develop the downtown railyards