1. Kings owners Gavin and Joe Maloof are embarking on a new business venture. Is it:

(a) Professional skateboarding
(b) Caffeinated beer
(c) Pain-free bikini waxing
(d) The first gas-powered parachute
(e) They're going to buy Sports Illustrated (including the Web site)

ANSWER: (a)

The Maloofs will put on the largest three-day skateboarding festival ever this summer at the Orange County Fairgrounds near Los Angeles, offering more than $400,000 in prize money. They're calling it the Maloof Money Cup, with $100,000 alone going to the winner of the U.S. Pro Street Championship.

"Whenever I looked out the window, I saw kids skateboarding,'' Joe Maloof said. "When I was a kid, you'd see kids playing catch with a baseball or a football or even a frisbee. But every kid today is skateboarding, and it's not just a sport. It's a lifestyle.''

Over the last year, Maloof would go on typically informal fact-finding missions while driving around Las Vegas or southern California.

"He would see groups of five kids and he would get out and talk to them about skateboarding,'' said Kings VP Troy Hanson, who works closely with the Maloofs. "He'd ask them why they like skateboarding so much, who are their favorite skateboarders. Then he gave them each $100 for talking to him and he'd go on his own way.''

"I tried skateboarding when I was a kid,'' Maloof said. "There was a place in Albuquerque called Kistler-Collister; it was a shopping center and it had an underneath parking garage. I went flying down the ramp and hit one of those drainage pipes that was sticking up. I must have flew 100 feet and landed on my face.

"When I saw Jake Brown fall 45 feet,'' Maloof said of his infamous collision off the mega ramp at the X Games last summer, "I realized not only is this a lifestyle but these guys have some guts. It can be very dangerous and you have to be skilled to pull these tricks off. These are very skilled athletes, though I don't know that they like to be called athletes.''

Maloof is hoping to create a tie-in between skateboarding and the NBA.

"We want to try to make this an annual first-class event, and I think the NBA should do something with it,'' he said. "Let met tell you why: Why fight it? These kids are going to be future customers. When they hang up their skateboards, they're going to be watching the NBA, the NFL or NHL. Why not have an affinity for NBA because you were brought up watching NBA?

"I'd like to talk to the NBA and say, 'You guys shouldn't fight trends like this. Join them. Be part of it. Learn what kids like this are doing, because they're your future customers and season-ticket holders. Why isolate them?' ''

2 Mulligans I wish I could have

2. What was I thinking when I forecast 27-year-old Luis Scola to become Rookie of the Year? He's averaging 6.5 points off the bench for the Rockets, while Kevin Durant is going off for 20.6 a night with Seattle.

1. What could I possibly have been thinking when I picked the Knicks to finish sixth in the East? Sen. Larry Craig didn't blunder so badly. Dick Cheney was more accurate in his prediction that we would be greeted as liberators. Imagine my humiliation with every Knicks loss to Seattle (in which Durant scored 30) or against Philly or against Philly again.

The only kind of mistake possibly more embarrassing would be to settle a sexual-harrassment case for $11.5 million after enduring weeks of agonizingly public testimony in a hopeless trial ... but why raise such an obscure comparison? No company could be so dumb as that.

1 Question from the grave

"The only player I love watching is Steve Nash. Everybody talks about how exciting the NBA is, but most of it is athleticism and muscle-flexing and posing after the same kind of dunk you've seen a thousand times already. What about ball skills, imagination and trying to do something you've never seen anybody do before? I'd rather see a little cleverness from Steve than another guy trying to bump his head on the rim.

"The one thing I would ask Steve if I could is, Is he enjoying himself out there? The big mistake is to assume that it's as much fun as he makes it look. Because if he isn't loving it, then what was it all for?''

-- Peter Press Maravich, 1947-1988