Column by Christian Caple

For The Daily News

LOS ANGELES — Maybe it’s unfair to judge Staples Center during an event like the Pac-10 tournament — and vice versa — since people in this city would rather, like, go to the beach and stuff than watch out-of-towners play college basketball, bro.

They show up 20 minutes late to watch their own teams play. So why would they care about a game between two schools like Washington and Stanford?

The house that Kobe built — or plays in, anyway — felt more like the cavernous Tacoma Dome on Day 1 of the 3A state tournament, minus the curtain in the middle and those weird neon lights.

Except if it were in Tacoma, there would have actually been Husky fans there. The largest concentrated group of purple shirts in the building was probably the band, with the UW bench a close second.

Washington scored. Silence. Stanford scored. Silence. Shots of USC fans on the video board drew boos from pretty much everyone in attendance, the loudest it got during the Huskies’ 85-73 win on Thursday.

I understand the thinking behind playing this thing in Los Angeles every year. It’s supposed to build tradition. It’s close to Disneyland. The Pac-10 is starved for national attention, and nobody on the East Coast recognizes that there are other cities out here besides L.A.

Fine. But you can’t tell me that a tournament at Staples Center, which doesn’t really even draw that well for games involving the hometown UCLA Bruins and USC Trojans, is a more enjoyable experience than one at, say, the Rose Garden would be.

Or American Airlines Arena in Phoenix. Or HP Pavilion in San Jose. Or, unless David Stern says otherwise, KeyArena. Or the Lumberdome (the fire marshals would have fun with that one).

Why not rotate the sites? The way it is now, only students from USC and UCLA have a chance to attend the tournament without making a huge financial commitment — as well as an academic sacrifice. But I think we all know which is more important.

Since I’m majoring in journalism and am going into sports writing, I’m not really missing a whole lot of important stuff to be here to cover this weekend’s action. I’m missing my Thursday lecture on “how to live on ketchup packets,” and am skipping all of my required reading in our newly released textbook, “So your industry is dying.”

But for others who actually plan on making money some time in the next two decades, getting final exams and project due dates rearranged isn’t worth the hassle. Not to mention the cost of travel, hotel, cab rides and loose change that you may or may not have pilfered from you by the homeless on patrol in downtown L.A.

Even the idea of a rotating-site tournament is misguided, because it perpetuates the notion that this tournament should even exist. What’s the point? So a last-place team can get lucky and put together four straight wins, and earn an NCAA tournament berth that they don’t deserve? So a team that worked hard all year and won the regular-season title has to bust its rear end for another three days to lay claim to the “real” title, the only one that really matters because it carries with it an automatic bid to the Big Dance?

That last part obviously isn’t an issue in the Pac-10. But for small conferences around the country, it’s a continuing problem. The regular season simply doesn’t mean anything anymore if you’re a mid-major — just like the conference tournaments don’t mean anything if you’re a power-conference team that’s already good enough to play in March.

So if we’re going to continue this whole charade, and continue insisting that these tournaments make teams better and improve the conference’s image and all that, can we at least do it where people give a crap?

L.A. sports fans are softer than the Jonas Brothers. Give this tournament to a city that cares about watching good basketball — not just their own.

Christian Caple is a staff writer for The Daily, UW’s student newspaper. He can be reached at huskydude30@hotmail.com