Lakers will pick up tab for celebration

LOS ANGELES – The Los Angeles Lakers planned to celebrate their NBA championship more modestly than their recent titles, with a self-funded parade that avoids the city’s downtown core and omits the huge rallies that have drawn tens of thousands of fans in previous years.

Both team and city officials were quick to say the Lakers would pick up the tab for the scaled-down celebration – estimated at $1.5 million by city managers and $2 million by the Lakers – after last year’s parade and the subsequent Michael Jackson memorial brought complaints of needless spending by the fiscally ailing city.

“I want to applaud the L.A. Lakers for their good corporate citizenship for sponsoring the parade,” Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told a news conference Friday. “It will be a great cause for celebration.”

Between 500,000 and 2 million people are expected to line the 2-mile-long parade route extending from the Staples Center to the edge of the University of Southern California campus, the Lakers said in a statement.

Lakers players were to address fans from a float plying the parade route, along with double-decker, open-air buses filled with the team’s coaches, staff members, owners and cheerleaders.

The scale of the event appeared significantly downsized from past years when championships were celebrated by kickoff rallies at City Hall or the Department of Water and Power building, parades through the downtown business district and huge rallies at Staples Center.

Lakers spokesman John Black said cutting out the rally would make the celebration easier and less expensive, while skipping downtown for the parade was designed to keep the event more manageable for police, fire and other city agencies.

“You want it long enough to make it enjoyable,” he said. “But it can’t go on forever.”

Police Chief Charlie Beck said the area south of downtown is “bigger, it’s easier to police, it has greater points of access” than the crowded downtown corridor.

Beck encouraged families to come to the parade, saying police and firefighters would keep them safe despite excessive victory celebrations Thursday night that led to 42 arrests and three assaults on police officers, one of whom had to fire a warning shot to avoid being seriously injured. The fire department got 40 calls complaining of incidents, 16 of them reporting fires.

“Please come to downtown to play safely, we need to celebrate this. It should be a victory for the city, not a defeat,” Beck told the news conference.

He said the department’s performance was “stellar” despite the problems.

Beck said police will get warrants based on surveillance video and other evidence gathered Thursday night, and will be scanning Monday’s parade crowd with hopes of making more arrests.