Not a good sign when you just assume your neighborhood NBA team is tanking. Because they have been doing it so long.

Take the Los Angeles Lakers, nuked 133-96 by the Oklahoma City Thunder tonight at Staples Center.

Those acclimated to seeing a Lakers defeat and thinking, “ah, good” … well, it is sometimes difficult to break the habit.

These Lakers are not supposed to tank — that is, not trying very hard to win.

This is a team that is supposed to begin climbing the standings.

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I am predisposed to dislike Nick Saban.

Alabama’s football coach seems joyless and put-upon, as if he can’t catch a break and it’s somehow the fault of the rest of us — despite those four national championships.

He is so concerned about security leaks that very little of Alabama’s practices is open to media. (Compare that to Pete Carroll during his time at USC, when nearly every practice was open from start to finish.)

Saban, the Bill Belichick of the college game, is such a control freak, according to Forbes, that he personally approves (or doesn’t) every interview request for players and assistant coaches — and the latter are adults, of course. But Saban has always demanded that he alone is the (dreary) voice of the program. “You’d like to have one message with multiple voices,” he said in 2008. “But it sure is easier to control with only one voice.”

So, today he made a silly complaint — or was he getting in an excuse early?

He does not like the timing of events leading up to the College Football Playoff championship game, next Monday, in Atlanta.

Here is his beef: He thinks there ought to be more time than the one week — the usual football interval — between the semifinals and the championship game.

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If it seems to y’all that the biggest games in college football involve a lot of coaches and players with drawls and odd names (lookin’ at you Dabo Swinney) … well, you are not just whistling Dixie.

Victories by Alabama and Georgia tonight put two Southeastern Conference (SEC) teams in the College Football Playoff championship game next Monday.

And their collision further solidifies what has become, to those of us living in states that never seceded from the union, a wearying tendency for teams from southern tier of America to play in college football’s biggest games.

Let’s examine some of the numbers.

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This is not an exercise in academic rigor. I did not have someone sitting with a note pad writing down literally the first 10 facts I could recall pertaining to sports in 2017.

But … it is a fairly accurate recreation of a fairly quick trip through my brain to see what stuck from the past 365 days. Certainly, I did not consult someone’s list or sit for a half-hour, pondering.

If I surprised myself it is due to the lack of international events. I watch a lot of English soccer, for instance, and I have lived outside the States since 2009. But this list could have, with maybe one exception, been created by someone living in southern California.

So, the 10 events I most quickly associate with 2017 in sports, working down from 10 to 1.

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This is mostly an NFL thing, though I see it on the college level, now and then.

Wherever it is allowed, it is objectionable.

That would be the four-five-six-etc.-man clot of players who push their way into what usually begins as a one-on-one, open-field tackle and ends as something rather like a rugby scrum.

(Here is a good — that is, bad — example of it in the NFL.)

It is bad football, and it also can lead to injuries. It is time for the NFL to step in and ban it.

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Two of the top quarterbacks potentially available for the 2018 NFL draft attend Los Angeles schools.

UCLA’s Josh Rosen and USC’s Sam Darnold.

Each has college eligibility remaining — one year for Rosen, two for Darnold.

Each is mulling whether to make himself available for the draft or to stay in school for another year. Each figures to be drafted in the top 10 picks and maybe the top five. And maybe the top two.

What might be involved in their thinking? What ought they to do?

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George Weah was an outstanding soccer forward from Liberia who excelled in the 1980s and 1990s with some of Europe’s biggest clubs — AC Milan, Paris Saint-Germain, Monaco, Marseille, Chelsea …

In 1995, he was named Fifa Player of the Year and won the Ballon d’Or, making him the first (and still only) African player to win those awards.

Today, he was declared the winner of the presidential election in his native land, with nearly 62 percent of the 1 million votes cast.

And, as is often the case when star athletes win an election, the questions begin immediately: Can a sportsman conditioned to the black-and-white laws of sports and representing the .001 demographic with the physical skills to play at the highest level … be expected to excel in another realm, one not governed by a referee?

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Back before the Los Angeles Rams went on their two-decade sabbatical to St. Louis, in 1995, I would have been opposed to this:

Sitting many of their best players for the final regular-season game — to ensure they are as healthy as possible for the club’s first playoffs home game in Southern California since 1985.

Running back Todd Gurley, defensive lineman Aaron Donald, quarterback Jared Goff, left tackle Andrew Wentworth and center John Sullivan will not play in the home game against the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday.

Several more key starters may well sit, too, according to coach Jim McVay, and other first-teamers may make only brief appearances.

Why would I have had a problem with this, 25 years ago?

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Rich Dauer has made plenty of news during his lifetime in baseball.

He was part of NCAA national championship teams at USC in the 1970s and the second baseman for the 1983 World Series-champion Baltimore Orioles.

On a local-local, hometown level the Colton native was the oh-so-cool young (35) field manager of the attendance-record-smashing 1987 San Bernardino Spirit, an independent team in the Single-A California League that built its advertising campaign on the former big-leaguer.

By 1990, he was back in the major leagues as a coach in Cleveland, and he did 18 seasons on the baselines for five teams, including the 2017 Houston Astros — who will be giving him a ring for his work with the new World Series champions.

Lots of stuff. Lots of notable moments.

But none compare to his near-miraculous recovery from a brain injury that came close to killing him on the day of the Astros’ victory parade, November 3.

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It is an exhibition, not a tournament. Something just north of hitting on a practice court.

No matter.

Serena Williams‘s return to a tennis court with an elite opponent on the other side of the net, with paying fans in the stands and someone keeping score … may be the biggest sports story in UAE history.

Serena on Saturday will play Jelena Ostapenko, the 20-year-old Latvian who won the French Open, at the International Tennis Centre in Abu Dhabi, the UAE capital.

It will mark Serena’s first competition since her marriage in November and her first child’s birth in September and her championship last January, when she won the Australian Open while two months pregnant.

It is much more than a sports story. It also is about famous people, rich people, motherhood, celebrity children, society, fashion, aging, female athletes …

And it is this other stuff that will drive global interest in Serena taking to the court in Abu Dhabi at 5 p.m. Saturday.

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