Smart money isn’t on the Lakers

All right, I’m going to admit something today, and then hide the newspaper when it hits my driveway. I can’t let my wife see this column.

My daughter generally gets her way, because I’m a pushover.

Dad, I want ice cream.

Sure, just finish it before we get to school.

Dad, I want a new toy.

Sure, but only one?

If we travel more than 10 minutes from home, the 7-year-old expects a souvenir. And she’d get one, too, except that my wife beats the wallet out of my hand with a baton and curses me for spoiling Little Miss Sunshine.

But I can’t help myself. Sometimes she doesn’t even have to ask, and I surprise her with a little treat. For instance, she didn’t ask for Lakers tickets, but I went shopping anyway.

I thought her first trip to a pro game would be a nice way to close out her second season of peewee basketball. Little Caroline Frances loves the game, partly because the Silver Lake Super Sonics are coached by a prince who teaches the game in a way that’s fun for the kids. Duncan Sobel apparently didn’t get the coaching memo on how to put his own dashed athletic dreams front and center, ruin things for the kids and pop a forehead vein.

I knew, of course, that tickets to a Lakers game wouldn’t be cheap. I suspected they might even run me $100 apiece if I cared to be in the same general neighborhood as the court itself.

But I was wrong, and while shopping on the Lakers website, my head jerked back so hard I almost lost a tooth.

Folks, Mr. Softie has hit his limit, and my little girl’s gravy train has gone off the rails just short of Staples Center.

A middling seat to a Lakers game runs about $160 if they’re playing a pushover and $295 if they’re up against a contender. And even at that, you’d be at the top of a ski lift and wouldn’t be able to hear Kobe bouncing the ball for $25 million a year.

A handful of tickets cost $10 to $15 for some games, but those seats are Boyle Heights-adjacent. To see a playoff contender like Orlando or Dallas, if you can’t spring for the $450 prime seats, you can climb the Himalayas for just under $100.

But you’d be better off buying an ant farm and dressing the ants in purple and gold.

This shopping experience got me wondering how much Philip Anschutz, who owns Staples Center and L.A. Live — as well as a piece of the Lakers — would charge for tickets to a football game in the stadium he wants to build on property he leases from the city for a sweetheart price of $1 a year. Will it be one month’s rent for end zone seats and two months’ rent for something a little closer to the action?

As my friend the esteemed barber Lawrence Tolliver was saying a couple of weeks ago, pro sports aren’t for working people in Los Angeles. They’re for corporations, celebrities and super box glitterati. Which is all the more reason for city officials to quit cheerleading for Anschutz, a man worth $7 billion, and start watching our wallets.

Yeah, I know about supply and demand and how the market sets prices. But as my colleagues Bill Plaschke and T.J. Simers have pointed out, the Lakers don’t give a fig about the working grunts who drive around town with purple and yellow flags on their cars. The team just signed a big Time Warner TV deal that will end free Lakers game programming for hundreds of thousands of people without pay cable.

Instead of shopping for Lakers tickets, I wish I had thought to take my daughter to last week’s Caltech game, in which the brainiacs who play for the fun of the game went wild after ending a 26-year losing streak and beating Occidental.

But then I remembered there’s another pro team in town, a young crew that has a losing record but maybe a better-looking future than the tired old Lakers.

Yeah, the Clippers.

And guess what. Clippers tickets are much cheaper than Lakers tickets.

Some people might have trouble rooting for such a reliable loser owned by a crusty old egomaniac named Donald Sterling.

But how can you not love Blake Griffin, the red-haired man-child who has single-handedly made the Clippers worth watching? Kobe might only have a few more years before his transmission goes out, but in the Slam Dunk contest last weekend, Griffin soared over an automobile that was illegally parked under the basket.

I think I’m going to raise a Clippers fan rather than a Lakers fan.

Better yet, an L.A. Sparks fan.

The WNBA season begins in June, and for the price of two decent seats at one Lakers game, I could get a pair of SEASON TICKETS to the Sparks.

That’s 16 games featuring some of the best female athletes in the world; no binoculars necessary.

Me and my girl, close to the action, with money left over for ice cream and souvenirs.

steve.lopez@latimes.com