Deep thoughts, cheap shots & bon mots ...

 Videos I will not be YouTube-ing: Jusuf Nurkic breaking his leg, and Robert Kraft warming up for a playoff game.

 Cal fires men’s basketball coach Wyking Jones after the second year of his five-year contract. Wyking was told to take a hiking. But why did Cal give a rookie coach a five-year deal? If the school had offered him three years, would he have said no, because he had better offers?

 Cal said it would hire a search firm to find Jones’ replacement. The last search firm Cal hired to find a basketball coach searched and found Wyking Jones. Maybe Cal should hire a search firm to search for a better search firm.

 The Raiders are a prime target for HBO’s “Hard Knocks,” but team owner Mark Davis is begging off, saying, “It would be disruptive. ... We’ve got a lot of business to take care of to get ready for the season.” As opposed to every other NFL team. But Davis has a point. Head coach Jon Gruden is notoriously camera-shy, and the intrusion of a TV crew might knock the Raiders out of the groove they’ve been in for the last two decades.

 If the Raiders can’t handle the distractions of “Hard Knocks,” how will they handle the distractions of Las Vegas?

 The Boston fan who yelled a racial slur at DeMarcus Cousins has been banned from the Celtics’ arena for two years. Two years? We’re not talking about throwing the person in prison, just an exile from an arena. A lifetime ban should be given, even though the fan was a minor. But just one lifetime, because the fan might be a Buddhist and could get reincarnated as a better person.

 Jordan Bell, it seems to me he’s lived his life like a candle in the wind.

 Speaking of Bell: Pro athletes on the road pay for their own hotel incidentals. Except for the baseball player years ago who told the desk clerk, “I want to pay for my accidentals.”

 Don’t mess with the pace and rhythm of the baseball, say the old-schoolers who rail at efforts to speed up games. But it’s the dawdlers and Velcro abusers who disrupt the ancient pace and rhythm of baseball. The Giants’ opener and the A’s home opener both clocked in at 2:18. So oldschool.