Joe and Gavin Maloof said Sunday they are optimistic about keeping the Kings in Sacramento.

“Tickets are definitely up over last year,” Gavin said. “They're up 10 percent over this time last year, and they're continuing to move.”

“I'll give you an example of how much better things are going," Joe said. "We sold $1 million worth of tickets last week. In five days. That's a lot of tickets. Gavin and I, we live here full time now. We're here every day, and we're still calling people.”

The Kings owners made their first public comments about the new collective bargaining agreement.

“I think it's a very fair deal for everyone involved,” Joe said. “The players are going to do extremely well. We're going to do a lot better. In the long run, it came out great for small markets like us (20th nationally), it really did.

“The revenue sharing is huge. Our market alone, it's going to be a tremendous amount of money, so the gap between the larger markets and smaller markets has really narrowed. Now we have a real chance to compete against larger-market teams, which is what the league wanted to get accomplished. And, like Gavin says, we have great flexibility with our team payroll, so we can strike at any time.”