Jason Kidd partners with Cal to bring defending champ UCLA in for a charity exhibition

Jason Kidd has been involved with girls basketball for the past five years with his own AAU team.

Now the former NBA star and coach is partnering with alma mater Cal by putting on an exhibition game Wednesday against defending champion UCLA. Proceeds from the event will benefit Kidd's Foundation.

“We talked about the foundation and the things that we’ve done for youth and for young ladies in basketball with the JK Select program in Northern California and also launching last year here in Dallas," Kidd said. "So this is another opportunity to bring eyes to the ladies' game and we're really excited to be able to do it in the Bay Area.”

Kidd was thrilled to bring the defending champion Bruins to Cal — an idea suggested by Bears coach Charmin Smith. The two former Pac-12 Conference foes will play in Haas Pavilion for the first time since 2024. It's the first time the defending champion will play at Cal since Stanford did it in 1993.

“We're really excited to be able to do that,” Kidd said.

Smith said she mentioned to Kidd and his group that UCLA wanted to play this year and that the exhibition game would work out well for that. She hopes this can be a yearly thing of bringing the defending national champion to the area.

“I hope that a team would be willing every year to come out," Smith said.

Kidd said that he saw how the late Kobe Bryant had started to lift up women's basketball and wanted to do the same.

“I felt can I help?” Kidd said. “Not be Kobe, but can I help pick up that light and keep it shining? There’s a lot of us out there that are trying to help bring light to women’s sports."

Besides the game, Kidd said there will be a chat with former NBA guard Gary Payton as well as former Cal player Reshanda Gray.

Kidd also said that his foundation will have an auction with Sotheby's in November to raise more money.

“We hope all of this will bring eyes to what we're doing for the Jason Kidd Foundation,” Kidd said.

Smith loves to see Kidd involved with women's basketball.

“We appreciate his investment in girls basketball. He has an amazing club team that's really successful,” she said. “I like having Jason Kidd’s name linked to our sport. I think it’s really obvious to see right now, girls basketball, women’s basketball is something worth investing in.”

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FILE - California head coach Charmin Smith watches against Vanderbilt in the first half of an NCAA college basketball game on Nov. 3, 2025 in Paris. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, File)

FILE - Dallas Mavericks head coach Jason Kidd is seen in the first half of an NBA basketball game, March 25, 2026, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)

STOCKHOLM (AP) — American-born economists Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford won the Nobel memorial prize in economics on Monday for their work on models that have helped governments and central banks manage economic shocks.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winners in Stockholm, saying the winners were being honored “for microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation.”

“The laureates have helped us smooth out the economy’s peaks and troughs,” the academy said in a statement.

Hall is affiliated with Stanford University in California, and Woodford with Columbia University in New York.

Woodford spoke to the committee by phone Monday from New York, saying: “It’s a tremendous honor, it’s a surprise."

“The laureates’ work has provided us with a stable theoretical foundation for the models that are now used by central banks and governments around the world,” John Hassler, chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, said in a news release.

“With them, we are better equipped to deal with shocks in the economy, such as energy crises or sudden changes in how much households consume.”

The economics prize is formally known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

Last year, three researchers who study business innovation won for explaining how new products and inventions promote economic growth and human welfare, even as they leave older companies in the dust.

The economics prize is formally known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The central bank established it in 1968 as a memorial to Nobel, the 19th-century Swedish businessman and chemist who invented dynamite and established the five Nobel Prizes.

Nobel purists stress that the economics prize is technically not a Nobel Prize, but it is always presented together with the others on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death in 1896.

Nobel honors were announced last week in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace.

The prize money this year is 12 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million), whether for an individual, small group of laureates or organization.

Dazio reported from Berlin.

AP Nobel Prizes: https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes

FILE - A bust of Alfred Nobel on display following a press conference to announce the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, on Oct. 3, 2022. (Henrik Montgomery/TT News Agency via AP, File)

FILE - A Nobel medal is held up during a ceremony in New York, Dec. 8, 2020. (Angela Weiss/Pool Photo via AP, File)