SH Blog: Calipari to coach in Brooklyn? Shabazz’s stock falling?

This is the best weekend of the year to be a college basketball fan. As such, we’ve got a very NCAA-heavy edition of this NBA news blog.Which is to say, there’s a lot of NCAA-NBA crossover here, also known as draft talk. For more straight-up tournament talk, check out Ben Baroff’s excellent recap of Friday’s action and be sure to check here at the end of each day’s play for another roundup. Or you could talk to me about my bracket.

Just kidding. Nobody wants to hear about anyone’s bracket.

Here’s the latest basketball news, both NCAA and NBA:

• Guess who’s missing from the NCAA Tournament? It’s potential No. 1 pick Nerlens Noel and no-longer-defending national champ Kentucky. While fans of every other college basketball team everywhere have been celebrating that absence all week, here’s a new wrinkle to that story, regarding coach John Calipari, courtesy of ESPN.com’s Marc Stein: “Amid the ongoing presumptions in coaching circles that Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov will want to pursue a marquee name for his bench this summer, given that the Nets won’t have the financial flexibility to make a free-agent splash, Calipari’s name is bound to resurface as a top target. Especially since Phil Jackson, who was clearly Prokhorov’s dream target when Avery Johnson was ousted in late December, has shown little interest in entertaining the Brooklyn job to date. But the strong word in coaching circles is that Calipari — while cognizant of the fact that Prokhorov is the one owner out there who could comfortably put the sort of “Monopoly money” on the table, as one insider describes it, to trump the big bucks he makes in Lexington — will be itching to come back with a vengeance next season after Kentucky slumped from a national championship in April 2012 all the way to a first-round loss in the NIT to Robert Morris.”
  
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