SH Blog: Rodman says Kim Jong Un is a very good guy, contract talks stall between Deng and Bulls

Important NBA news and player movement has mostly been dwindling over the past few weeks as the offseason begins to wind down.

No matter.

There are still plenty of interesting stuff going on around the league, starting with the continued ridiculousness of Dennis Rodman and his bizarre friendship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. The former rebounding machine visited Kim back in February and did so again, this time providing plenty of specifics, from Brian Mahoney of The A.P.:

Dennis Rodman is going back to North Korea, and plans to bring a team of former NBA players with him.

Days after returning from his second trip to visit Kim Jong Un — in which he said he became the first foreigner to hold the leader’s newborn daughter — Rodman announced plans Monday to stage two exhibition games in North Korea in January.

The first will be Jan. 8 — Kim’s birthday — with another to follow two days later.

[…]

Touting his friendship with Kim and taunting President Barack Obama for not talking to him, Rodman said he will go back to North Korea for a week in December to help select local players for the game. He hopes to have stars such as former Chicago teammate Scottie Pippen and Karl Malone.

“Michael Jordan, he won’t do it, because he’s Michael Jordan,” Rodman said.

Rodman, holding a cigar and wearing the shirt of a vodka company and a hat of a betting company that is funding the event, said Kim has asked him to train his players to compete in the 2016 Olympics and offered to allow the Hall of Famer to write a book about him.

It would be truly surprising if Rodman somehow convinced legends like Pippen and Malone to join him on his next trip back to visit one of the most dangerous dictators of the world, no matter how “good of a guy” Rodman thinks Kim may be:

Though saying he didn’t want to discuss politics, Rodman raised his voice when answering a questioner about Kim’s human rights record and portrayed himself as the person who could make outsiders see the young leader as different than his father and grandfather.

“He has to do his job but he’s a very good guy,” Rodman said.

“If he wanted to bomb anybody in the world, he would have done it.”

Maybe Rodman can go back and ask his friend what this was about. On that note, we move onto other news from around the league:

• Contract talks between Luol Deng and Chicago Bulls have stalled, according to Aggrey Sam of CSN Chicago: “Negotiations between the Bulls and Luol Deng’s camp surrounding a long-term contract extension have stalled, CSNChicago.com has learned. Yahoo! Sports reported that initial discussions had been taken place between the two parties in separate late-June and early-July meetings regarding keeping the All-Star small forward in Chicago beyond this season, the final year of his current deal. But when the talks were revisited, the Bulls opted to put those plans on hold for the time being and risk the team’s longest-tenured player becoming an unrestricted free agent next summer, according to a source with direct knowledge of the situation. “We were optimistic,” the source said of the mentality Deng’s camp had heading into the late August meeting, approximately two weeks ago. “Our goal was to get an extension done this summer. If that’s not what they want to do, so be it.”
  
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