ORLANDO — We’ll begin this morning by offering our congratulations to Sam Smith for receiving the Curt Gowdy Media Award, which means he gets to join our own Mark Heisler and former AP colleague Jim O’Connell in the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass. Smith, like Heisler a victim of the Tribune company’s talent purge, now writes unfiltered for Bulls.com. You should read his column every Monday. He gets to write without being edited, which can be a blessing and
ORLANDO – NBA rosters are going to stay at 13, permanently. The league’s competition committee met Friday and will recommend two rules changes to the Board of Governors, including one that will make 13-man active rosters permanent and another that would change the waiver wire rules and give teams 48 hours to put in a claim — and not just on weekdays. League vice president Stu Jackson said representatives from the 30 NBA teams voted unanimously to recommend making the current 13-man
DNP-PR is a close cousin to DNP-CD. The first stands for Did Not Play-Personal Reasons. The second stands for Did Not Play-Coach’s Decision. I had the unfortunate luck of having Lamar Odom on my roster for last night’s fantasy challenge sponsored by Draft Street, and Odom was not with the Dallas Mavericks for their game against Odom’s former team, the Los Angeles Lakers, after being excused from the game for personal reasons (a DNP-PR) to tend to a family matter. That left
// Before All-Star weekend arrives, there is one last test game for a couple of teams. It comes Thursday night when the Knicks visit the Heat in Miami, and it is a test in many ways. For New York, now with a full complement of healthy players and a level of depth that exceeds what they’ve had over the first half of the season, it is a chance to measure themselves against a Heat team that has been steamrolling through the
NBA commissioner David Stern said the field of potential buyers of the league-owned New Orleans Hornets as been whitted down to 2 or 3, and a sale could be imminent. “I’m optimistic and hopeful that we will complete the sale by the end of the month,” stern told USA Today in an intewview at NBA headquarters in Manhattan. “We’re talking with multiple perspective buyers, but we’re anticipating the ability to close by the end of the month,” Stern said. “We’ve had offers
I have been playing fantasy hoops with a new team every night quite a bit on DraftStreet lately, and I cashed Monday night (won $20) by finishing tied for $14th place with a lineup of Dwight Howard, Kyle Lowry, Serge Ibaka, Ryan Anderson, Arron Afflalo, DeAndre Jordan, Kevin Martin and Gustavo Ayon. It cost me $5 to enter, and the $15 profit will be used to defray the cost of my all-stromboli diet (Not kidding). The winner in that $5 tournament was
The TV was turned off before 11 p.m., and the home office shut down for the night. Yes, the San Antonio Spurs were playing, going for their eighth straight road win and their 12th straight W overall. But truly, they weren’t going for it. Tony Parker and Tim Duncan were being rested by their coach on the second night of a back-to-back, Tiago Splitter and Manu Ginobili were out nursing injuries, and there is only so much Cory Joseph a man can endure. I
NEW YORK — The online auction for the jersey Jeremy Lin’s wore in the Knicks’ victory over the Los Angeles Lakers fetched $42,388, the Knicks announced today. The jersey, worn during the team’s victory over the Los Angeles Lakers on Feb. 10 at Madison Square Garden, was auctioned off with four tickets and a postgame meet-and-greet with Lin for tomorrow’s Knicks vs. Hawks game. The seven-day online auction, which was conducted by Garden of Dreams and concluded today at noon, marked a major