LAS VEGAS – After a week of NBA teams throwing money around like a busload of retired tourists at a swarm of slot machines, it seemed only appropriate for the best, brightest and richest basketball players to assemble in this city of excess. Had they not been engaged in the task at hand, players probably would have walked around with smile reminiscent of Jim Carrey in The Mask. Salsa anyone? But they came to Las Vegas to play . . . play
A funny thing happened on L.A.’s way to oblivion…. Actually, the L.A. teams didn’t go anywhere, even if they wrote them off as the new backwater of the West and whatever other insults and Skid Row photos they threw into their dumb stories. OK, I was the one who did the backwater story a while back. OK, it was just two days back—or put another way, just before the Lakers got Steve Nash–becoming even older and slower (their starters will be 38-34-32-32-25) but
// Lamar Odom is the latest to withdraw from Team USA, leaving only 15 players on the roster heading into the first day of training camp Thursday. “Lamar has told us that he is unable to play for the United States this summer,” Team USA managing director Jerry Colangelo said. “While it is unfortunate to have lost the players we have, Coach Krzyzewski and I remain extremely confident with the group of players we’ll have at our training camp in Las
By now, you have probably heard about the Miami Heat trio of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh having a sit-down with Oprah Winfrey for some exclusive interviews soon after the NBA Finals on her new network called Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN). You know what that means: the revealing of personal, deep, hidden emotions never revealed before. Or something along those lines. While we don’t have the segments by entirety, we do have snippets, thanks to OWN’s youtube channel. Below, you
Today marks the beginning of NBA free agency, and folks need a primer on which teams will be the biggest players in the open market. It all depends on how far below the salary cap they can get, and we are here to break those numbers down for you. Chris Bernucca has done a great job of ranking the NBA’s top 2012 unrestricted free-agents and the league’s top 2012 restricted free-agents, but in addition to checking out either those pieces, it’d be
We told you restricted free agency is tricky. Well, it’s so tricky that the Memphis Grizzlies and Minnesota Timberwolves decided not to participate in it. This week, the Grizzlies decided against making a $7.4 million qualifying offer to guard O.J. Mayo while making cheaper QO’s to forwards Marreese Speights and Darrell Arthur. The Timberwolves made the same decision on their $8.2 million qualifying offer to Michael Beasley. Those decisions make Mayo and Beasley unrestricted free agents – and remove them from our
Free agency started Sunday midnight ET. On Monday, the Brooklyn Nets and Dallas Mavericks are expected to make an unrelenting push for All-Star point guard Deron Williams, who is clearly the best available player. The team that lands Williams also has the best chance of acquiring superstar center Dwight Howard, who is not a free agent but has said that he would like to play alongside Williams. In terms of flexibility, the Nets have the inside track. They can offer Williams more money
