When Marc Gasol went down with a scary knee injury in late November, the Memphis Grizzlies were a modest 7-6 to begin the season. Without their reigning Defensive Player of the Year, the Grizzlies were a subpar 10-13 and many around the league began to wonder if they would even make it back to the playoffs in the ultra-competitive Western Conference. [Read more…]
Big game tonight for the Memphis Grizzlies, who you may recall went to the Western Conference finals last season despite hiring John Hollinger. 🙂 With a win, they crawl back within one game of .500 despite being without Marc Gasol for the past several weeks. With a loss, their uphill climb back to respectability gets a little tougher. It now appears the West is going to be an 11-team race for three spots, with the Pelicans falling out of the picture
Since training camp opened, there have been five significant trades involving 10 teams, 19 players and seven draft picks. The big winners have been a team that got rid of the highest scorer among the traded players and a team that acquired a player who has yet to play. The big loser has been a team that swears by analytics. Another way to look at it is like this: The biggest trades thus far have been the ones that haven’t been made
As an action packed weekend of basketball comes to a close, here’s the good, bad and the ugly of what took place. [Read more…]
The Pau Gasol-for-Andrew Bynum trade talks appear to be dormant but not dead. The Lakers would like to get another worthy asset thrown into in the deal … but so would the Cavs. And you know what? I have to side with the Cavs and general manager Chris Grant on this one. By taking Gasol’s $19.3 million salary off the Lakers’ books, they will drop Los Angels below the luxury tax threshold, saving the Buss family in the area of $20 million.
Advertisement The Western Conference is absolutely nothing like the Eastern Conference when it comes to championship odds. We have what I call a two-horse race in the East versus what I am going to call the six-plus team race in the West. In the 15 previous seasons, only four teams (the Lakers, seven times; the Spurs, five times, the Mavericks, two times; the Thunder, once) have won the Western Conference, which is a similar concept to what the Eastern
It’s very rare that the worlds of basketball and mixed martial arts cross paths, but when it does it’s always interesting to see a players take on the sport. With the highly anticipated main event between Anderson Silva and Chris Weidman at UFC 168, players from around the NBA watched the bout. With their interests particularly rooted in this match, their reactions were mixed as the fight ended with a shocking injury. [Read more…]
Zach Randolph wasn’t happy about the officiating in Thursday’s Grizzlies-Rockets game. The NBA wasn’t happy about Randolph’s opinion of the officiating. Randolph was fined $25,000 by the NBA on Friday for his postgame comments about the referees, whom he called “horrible” and “awful.” [Read more…]