NBA Playoffs: Russell Westbrook’s Injury Doesn’t Kill Oklahoma City Thunder
As a fan, a gambler and a pure admirer of the Oklahoma City Thunder, I’m just as devastated as anyone by the news of the day. According to an AP report, Russell Westbrook is out for the playoffs with a torn meniscus.
Before you jump off of the OKC bandwagon, remember a few important things:
First of all, LeBron James led the 2006-07 Cleveland Cavaliers to the NBA Finals. Only three other players from that team (Daniel Gibson, Anderson Varejao, Drew Gooden) are still in the NBA. All of the others didn’t deserve to be in the first place. This could be Kevin Durant’s chance to put the Thunder on his back just as LeBron did in Cleveland.
Second, the rest of the Western Conference isn’t exactly healthy. Denver is without Danillo Gallinari, Golden State no longer has David Lee, the Lakers don’t have Kobe and the Spurs haven’t really been fully healthy in two years. Only the Clippers and Grizzlies are both at full strength and present a real threat to the Thunder.
Speaking of the Clippers and Grizzlies, despite LA’s 2-0 lead, they will likely beat each other up pretty badly in their series. Even without Westbrook, beating the Thunder after dealing with each other will prove a difficult task.
There’s another important factor to consider as well. It sounds almost blasphemous, in fact, I feel stupid for even bringing it up, but are we sure the Thunder wouldn’t be better off without Westbrook anyway?
Think about it, he completely monopolizes the ball. On most teams this would be fine, but Kevin Durant is his teammate. Now, without Westbrook, Durant will be able to control the team. He’ll be able to shoot as much as he wants. Sure, it will make the OKC offense far more predictable, but until they reach Miami in the NBA Finals, I don’t think there’s a Western Conference team who can really exploit that.
Kevin Martin is a passable second scorer. Serge Ibaka can pick up a bigger load on offense. Kevin Durant will step up. It’s not a perfect situation, but the Thunder are far from dead. Oklahoma City is still my pick to win the Western Conference. All this does is make Miami’s road to a second straight championship that much easier.
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LeBron James may kill pregame dunk show
There is little doubt that LeBron James likes to entertain people. Recently he has caught flak for how he entertains people.
LeBron’s self-styled dunk contest that has taken place before Miami Heat games has started to become a popular attraction thanks to the power of the internet.
As such, his tricks have become more intricate.
They have gone from basic free-falling displays of skill to involving teammates.
It has given his critics one more reason to wolf about some thing that in the big picture is not that serious.
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Mike D’Antoni’s Stubborn Use of Pau Gasol Will Kill LA Lakers’ Ceiling
Los Angeles Lakers power forward Pau Gasol is one of the most versatile big men in the NBA. He’s an exceptional passer, has a plethora of low-post moves and can finish with either hand around the basket.
However, you wouldn’t know that if you were only introduced to Gasol this season. Under the watchful eye of head coach Mike D’Antoni, Gasol now spends most of his time roaming the perimeter, robbing the 7-foot star of much of his effectiveness.
The 32-year-old forward is shooting a career-worst 41.2 percent from the floor, and is becoming increasingly disenchanted with each passing game. Gasol’s poor play has led to him being benched four times in the fourth quarter since D’Antoni took over just prior to Thanksgiving.
Now that Gasol spends much of his time 10-15 feet from the basket, his rebounding totals are suffering as well. Under former head coaches Mike Brown and Bernie Bickerstaff, Gasol had five double-doubles in the Lakers’ first eleven games. With D’Antoni on the bench, Gasol has grabbed 10 rebounds or more only once in 13 contests. Through 24 games, Gasol is averaging just 2.2 offensive rebounds per night—the lowest figure of his career.
Gasol may be frustrated with his role with the Lakers, but he won’t go so far as to ask for a trade.
“No, oh, that’s radical,” Gasol told ESPN. “I still have faith that I can be a big part in helping this team succeed.”
The head coach of the Lakers has faith as well, and in order to get on the same page with his star forward, D’Antoni invited Gasol out to dinner in late December.
“It was to make sure we’re in the same boat,” Gasol told the Los Angeles Times the day after the late-night meeting. “Hopefully, we can meet halfway on some points.”
Nearly three weeks later, the two parties still haven’t found much common ground. Gasol continues to hang around the foul-line extended area, spotting up for jump shots instead of rolling toward the basket and/or posting up at the start of each possession. And just as Gasol struggles to find his niche is D’Antoni‘s system, the Lakers are still trying to find some level of consistency on both ends of the floor.
The most consistent thing about the Lakers offense is the way that they’ve miscast Gasol this year. This season, 51.1 percent of his field-goal attempts have come from 10 feet and beyond. By comparison, 44.3 percent of Gasol’s shots came from the same distance in 2011-12.
To help illustrate this point better, here is a chart showing the distribution of Gasol’s shots this season:
As you can see, 26.1 percent of Gasol’s shot attempts come from the top of the key, and only 10.3 percent come from either side of the paint. On the surface, that doesn’t appear to be the most practical way to utilize a 7-footer.
“It’s difficult sometimes because it’s not up to me to get involved,” said Gasol in an interview with ESPN on Jan. 4. “I’m trying, but the times that I am at the elbows are the times that I get more involved and can make more plays from there, but it’s not consistent.”
Obviously, the offseason addition of Dwight Howard means that Gasol can’t post up as often as he used to. But when one of the league’s best big men is relegated to running pick-and-pop plays with Steve Nash much of the time, something is wrong with the system, not the player.
D’Antoni begs to differ, however. And if his recent comments are any indication, he won’t be changing his schemes to accommodate anyone anytime soon.
“He’ll be good in any system,” D’Antoni told the Los Angeles Times when asked if Gasol can work in the Lakers’ current offensive structure. “There can’t be a system out there where, if you’re really skilled and know how to play, it doesn’t work for you.”
That statement doesn’t appear to be entirely true, given the Lakers’ 15-17 record and the overwhelming talent that they have on the roster. Yet despite all of the issues that the team has had this year, Los Angeles is still capable of winning the NBA title.
That said, there won’t be a parade through the heart of downtown L.A. unless D’Antoni puts his players in the positions where they’re most able to succeed. And for Pau Gasol, that position is much closer to the basket than where he’s been standing for most of this season.
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Dirk Nowitzki Delaying Surgery Will Kill Dallas Mavericks’ Momentum in 2012-13
You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone, much less a professional athlete, who’d ever want to go “under the knife.” Expenses aside, the whole thing’s quite a hassle—going under anaesthesia, spending hours on an operating table and, of course, enduring a grueling recovery thereafter.
It’s certainly understandable, then, that Dirk Nowitzki would want to put off surgery on his swollen right knee, if not avoid it entirely, and explore his other options in the meantime. Nowitzki’s knee started acting up again during Dallas’ Eurotrip earlier this month, following a win over Alba Berlin in Dirk’s native Germany. As he told Tim McMahon of ESPNDallas.com after missing the Mavericks‘ home game against the Houston Rockets on Monday:
I’m doing everything I can not to have surgery. I guess that’s obvious that I really don’t want it done now. If I want to do it, I would love to do it after the season, get through the season somehow, but the swelling came back three or four times now. That’s obviously not good news.
If it’s going to keep swelling up on me, that’s obviously not a way to go throughout an 82-game season and hopefully long playoff run.
Obviously not, though the Mavs would be fortunate to embark on a “long playoff run” of any kind this season, with or without Dirk. Dallas may well be in the “danger zone” this season, teetering between a low playoff seed and a spot at the bottom of the NBA Draft Lottery, after whiffing on Deron Williams and Dwight Howard this summer.
GM Donnie Nelson did well to maintain financial flexibility for 2013 while reloading in the interim with the likes of Darren Collison, OJ Mayo, Chris Kaman and Elton Brand. Still, the 2012-13 squad, as currently constituted, is a far cry from the one that shocked its way to the title in 2011.
In fact, Dirk, Shawn Marion, Rodrigue Beaubois and Dominique Jones are the only holdovers from the group that hoisted the Larry O’Brien Trophy in Big D not a year-and-a-half ago.
The longer Dirk’s out, the longer it’ll take the revamped Mavs to figure out how to play together. Despite his advancing age—he turned 34 this past June—Nowitzki remains the central figure around which Dallas’ entire operation is organized. After all, he’s the future Hall-of-Famer, the team’s leading scorer and the go-to guy in crunch time, with the cojones and the know-how to make the proper play.
There’s simply no replacing a guy like that. The Los Angeles Lakers would be in a bind without Kobe Bryant, the heart and soul of their squad, but could certainly survive in a pinch, with Dwight Howard, Steve Nash and Pau Gasol picking up the slack.
Dallas has no such superstar reinforcements, to say the least. Elton Brand was an All-Star power forward once upon a time, but injuries and the normal wear-and-tear of an NBA career have left him little more than a shell of his former self.
And don’t even get me started with Brandan Wright, for whom Dirk once offered advice that some believe he’d do well to heed sooner rather than later:
If arthroscopic surgery is, indeed, the way to go for Dirk, then he’s bound to miss the start of the season. Whether he calls up the surgeon now or decides to weigh the alternatives a bit longer will determine how much of the campaign he sits out. Dirk, for his part, understands this (per Tim McMahon):
I’m usually a pretty fast recovery guy, but you never know. Once they look in there, it might be a lot worse, might be a lot better. I guess that nobody really knows [the recovery time]. No doctor in the world can tell you.
I guess if we do decide next week to do that, it’s not looking good for the beginning of the season.
Luckily for the Mavs, their early-season schedule should be relatively navigable sans Dirk. After opening salvos against the Lakers and the Utah Jazz in late October, Dallas will have to dance with the Bobcats (twice), the Trail Blazers, the Raptors, the Knicks, the Ricky Rubio-less Timberwolves and the John Wall-less Wizards during the first two weeks of November.
Should Nowitzki have to sit out longer, the Mavs would run into a much tougher portion of their schedule—five out of seven against returning playoff teams, plus a home game against the Warriors—without their franchise superstar.
Hardly ideal. Then again, neither is knee surgery, though that may well be the way to go for Dirk. Let’s just say, it’s never a good sign when a player has to have his knee drained twice in any two-week span.
Much less during training camp, before the rigors of the regular season have set in.
There’s still hope for Dirk and the Mavs, though, that he won’t need to have his knee scoped after all. Nowitzki encountered similar discomfort in his right knee last season, which contributed to his horrific first half (17.5 points, 5.4 rebounds and 2.3 assists), by his standards. But, after taking a week off to work on his conditioning in January, Dirk went the rest of the way without any knee troubles of which to speak while averaging 23.1 points, 7.2 rebounds and 2.2 assists.
It’s likely that experience from which Nowitzki is drawing his present resolve, to stay the course without winding up in a hospital bed.
At this point, the Mavs can only hope that Dirk is “right” to refuse the knife, lest it be their fading hopes in the West, along with some of Nowitzki’s cartilage, that are trimmed as a result.
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Darko Milicic Willing to ‘Kill Someone on the Court’ in Order to Help Celtics Win
Darko Milicic is a wild card entering this season. And while the former No. 2 overall pick will probably never live up to his draft hype, he’s ready and willing to do whatever is asked of him in his first season in Boston. “I’m done trying to prove I’m the No. 2 pick and that [expletive] stuff,” Milicic said, according to CSNNE.com. “This year, it’s all about Celtics, to show that I am a team player. It’s not about me. It’s about us as a team. Milicic is so focused on succeeding with his new team — the sixth of…
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Milicic will ‘kill someone’ for Celtics
Since being released by the Minnesota Timberwolves under the NBA’s amnesty provision, Darko Milicic has signed a one-year deal with the Boston Celtics. Many skeptics, including myself, have questioned what exactly it is that Milicic brings to the table. Having been largely unable to contribute as a member of five different teams over the past nine years, most of us have come to the conclusion that Darko, despite his obvious physical gifts, will simply never turn himself into a productive NBA player.
Milicic feels differently, of course, and he’s recently vowed to do “whatever it takes” to make the Celtics a better team. Courtesy of CSNNE.com, here he is stating that he’ll go as far as to “kill someone on the court.”
“I’m done trying to prove I’m the No. 2 pick and that [expletive] stuff,” Milicic told CSNNE.com. “This year, it’s all about Celtics, to show that I am a team player. It’s not ab…
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Jason Terry Ramps Up Rivalry Talk With Celtics, Says ‘My Mission Is to Kill’ Heat, Lakers
Jason Terry is a veteran of the game, from knowing how to play to what words to say as he gets ready to take the court with a new team. Terry broke out the bravado again this week, saying he already has his eyes set on perennial Boston Celtics targets: the Miami Heat and Los Angeles Lakers. “My mission is to kill,” Terry said at the Celtics’ annual golf tournament, according to ESPNBoston.com “Whoever that is, whether it’s the Heat, whether it’s the Lakers — hopefully both. That’s my mission, and that’s what I’m here to do.” The sharp-shooting Terry…
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Dwight Howard Trade Rumors: Rockets Would Kill Rebuilding Effort in DH12 Deal
On Monday, the Houston Rockets were rumored to have interest in acquiring two top-10 picks in the 2012 draft in order to immediately flip them to the Orlando Magic in exchange for Dwight Howard.
Today, according to David Aldridge of NBA.com, Howard is saying there is “not a chance” he would remain in H-Town past the summer of 2013.
It appears that DH12 has no interest in keeping quiet this summer and plans to continue starring in the media circus that has surrounded him since he first demanded a trade after the 2011 lockout.
The All-Star center is burning more bridges and becoming less and less attractive to potential suitors the more that news and rumors leak out from sources about where he does and doesn’t want to play.
Houston should definitely avoid wasting two top-10 picks in a stacked draft class on a star who reportedly has absolutely no interest in even considering re-signing when his contract is up after next season.
What is even more remarkable is that the Rockets may be considering amassing even more first-round picks to sweeten the offer. Aldridge writes:
One league source said the Rockets hoped to make deals for the additional Draft picks using existing players, so they would have as many as four first-rounders they could put in a package to Orlando for Howard.
Houston would be trading a ridiculous amount of prospective talent in exchange for a petulant big man—coming off an injury, no less—that wants nothing to do with the franchise.
If the Rockets are going to gather up all of those picks, they need to either spend them on prospects that they can develop within the organization or flip them for a superstar that would be receptive to playing in their city for the long haul.
It’s just not worth it for the team to mortgage the future on Howard, who would more than likely be gone in less than one year.
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Age Limitless: Should the NBA Kill College Basketball?
What if the NBA offered the top 100 high school prospects money, every year? What if owners pooled their resources, distributed a scaled amount of say, $25 million (less than what Kobe makes) among these recruits to ensure their arrival in the league?
These athletes could enter the draft, play in the D-League, or simply take the cash. But what they couldn’t do, per NCAA rules, is play college basketball. And that should be an appealing idea for the NBA.
Summer is the time for analyzing NBA draft prospects, many of whom have been waiting to join the league for a year at least. Summer is the time for analyzing college basketball recruits, many of whom have just joined wildly excited NCAA teams, in a process that can perhaps be described as a much celebrated form of forced waiting.
The age limit may not be the reason for the prospecting season, but it certainly impacts its weather like an annual El Nino. There is more hype for a prospect like Shabazz Muhammad or Nerlens Noel (prodigies who will probably only play one obligatory year) than for someone who feels grateful for four years on scholarship.
It is as though everyone subconsciously grasps that UCLA and Kentucky are getting away with something incredible, something other than an NCAA rule violation: These schools have procured the free services of a famous mega-talent who prefers to be elsewhere.
It isn’t just these programs who revel in free labor of the most wondrous kind; it’s the entire college basketball structure. NCAA president Mark Emmert is so addicted to the NBA’s largesse that he’s tacitly begging David Stern to further raise the age limit.
The conventional view is that this age limit is good for pro basketball because it allows the league a “free farm system.” I hardly see how the system is free.
To my eyes, it looks like NBA owners are putting money in the pockets of college athletic directors, and for what in return? So that Casual NBA Fan can knows who Kemba Walker is? So that the NBA doesn’t have to worry about making money on the talent college administrators wring to the tune of $11 billion on March Madness alone?
The “free farm system” angle implies that the NBA and NCAA operate in a state of blissful symbiosis. Except, college basketball is quite popular and overlaps with the NBA season. From fall through winter through spring, NCAA hoops pulls ratings and ticket money that might otherwise go to its big brother.
Not only that, but fans often draw comparisons between college and pro ball that can reflect unfavorably on the latter. Mark Emmert’s sport is less a farm system than it is a competitor.
So if you’re a business (and the NBA lockout reminded us that pro basketball intends to one), then what do you do to a competitor? If you can, you kill it. The age limit is college ball’s deus ex machina, a magical gift from David Stern that keeps the sport more relevant than it otherwise would be.
The NBA could take back that talent and go another step: They could cut deep into the NCAA talent ranks, deep enough to where fans would give up on college ball despite the tradition and French horns and ugly sweaters.
Pro basketball’s advantage: it’s easy to beat the nothing Mark Emmert insists on paying his employees. So what would it take to kill college basketball? Paying the top 100 recruits? Top 200? What price does the NBA need pay to own its own sport?
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NBA Rumors: Pursuing Kevin Garnett Will Kill the New Jersey Nets
The New Jersey Nets will have quite a bit of money to spend on free agents during the upcoming offseason. While most of the hub around them has revolved around attempts at landing Dwight Howard, reports are now surfacing that the Nets will also pursue Boston Celtics power forward Kevin Garnett in free agency.
According to NBC Sports, the Nets are seriously considering making a run at Garnett in an effort to boost the starpower of their team for their move to Brooklyn. This would be a massive mistake on the part of the Nets. Garnett is not the right player to help this franchise get back to where it needs to be.
Old and Young
Garnett is no spring chicken in his NBA career. He is still a valuable contributor and would be on any team that he chose, but he isn’t the type of guy you get to build for the future. The cold, hard truth is that Garnett will probably be retired before that future ever comes about.
The Nets need to build a roster around younger talent. Just going out and getting Garnett because he is a recognizable name is not the right way to make your team a contender in the years to come.
Getting younger talent, like a Roy Hibbert or even Howard, makes much more sense for the Nets, who already have some pretty good young players to work with in MarShon Brooks, Brook Lopez, Gerald Green and Kris Humphries. Garnett just wouldn’t work in that mix.
Not Enough Alone
Garnett alone will not make this team much better next year or in the coming years. If the Nets were to land Howard and Garnett together then we are talking about a potentially dangerous playoff team.
However, nabbing Garnett alone isn’t good enough because he doesn’t do enough at this stage of his career. His main contribution right now is defense, which is something the Nets need but isn’t all they need. The mere addition of Garnett won’t be enough to help the Nets win on the court.
It also won’t be enough to help them win off the court by keeping Deron Williams in town. Williams wants to go somewhere where he can play with other great players and win a championship. Garnett was once that caliber of player, but he isn’t any longer. The addition of Garnett will not be enough to keep Williams in town.
The Price Tag
First of all, with the cap space the Nets have cleared, they can easily afford to pay Garnett whatever the market demands. However, is that really the wise option?
Garnett could easily demand over $12 million per year on the open market just based on reputation alone. There is no way he’s really worth that amount. That doesn’t mean I can’t see the Nets paying him that, especially since it seems like just the bone-headed move the Nets always pull.
The bottom line is that Garnett is not worth what they’ll have to pay him. Think about it, what reason could Garnett possibly have for signing with New Jersey, especially if the Nets don’t get another star? The answer is money, and wasting it on the aging Garnett is not a good move for the future of this team.
Ultimately, Garnett will not help this team enough for the price that he will demand. The Nets are better off finding cheaper, younger players that can grow together to form a future contender.
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