*Midnight Madness is over, and with it went the smoke machines, dunk contests and laser shows that kick off the season. College basketball begins now, and while the excitement still remains it’s time to peel the hype back and see who the nation’s best truly are. That’s why Dime has you covered with individual previews of the nation’s top 15 teams and a few others just outside, all over the course of the next few weeks. Today, Arizona. Read More »

Dime will be in the building all week for the 2012 Pac-12 basketball tournament to drop some knowledge on you about multiple, epic fails of NCAA Tournament hopes and Ernie Kent’s drink of choice.

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Now they’ve really done it. If you had asked me before the Pac-12 Tournament to make some predictions, I wouldn’t have guessed any of the following. Read More »

Dime will be in the building all week for the 2012 Pac-12 basketball tournament to drop some knowledge on you about multiple, epic fails of NCAA Tournament hopes and Ernie Kent’s drink of choice.

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As a recent college graduate, I’m not down with dropping the cash to stay at the media hotel across from Staples Center. The first night of the tourney, I made the mistake of shelling out $40 bucks to stay at a downtown hotel that Hotels.com didn’t mention as being, essentially, a hostel. Read More »

Dime will be in the building all week for the 2012 Pac-12 basketball tournament to bring you updates on how the league is screwing with the NCAA selection committee’s collective head and the awesome Staples Center buffets.

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Day 2 of the Pac-12 Tournament just had to be better than Day 1 as far as quality was concerned. I knew this from the onset, but I didn’t know how crazy of a day it’d become. Look, this is a conference where some silly people think the regular season winner could potentially miss the Big Dance. Read More »

Dime will be in the building all week for the 2012 Pac-12 basketball tournament to bring you updates on the epic media margarita glasses, the best crowd chants and of course, all of the hoops action.

I admit that I do silly things when I travel. To reach the Pac-12 Tournament, I woke up at 4 a.m., chugged a Red Bull and drove from Phoenix to Los Angeles with only a single pit stop to fill my gas tank. The final two hours of the seven-hour journey were spent in mind-numbing, stop-and-go L.A. traffic. I almost crashed like 10 times. Read More »

Ceilings are based half on luck and half on decision-making.

Bill Walton‘s bad luck ended his career in the form of uncontrollable injuries. Isaiah Rider‘s decision-making ruined his. Walton and Rider, had they both the luck and the positive choices, could have done so much more in their NBA careers.

When you consider Washington Wizards center JaVale McGee, Rider might be a parallel case. Unlike Rider, McGee’s decision-making problems begin and end on the court, but in the same sense, it’s the only thing standing in his way from going from a middle-of-the-road NBA player to a star. Read More »

In a presentation hybridizing performance, art and sustainability, Nike released a new series of its Hyper Elite Platinum uniforms this morning, making another move in the advancement of style meeting sport. The nine teams featured will each wear the jerseys once this season, against non-Nike opponents nonetheless. Read More »

When we throw around the word “sleeper” in reference to an NBA team, it doesn’t really say much other than we think Team X will surpass expectations. Some sleepers could win championships, a la the Dallas Mavericks of a year ago. Others, such as the Memphis Grizzlies of last season, will slip into the playoffs and make a deep run after they weren’t expected to amount to anything.

So in picking the top five sleepers for the 2011-12 NBA season, there’s going to be some good teams that turn out to be super good and some bad teams that might surprise us by not completely floundering about. There’s a few prerequisites to being a sleeper, however. Read More »

A year lost to the black hole of an NBA lockout doesn’t stop at lost revenues for team owners, nor the lost nights of kicking back with an extra large bag of Doritos to catch a game.

An NBA lockout means some players who live and breathe hoops won’t know what to do with themselves. To be real, the most gifted of NBA players probably don’t have hobbies, and blasting inferior competition in self-organized streetball games can only fulfill that competitive itch so long. Read More »

Sean Miller is rolling through the recruiting circuit heading into only his third season at Arizona. On Monday, the Wildcats’ head coach pulled in his biggest recruit yet, landing a top-5 overall prospect in the Class of 2012, Brandon Ashley, to a verbal commitment.

The 6-8, 215-pound power forward transferred this summer to Findlay Prep in Nevada following his time at Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland, and chose the Arizona over Oregon, UCLA and Kentucky. Scooping Nike U and the country’s best recruiter in Kentucky’s John Calipari is surely a sign of things to come for Miller at Arizona. Read More »