FRESH PICKINGS: Kawhi Leonard (56 percent owned in Yahoo!, 68 percent in ESPN) After singing Kawhi Leonard’s praises a few weeks ago, he did me dirty by taking a little extra time to heal his bum knee. Now back in action, he put up 17 points, four rebounds, two assists, five steals and three treys in his first start back. In fantasy, Kawhi is a steals specialist, and while he isn’t going to wow you in any other category, he’s not going to hurt you anywhere either. Read More »

On one hand, you have Sunday being defined by a Seahawks team coming out of relative nowhere to crush the 49ers and become the NFL’s hottest team. In the NBA, its best team right now is on just the same kind of roll — 13 straight wins after Sunday — and even though you can say we’ve seen the Los Angeles Clippers coming for a couple of seasons now, it’s still remarkable that they’re the class of the West. Read More »

The return of Chauncey Billups on Wednesday night signaled a reason for optimism for the once-sagging Clippers. Even with a surplus of talent at point guard with minute-eater Chris Paul and Eric Bledsoe, Los Angeles needed to have Billups, its no-questions-asked leader, back in the lineup to show his teammates how to win, not only telling them how from the sideline. Read More »

This morning the NBA officially released their list of the top-selling jerseys and merchandise, and the big winners are LeBron James and a hugely resurgent New York Knicks franchise.

LeBron reclaims the title of the NBA’s most popular jersey – the first time he has held the spot since April of 2011 – by jumping from No. 4 on the list to overtake Read More »

Turkey Day is one of those guilt-free days where you can cheat on the NBA without feeling bad. NFL football is a tradition on Thanksgiving of course, and we’re left with Texas (Cowboys got RG III’d) and New York (a Jets fail for the ages) as two of the biggest stories coming out of a day without any NBA games. You won’t even have to readjust to make room for one of Friday’s biggest games — the Knicks at the Rockets. Do we even need to state the obvious about the matchup to watch in this game? Read More »

With Mike D’Antoni literally sitting in Phil Jackson‘s old seat (and even walking like him) along the Staples Center sideline, the new Lakers era didn’t exactly start according to plan. They couldn’t make free throws (19-for-37). They couldn’t make shots. They couldn’t even stop Brook Lopez. But down the stretch, their defense was suffocating, and Kobe Bryant (25 points) hit enough free throws to hold off Brooklyn, 95-90. Read More »

Through the first 20 days of the NBA’s regular season, injuries and setbacks have already occurred. Some, like Chicago, were injuries we already knew about; they would be without their former MVP, Derrick Rose, for a large portion of the season. Others, like the Los Angeles Lakers, lost their former two-time MVP point guard in the inchoate days before we’d really seen them play as a full, Hall-of-Fame, group. But most of the teams missing their stars have banded together and kept from sliding all the way to the territory of Detroit or Washington. Read More »

Even after Dallas avoided what could’ve been a knockout punch this summer (hint: Deron Williams) and instead netted some decent talent, I did not expect them to make noise in the West this year. Dirk Nowitzki was going to be out for an early chunk of the season. They had lost a handful of veteran leaders. And they were coming off yet another summer where they failed to land any big names. Mark Cuban‘s philosophy felt like it was in a tailspin, a forever cycle of Plan Bs that weren’t quite good enough. Read More »

I give you an installment of “Mavs Playeraoke,” which apparently consists of Dallas players singing along to popular songs so poorly, the challenge is to decipher what the song is supposed to be.

This is Dirk Nowitzki slaughtering Bruce Springsteen‘s “Born in the U.S.A.” Read More »

The return of the full 82-game schedule is less than a week away in the NBA, a reminder that teams have months recover from poor starts. There is time. There is breathing room, even if some teams and fanbases haven’t let out a breath of air  since their star got hurt during training camp. Not all injuries should be worried about evenly, thouh. Dime breaks down which injuries should be cause for concern, and the others should be monitored closely but not induce hand-wringing. Read More »