It is pretty rare when an elite superstar, a player at the top of their game, is traded off by a team. Circumstances have to reach a boiling point where the team is not going anywhere or the player sees greener pastures and nothing will stop that fixation. In the NBA today, superstars (and those who think they are superstars) are all built the same. If their team has not won a championship or when they see their friends winning them in a brief amount of time, they see it as a need for a new setting. Read More »

Yesterday’s ambush of trade and free agency talk tipped off with a rather awkward rumor: The Celtics weren’t actively shopping Rajon Rondo, but that they’d be open to a deal should anything materialize. In the sports world, that’s basically code for other teams to start calling so they can start the bidding. Danny Ainge and Boston were hinting at something. We just didn’t know what it was yet. So naturally the response from most fans was: WTF? It didn’t help that Rajon Rondo trade rumors are an offseason rite of passage by this point. It doesn’t feel right unless we get a few of them. Read More »

Is it possible to be any less cool than John Stockton? It wasn’t just the short shorts either, or the fact that he played in Utah. It was because everything about him was so, quite literally, vanilla. As old-school as old-school gets. Putting together a decent highlight video for Stockton might be one of the hardest things an NBA TV executive could do. His YouTube videos have to be the first time – and possibly the last time – it’s ever not fun to watch a tape of one of the greatest basketball players ever. Stockton was really only memorable because he was so boring. Read More »

We’ll call this the list Gary McGhee loves to hate…

I’ve been on both sides of the coin before. But it’s the embarrassing times you remember. One in particular stands out for me. College. Sophomore year. Preseason. Every fall at a D-III college is always the same: there are the returning players and then there are dozens of kids from high school, all coming together and all believing they’ll be one of the three or four kids who actually make the team. They all have some game – or at least a little bit – and they’re all cocky. Read More »

The best one-on-one player in the game? We thought we already answered this earlier this summer. Dime’s fanbase seemed to think Dirk Nowitzki would take home the top spot, but yet we can’t help but think that was a little bit of the championship hangover as well as crazed fans doing whatever they can to get him some extra votes. The Los Angeles Times recently interviewed some pretty big name players – Kevin Durant, John Wall, Matt Barnes and Trevor Ariza – and all of them except for Wall said in a game of one-on-one, Kobe Bryant would beat LeBron James. Read More »

The best ever? That’s hard to do. Even with a limitless library like YouTube, it’s virtually impossible to make a list of the best alley-oops of all-time and not miss a couple. All of the NBA’s greatest players have their most popular highlights, but what about the average or no-name players? Some of them have great alley-oops too, but you’ll be lucky to find them anywhere, much less remember them.

When a video was posted last week, it became painfully obvious pretty quickly that it was missing a few. So I figured I’d make the REAL top 10 list. No gimmicks. No timetables. Just straight raw ferociousness. Read More »

The only memories I have of Wayman Tisdale are from his final few years in the NBA when he was just a forgettable role player in Phoenix. I didn’t catch him in his prime during the late 1980s and early ‘90s. I also never realized he was a spectacular musician until sometime around his death in 2009. If we are talking about great NBA musicians, then Tisdale has to be near the top. He had a No. 1 Billboard album, as crazy as that sounds. But if we did that – opened this list up to every ballplayer/artist – it would turn into an impossibility. Read More »

The league starts and finishes another day of the dreaded lockout today, which saw a glimmer of hope as the NFL rebooted up to normal. However, just like last week, our foreign friends are continuing to try to lure superstars onto courts far away from home. Amar’e Stoudemire is the newest big-time attraction on the overseas market. The Knickerbocker big man’s phone is attracting calls from all sorts of places, including Israel, Turkey, China and Spain. Read More »

So maybe there was a WNBA logo at midcourt. And maybe the crowd of just over 5,000 was about one-fourth of what you’d get on a good night at Staples Center or Madison Square Garden. And maybe the only certified All-Star on either roster was sitting on the bench in street clothes, cradling his 2-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son in his arms instead of a basketball.

But none of those images could dim the fantasy that, for now at least, the NBA was back in Seattle. Read More »

NBA arenas, chartered flights, five-star hotels and being set financially; all of these things were supposed to happen for Damon Powell. Despite some setbacks, he still finds himself one step closer to his ultimate goal. Read More »