I received a text yesterday afternoon. It was from a friend, who mentioned that someone had said to him that they no longer respected Derrick Rose.

I do not live under a rock, ergo I know that everyone who watches basketball and has a Twitter account and/or a voice box has had an opinion on Rose’s knee. I also know that the athletes whom are familiar with Rose’s injury in some way (Marcus Lattimore, Adrian Peterson, Iman Shumpert and Ricky Rubio to name a few) have had absolutely nothing bad to say about Derrick. Read More »

Sportswriting often speaks about ephemeral events in inflated, grandiose terms. Just about all of us who love sports and attempt to write or speak about it are guilty of this at one time or another. Prisoners of the moment, we forget, as time passes, about the events that we once deemed so significant, the result of some combination of our collective societal attention deficit and the actual triviality of the events. Read More »

So, when exactly is the latest “new” Lakers season starting? At the end of the third quarter last night in Phoenix’s unbelievable 92-86 win, all was right in L.A. The Lakers shot 65 percent in the third quarter, Kobe was dishing (17 points, nine assists) and L.A. was up double-digits. Then, Dwight Howard re-injured his shoulder, Michael Beasley (27 points) took it back to K-State, and the Lakers started unraveling. Read More »

Do positions even matter anymore? They feel arbitrary. Shooting guards and small forwards should be wings or swingmen. Power forwards and centers should just be bigs. Most of the time, those are the terms people within the sport use. But for fans and the media, having specific one through five positions help to make sense of it all. 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 »

Even if James Harden wasn’t, we all had waited a long time for last night. Both Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook didn’t suit up, which meant the Beard would finally get a long-awaited chance to be the no. 1 option versus a top defense like the Bulls. Harden never really wanted this, dating all the way back to the draft when he reportedly actually wanted to be picked by OKC because he could fit in rather than dealing with the pressure of being “the man.” But anyone on the cusp of getting a max contract should be willing to test themselves. It’s safe to say Harden failed this one. Read More »

The biggest complaint in hip-hop today is that everything is soft. Grown men are circling their neighborhoods in skin-tight jeans, and are crooning instead of rapping. The aggressive lane has become a recessive trait in hip-hop. Bars are depreciated because nobody listens to sixteens anymore. Everybody needs a catchy hook and a melodic beat in order to smoothly digest a record. The gangsta in gangsta rap is diminished. Still, there’s some hope. Indiana’s very own Freddie Gibbs, commonly referred to as Gangsta Gibbs, has no desire to let the epitome of gangsta rap die. Read More »

Grant Hill turns 40 today, one of the game’s greatest in his Detroit prime yet still one of its greatest comeback stories today. His career path is well trod now, but one of the very best to not win a ring has that chance as a Clipper. The man whose ankles nearly killed him has played about five years without even ankle braces, a remarkable story that he hopes ends in storybook fashion this season alongside Chris Paul and Blake Griffin in Los Angeles. Read More »

Chris Paul might not be Dwyane Wade, who seems intent on turning himself into some sort of fashion icon. But he’s stylish enough to make the cover of GQ (along with actors Denzel Washington and Javier Bardem), and in the subsequent interview, he admitted he was happy to end up with the Clippers instead of the Lakers. The former JV team had better pieces, and as Paul said, “winning with the Clippers would be legendary.” Read More »

Kevin Durant‘s contribution to his new movie, Thunderstruck, has been interesting to watch evolve. Maybe the biggest reason for that feeling is that I just don’t picture KD as a guy with movie ambitions. Need him on set? He’s probably still at the gym hoisting his 500th jumper of his second shooting session of the day (conveniently, he plays a basketball player in the new movie). So the thinking began: Who else could make a surprising movie star — and do they have a role tailored for them? Read More »