Only two dozen or so games remain in the NBA regular season and we still don’t fully understand the identity of either the Rockets or the Nets. Brooklyn’s right in the middle of the East’s divide between the upper and lower half of its playoff spots. Read More »

If you’re looking for someone to be critical of Kevin Garnett‘s alleged “Honey Nut Cheerios” comment to Carmelo Anthony, Houston coach Kevin McHale might just be the last person to seek out. He’s known Garnett for years from their Minnesota days and by trading him to Boston in a sweetheart deal in 2007 delivered the final piece of the Big Three to McHale’s former Celtics. Read More »

Twitter and Instagram have added yet another avenue for basketball fans to connect with the personalities of their favorite NBA, college and high school players. It’s damn near impossible though for most normal people to stay up with everything that gets posted to Instagram on a daily basis, so we’re gonna help out the best way we know how: by collecting the best pics each week for our readers to cruise through at their leisure.

Here’s the best of this past week. Let us know what we missed in the comments section below. Read More »

Think about all of those games you remember that came down to a final shot, the ones where you thought you’d pass out if it got any more intense. Technically, San Antonio’s 111-106 win over Toronto on Sunday was the NBA’s most tightly contested win of all time. That the game went into two overtimes is notable, but not as much as this — according to Elias Sports, since 1954 this was the “first double-overtime game in which each of the first five periods was either tied or decided by a single point.” Polar opposites though they may seem, Toronto and San Antonio turned a matinee into 24 minutes of free hoops instead. Read More »

There are established patterns to winning NBA Coach of the Year. You either guide a team with high expectations to its expected goal, stun with an eye-popping turnaround out of the Lottery or take a team from the playoff fringe into a team no one wants to face in the opening round by catching fire. We’ll call them the Excellence’s Status Quo, Out Of Nowhere, or Next Step plans to earning respect, respectively. With the curtain being drawn on the 2012-13 season tonight, Dime is projecting the major awards all week, and today we look at the top coach. Read More »

Just a day after we heard Allen Iverson say he was willing to take the Starbury detour and head to China to play ball, we’re hearing another former star could be coming back to basketball: Shaquille O’Neal. That sound you hear is TNT fans everywhere screaming in delight. No one is talking about anything permanent, however. Sorry to kill the excitement. Yes, O’Neal should be back to possibly submarine “Inside The NBA” again, but there are also some plans in the works for the Big Fella to restart his pro career on the court. Read More »

Did you know how small Jay-Z‘s ownership of the Brooklyn Nets is? It’s got to be decent, you’d think, what with his face on billboards around Manhattan, being at the shovel ceremony for the Barclays Center and having about four of his other business interests tied into the team’s new arena. Actually, it’s tiny: one-fifteenth of one percent, reported The New York Times today. But if teams want to lure in a big fish celebrity to co-own a pro team (even if they’re not spending relatively much — Mr. Carter put down $1 million) you can be sure they’ll watch this other Brooklyn blueprint. Read More »

Colin Cowherd has really jumped on the anti-Michael Jordan train these days – not Cowherd himself, but bringing guests onto his ESPN Radio show to rebut the notion that MJ is the greatest ever. First it was Jim Boeheim making a mere suggestion that LeBron James might be a better player than MJ. And now it’s former NBAer John Salley, who said that MJ isn’t the greatest either. And, even worse, he names five players who he thinks were better. So for those of you counting at home, Michael Jordan isn’t one of the five greatest players ever. According to John Salley, that is. Read More »

Aside from checking in on the results of the NBA Draft Combine this week, where you probably noticed that Harrison Barnes somehow tested out with a 38-inch standing vertical and a 3.16 3/4 sprint, the fastest of anyone, there’s another draft mini-camp going on across the pond right now. The adidas EUROCAMP, the only official NBA Draft camp outside of the U.S., kicked off this week in Treviso, Italy with more than 45 early entries and draft-eligible players taking part in drills and competition. Read More »

Who are these old guys, anyway? Shouldn’t San Antonio’s core of Manu Ginobili, Tim Duncan and Tony Parker be content with riding out their careers with rings and memories in hand?

Think again. The Southwest Division this year has been up for grabs dating back to Memphis’ playoff upset and Dallas’ offseason moves that made its title defense a question. This division used to be the Spurs and Mavericks’ personal playground every year. Only the Hornets in 2007-08 broke the hold of those two teams’ titles going back to 2004. Read More »