Signing a huge deal affects athletes in different ways. For some players, the pressure of living up to the cash is just too much to bear and their play suffers from the added expectations. Others put up career numbers in a contract year to earn the big payday, and then relax on the court as they watch their bank accounts swell. In addition to frustrating the Hell out of loyal fan bases, these reactions can lead to general managers prematurely cleaning out their offices and updating their resumes for a new line of work. Read More »

With the dark days of August upon us, NBA players and scribes go into hibernation until training camps kick off in September. The Olympics are over and most of the player movement already happened, so it’s a mellow month for most NBA heads. Instead of resting on our laurels, we’d like to preface the 2012-2013 season with a list of players who will experience the highest levels of pressure heading into the new NBA year. Read More »

After Portland announced former top Mavericks assistant Terry Stotts as its head coach on Wednesday, Stotts talked about freeing up the Trail Blazers’ game plan. More threes, more running, more room for players to make instinctual plays based on their abilities to read and react. Stotts was the offensive mind behind Dallas’ NBA title run in 2011, and he’ll have his own 6-10 centerpiece who can shoot in Portland, too, in LaMarcus Aldridge. He’s not Dirk Nowitzki, but the Dallas native is an All-Star worth building around. Aldridge also is the guy who campaigned for the job to go to video intern turned interim head coach Kaleb Canales. Then Stotts threw a curveball that will surely keep Aldridge pleased: Canales will stay on as assistant. Well this could be awkward. Read More »

It’s hard to be considered an offseason winner when your No. 1 player and franchise cornerstone recently tore up his knee and won’t be returning until probably March at the earliest. But the Bulls aren’t just going to be one player down next season; They’ve made some huge changes in this offseason. They lost Ronnie Brewer, Kyle Korver and Omer Asik, among others, and replaced them with Kirk Hinrich, Nate Robinson and Nazr Mohammed. Rose probably means a dozen wins himself, and with the new changes they’ve made, Jeff Van Gundy doesn’t think they’ll even make the playoffs. The Notorious J.V.G. said on ESPN 1000′s “Waddle & Silvy” show that it’ll be a heck of a year if the Bulls can even win half of their games. Read More »

Portland and Minnesota have representatives in Las Vegas this week, carrying on a mini-feud that started with one team unwittingly a part of it, sucked in by people now long gone. Portland’s Neil Olshey and Minnesota’s David Kahn are GMs spending their time in Las Vegas trying not to look at one another when they’re not running around the city trying to deliver offer sheets. It’s a bizarre feud that has culminated (I think) with one of the more interesting free agency stories of this summer, Nicolas Batum, through a winding series of missteps by players, front-office types and even co-workers of those involved. For a feud dealing with teams that are at best mid-level squads in the Western Conference, it has surprisingly stuck. Here’s how it got this way. Read More »

The 2012 NBA Draft has come and gone like Maybach Music Group’s Self Made 2 drop earlier this week. Billed as one of best drafts in recent memory, it didn’t provide the same kind of trade activity that all the pre-draft talk suggested. Nevertheless, the lack of major moves impacted the way the draft played out. Hell, David Stern, Adam Silver and the entire ESPN broadcast couldn’t even keep up with the rate Twitter was disseminating the picks at warp speed. Now GMs, teams, and players have no time before they’re notified of how great or how poor their evening went. We documented each selection as it unfolded; and here’s our list of the top ten winners and losers of the draft. Read More »

Unless you’re Skip Bayless and your job is to swim against the current of popular opinion — that being LeBron James keeping Miami almost single-handedly from exiting the playoffs was an incredible, once-every-50-years performance — LBJ was the first thing you talked to your friends about around the water cooler. And why wouldn’t he be? The wrong-footed jumpers (he even banked one in over Kevin Garnett; so filthy), the tip-dunk where his head was at the rim, the 15 rebounds, there was more than enough to go around for conversation. Read More »

While most of the NBA’s Lottery teams were busy selecting first-round talent in last week’s Draft, the Clippers found themselves on the outside looking in. Yeah, in a perfect Clippers’ world, Cleveland’s No. 1 selection of Kyrie Irving could have possibly been theirs – a piece lost in the Baron Davis-Mo Williams midseason swap – instead, they were left searching for new talent in the second round with a pair of selections. Read More »

Los Angeles Clippers forward Blake Griffin was officially named the NBA Rookie of the Year Wednesday afternoon in Playa Vista, Calif., finally putting to rest a decision that, I don’t know, everyone knew was going to happen since early November.

With the award now in hand, Griffin becomes the NBA’s first unanimous Rookie of the Year since David Robinson was crowned ROY in 1990. He also collected all possible first-place votes, with rooks John Wall and DeMarcus Cousins respectively following suit behind. In a very crowded gym at the Clips’ practice facility this afternoon, Griffin talked about his progression in his first season as a pro. Read More »

For the first time since Darius Miles and Quentin Richardson were pulling out the antennas, it’s trendy to be a Clippers fan. They’ve won 10 of their last 14 games, with wins over the Lakers and Heat, and Blake Griffin is making everyone find their boy with NBA League Pass whenever the Clip Show are on. But after so many years of disappointment, you can understand why management is trying to assure their fan base now that B.G. isn’t going anywhere when he becomes an unrestricted free agent in the summer of 2014. Read More »