LeBron James is becoming his own hyperbole, his game better than anything performed at the Grammys on Sunday night. The real show has become what King James is doing every game, so fine tuned is his game right now with his fifth 30-point and 60-percent shooting game in a row. The Lakers held tough and made the game interesting, and Kobe kept up his end of the deal with 28 points, six boards and nine dimes in Miami’s 107-97 win. Read More »

The 2012-13 Minnesota Timberwolves seem to be a jumbled mess of broken bones, tweaked knees, discombobulated ligaments and disappointed fans that expected them to make the leap to Western Conference contender status. Instead, they lost their best player before the season started while simultaneously still missing their specious second-best player to a knee injury from last year. But they’re 12-11 through 22 games even after losing to the defending NBA champs earlier this week, and now is not the time to sprint before they can crawl, sometimes quite literally in Brandon Roy‘s case. Any pundits looking for Rick Adelman to accelerate the return of their still-recovering franchise point guard have to remember the NBA’s six-month regular season is a marathon instead of a 100 meter dash. Read More »

Yes, we know the season is still young. There are a lot of games left to be played in what should be a great year, but still, it seems there’ll be a surprise for us waiting around every corner.

This season has already given us some unexpected gut-punches in the first two weeks of the season. Even before opening week ended, we were treated to some moves that garnered a lot of attention and excitement, and I think the regular season will have the same compelling feel as the offseason did. 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 »

There may not be a more fascinating front office than Minnesota’s, where GM David Kahn has been a lightning rod of criticism ever since 2009, when he succeeded Kevin McHale. He drafted Ricky Rubio and Jonny Flynn with consecutive picks in the same 2009 NBA Draft and gave Darko Milicic a $20 million contract, but also kept Kevin Love in uniform until at least 2015. This offseason was no different in Minneapolis, either. Most interesting are the doubts and decisions stemming from the latest moves from inside the organization itself. Read More »

For the past two seasons, perhaps no player in the NBA has put up more impressive, under the radar numbers than Houston’s Kyle Lowry. He was the litmus test for all fantasy players: if you knew and respected Lowry’s worth, then you knew your fantasy hoops. In 2010-2011, Lowry was a monster in the second half of the season, and even averaged 19.8 points, 5.3 rebounds and 8.1 assists a game during March. And then this year, despite nagging injuries that severely limited his production during the season’s final month, the 6-0 point guard still averaged 14.3 points, 4.6 rebounds and 6.6 dimes a night with a PER of just below 19. Read More »

Everyone take a deep breath and check the calendar. It’s not June yet. We still have to wait. But we do think everyone in the world wants this. Hell, we bet even the Spurs and Bulls fan out there want to see seven games of OKC/Miami in the NBA Finals. If they’re anything like Miami’s 98-93 win last night in terms of drama and physicality, we’ll be spoiled. In one second quarter stretch, Kendrick Perkins slapped D-Wade in the face, and then Russell Westbrook (28 points) nearly got thrown out for a bad foul on a LeBron James breakaway. Read More »

While Minnesota has been haunted since Kevin Garnett left for Boston, Michael Beasley has long been knocked as a shoot-first, look-for-teammates-later kind of player. This season, signs are showing that the T-Wolves’ rebirth is changing the way we think of Beasley, too.

The following interview can be seen in its entirety in the current issue, Dime #68. Read More »

Say hello to the bad guy. We have a new beast in the West. In probably the most physical game of the NBA season so far, the Blazers showed why everyone is so frightened of playing them up in the Northwest by punking the Clippers and Blake Griffin, 105-97. With the NBA’s newest A-List team threatening them over and over, Portland answered every call. Between Gerald Wallace, LaMarcus Aldridge and Marcus Camby, they did work on Griffin, holding him to the most up-and-down 18 and 12 night you’ll ever see. Read More »

When we throw around the word “sleeper” in reference to an NBA team, it doesn’t really say much other than we think Team X will surpass expectations. Some sleepers could win championships, a la the Dallas Mavericks of a year ago. Others, such as the Memphis Grizzlies of last season, will slip into the playoffs and make a deep run after they weren’t expected to amount to anything.

So in picking the top five sleepers for the 2011-12 NBA season, there’s going to be some good teams that turn out to be super good and some bad teams that might surprise us by not completely floundering about. There’s a few prerequisites to being a sleeper, however. Read More »