Real life hit the NBA once again yesterday, when reports surfaced that a number of Miami Heat employees — most notably Pat Riley and head coach Erik Spoelstra — accepted pay cuts up to 20% in an effort to prevent further layoffs in the organization. It’s been public knowledge for years that some NBA teams are in financial trouble (Grizzlies, Bobcats, etc.), but Miami usually wasn’t in that group. It’s not like Riley or Spoelstra is starving or anything, but it’s got to be scary for a lot of people around the League. And of course, it kicks off an easy round of “Why can’t Underachieving Player X take a pay cut?” Read More »

All I can say is WOW! ESPN The Magazine’s Chris Broussard is reporting that (according to two sources with knowledge of the discussions) the Cavs and Suns are nearing an agreement on a trade that would send Shaquille O’Neal to Cleveland in exchange for Ben Wallace and Sasha Pavlovic. As I said, all I can say is WOW! Read More »

Add another bit of history to the LeBron James career highlight reel, which will some day challenge Mike, Vince, Kobe, Barry Sanders and Reggie Bush (the stuff he did in high school and college was just unreal) as the greatest in the history of sports highlight reels. After Hedo Turkoglu hit a tough jumper over Sasha Pavlovic to put Orlando up by two with exactly one second left in last night’s conference finals Game 2, the Cavs had one chance to avoid an 0-2 series deficit as everybody in Cleveland was nauseous on John Elway flashbacks. Mo Williams was the inbound passer — as Mike Brown flagrantly ignored the lessons of George Karl — and held it for 4.5 seconds before LeBron popped open at the top of the key. Read More »

Today, reports were confirmed that LeBron James is this year’s NBA MVP. Tomorrow, ‘Bron will accept the trophy in front of the Cleveland crowd before his second-round series with Atlanta gets underway. Back in February we put LeBron on the cover of Dime #47, as he was in the middle of his career year. Here’s the reprint of that feature:

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Where did the game go?

Sometime between when Mike could still fly, when Isiah could still finish, when Magic could still seek and Larry could still destroy — sometime between then and when they stepped aside for Kobe, Chris, Dwyane and Dirk — the game escaped us. Read More »