According to a report from Yahoo! Sports, Vinny Del Negro has been fired as head coach of the L.A. Clippers. Del Negro went 128-102 in three seasons at the helm of the Clippers, but none of those wins overshadowed the fact that his teams consistently flamed out at the end of seasons and consistently underachieved. Read More »

It had been 19 years since Michigan had made the Elite Eight in the NCAA Tournament. But dabble in a little Trey Burke, and add in some copious amounts of the Kansas Jayhawks — who have a history of this sort of choking — and it all adds up to the best comeback of March Madness … After overtime, the final score read, 87-85, Michigan, but make no mistake: it wasn’t the Wolverines that won the game. It was their point guard. Read More »

There were times during the Los Angeles Clippers incredible final month of 2012 when both Blake Griffin and Chris Paul struggled to find the bottom of the bucket. When you checked the box score, both of their superstars appeared to struggle and barely managed to play 30 minutes on the night. Read More »

For as much work as Santa Claus put in last night, the sports world was undeniably quiet on Christmas Eve. Yeah, we were all busy watching Elf for the fifth time this week, and you were probably finishing off your seventh cheesecake of the holidays. But the NBA? College basketball? They were silent. We’re about a quarter of the way into the NBA season, and nothing is decided yet. 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 »

Everything was going Tony Parker‘s way in May. He had that 20-game winning streak with the Spurs. The people at Merriam-Webster basically were putting the Spurs’ team photo next to “team” in their dictionary. They weren’t just beating Oklahoma City, they were teaching them a lesson. Then it all came tumbling apart in a four-game losing streak. Now, Parker has a damaged cornea thanks to being collateral damage in a Wednesday throwdown between Chris Brown and Drake in a NYC club. Parker says he can’t do anything for seven days but will still play in the Olympics for the French national team, and that he got hit because he was shielding his girlfriend from the shards. Read More »

Every team believes they have unfinished business when they go down in a playoff sweep. It’s too sudden. Losing four in a row wraps the season up quite nicely, and everyone is left searching for excuses and answers. When you have the game’s most explosive power forward and one of the best pure point guards in the last 20 years, no one is expecting the broom… even if you are the Clippers, even if you had injuries piled higher than Barkley‘s dinner plate and even if your coach is Vinny Del Negro. Read More »

There’s a photo of the NBA championship trophy above the locker of every Knick. Too much? Probably. But at least they can dream. Last week at this time they were closer to filming a horror movie. The Knicks destroyed the Pistons at home last night, 101-79, pushing their run to six of seven since Mike D’Antoni was pushed overboard. Carmelo Anthony was on the court a solid 90 minutes before tip trying to find his touch again, and while he only had 15, everybody else picked up the slack … Read More »

Facebook is about to go public with its IPO, which has everyone in a buy/sell mood and streaming “The Social Network” soundtrack on Spotify. It leads to conversations about how big the company can become. If you’re a hoops fan looking for a steal, it’s time now, at nearly a third of the way through the season, to see what teams you should invest your hopes in and who to sell off quick while you still can.

I don’t know anything about tech stocks but here’s who you believe in and what teams, if bought too aggressively, could ruin your portfolio. Read More »

Everyone wants to talk about super teams. Of course, the Heat, Knicks, Clippers, Celtics and all the rest of ‘em capture the imagination of the NBA fan base. There’s nothing quite like feeling the anticipation and excitement in the air when you see that news hit telling you Chris Paul has finally been traded and he’s going to the Clippers. What immediately follows is typically more invigorating than what eventually happens. The promise of what could be is almost always better than what is. Even here at Dime, we find ourselves talking about one third of the NBA about 80 percent of the time. That doesn’t mean we don’t care about everyone else. Read More »