National Basketball League News and Rumors
Nuggets beat Grizzlies for 11th straight winAssociated Press, ESPN.com Kosta Koufos scored 18 points and grabbed a career-high 16 rebounds, helping the Denver Nuggets rally to beat the Memphis Grizzlies, 87-80, on Friday night for their 11th straight win, their longest streak in 30 years. |
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Associated Press, ESPN.com LeBron James and Chris Bosh each scored 28 points, and the Miami Heat made it 21 straight wins, beating the Milwaukee Bucks 107-94 on Friday night. |
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Associated Press, ESPN.com Kobe Bryant lasted just one quarter on a severely sprained left ankle, but Dwight Howard completed a go-ahead, three-point play with 90 seconds left Friday night to help the Los Angeles Lakers hold off the Indiana Pacers, 99-93. |
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Associated Press, ESPN.com Josh Smith is back in Atlanta's lineup against the Phoenix Suns after missing one game with a sprained left knee, but point guard Jeff Teague is missing his second straight start. |
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The New York Knicks have signed veteran forward Kenyon Martin for the remainder of the season. |
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The play was ordinary and unusual, a fitting start to the complex, contradictory debate unknowingly about to begin. Mike Rosario of Florida stole the ball, drove the right side and curled toward the rim to finish the breakaway layup, only to be denied b… |
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Kelly Dwyer, yahoo.com A look around the league and the Web that covers it. It's also important to note that the rotation order and starting nods aren't always listed in order of importance. That's for you, dear reader, to figure out. C: Oklahoman. The Oklahoma City Thunder r… |
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Dave McMenamin, ESPN.com Kobe Bryant, who is nursing a sprained ankle, will be a game-time decision when the Lakers play the Indiana Pacers on Friday. |
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Eric Freeman, yahoo.com The Miami Heat, holders of the NBA's best record at 49-14, also happen to be the league's hottest team. They've won 20 games in a row, and it's not entirely crazy to think they could challenge the 1971-72 Los Angeles Lakers' all-time record of 33 straig… |
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The Los Angeles Clippers have signed forward DaJuan Summers to a 10-day contract. |
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Kelly Dwyer, yahoo.com Former Los Angeles Lakers assistant coach Brian Shaw will probably be the first to tell you that he isn’t slumming while working as associate coach of the Indiana Pacers. The team is firmly established as the Eastern Conference’s Number Two, and he an… |
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Eric Freeman, yahoo.com New York Knicks shooter J.R. Smith can be an incredibly frustrating basketball player to watch, the sort of guy with enough talent to believe himself capable of things that no physics-bound human should attempt. On the other hand, that disregard for com… |
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Arash Markazi, ESPN.com Los Angeles Clippers forward Caron Butler practiced Friday for the first time since suffering a left elbow strain last week and hopes to start Sunday when the team plays the New York Knicks. |
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Andrew Greif, dimemag.com One stat in particular jumped out at us last night as we watched Portland’s detonation of the Carmelo Anthony-less Knicks: Since Jan. 1, the New York Knicks are 17-16, while the Wizards, formerly the embarrassment of the league, are 17-18. Knee injuries… |
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Jared Zwerling, ESPN.com Carmelo Anthony, who had a soft tissue fluid collection removed from the back of his right knee on Thursday, is expected to rejoin the New York Knicks in Los Angeles in preparation for their game against the Clippers on Sunday, according to the Knicks. |
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Kelly Dwyer, yahoo.com Contrary to the storyline we’re all assuming, the Los Angeles Lakers were playing pretty well when Pau Gasol went down with a plantar fascia tear. The team had won six of seven before he hit the shelf in the first week of February, improving its record … |
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Andrew Greif, dimemag.com Detroit Pistons rookie Andre Drummond has been hurt for four weeks with a stress fracture in his back, but while his trick shot over a wall of shoeboxes Thursday at Portland’s Oddball.com shoe warehouse isn’t part of his rehab, it’s still pretty awe… |
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Dan Devine, yahoo.com The last time most NBA fans saw or heard from Adrian Dantley, the legendary scoring forward and 2008 inductee into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame was crying foul over losing his job as an assistant coach with the Denver Nuggets because, h… |
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John Koblin, deadspin.com So, Jay Mariotti's no-seriously-I-have-a-girlfriend-in-Canada-I-met-her-at-summer-camp freelance project? Turned out to be real. ESPN allowed Mariotti to write more than 5,000 unforgivable words on Kobe and the Lakers. The important thing to remember ab… |
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Chris Forsberg, ESPN.com The Celtics are "not really impressed" with Miami's current winning streak. |
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Dan Devine, yahoo.com There's a yin-and-yang element to this, right? Ivan Johnson's explosion contrasted with Metta World Peace's faux placidity? The intense appreciation of winning compared to the roiling angst of losing a winnable game? Or am I just looking for connections… |
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Steve Mcpherson, nytimes.com The details of San Antonio Coach Gregg Popovich coaching strategies are secondary to how much his players believe in them. |
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Miami aiming to extend win streak to 21 in Milwaukee |
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There's a reason Miami has ripped off 20 wins in a row. Yet some teams have had a measure of success against the Heat. Is there a blueprint to stopping them? asks Rob Mahoney. |
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Dan Devine, yahoo.com The San Antonio Spurs won their 50th game in 66 tries during the 2012-13 season on Thursday night, topping the longtime rival Dallas Mavericks in a game that saw Tim Duncan continue his brilliant turn-back-the-clock season with a game-high 28 points on … |
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Paul Palladino, dimemag.com The NBA is notorious for having a small number of teams with realistic championship expectations. While nearly half of the NFL can claim to be in the running, the NBA normally only has a handful of true contenders. The Heat, Thunder and Spurs have all e… |
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Kobe Bryant may be back on the court sooner than anyone expected - perhaps in time for Friday night's game at Indiana. |
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Barry Petchesky, deadspin.com This is for all the basketbloggers out there: you will never need another box score again. Edd Morgan, a software developer in the UK, has created Box Score Replay. Try it out with last night's Mavs-Spurs game—by moving the slider at the top of the scre… |
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Dave McMenamin, ESPN.com Kobe Bryant, who is nursing a sprained ankle, will be a game-time decision when the Lakers play the Indiana Pacers on Friday. |
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Dave McKenna, deadspin.com Day after day, Adrian Dantley hangs out on a street corner in his hometown, like some cliché of a pitiful ex-ballplayer years after his athletic prime. But Dantley's neither a cliché, nor is he pitiful. He's a crossing guard. The greatest 6-foot-5 post … |
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Stuart Miller, nytimes.com The N.B.A. courts Latino fans with its Noche Latina promotions, but does calling its teams El Heat or Los Bulls appeal to Spanish speakers, or insult them? |
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Dan Devine, yahoo.com Through the first 21 minutes of Thursday night's late TNT game, the shorthanded New York Knicks — playing without their highest-priced player (Amar'e Stoudemire, out for the next six weeks following right knee debridement surgery), their leading scorer … |
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Sean Sweeney, dimemag.com The Knicks are walking around wounded right now, and fell again in Portland last night, being unable to back up their boy Raymond Felton‘s claims that he was going to kill the Blazers. But J.R. Smith did have one great highlight: this nasty, one-handed … |
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Dime Magazine, dimemag.com The season wasn’t even halfway done, and Kobe Bryant had still uttered enough to reporters to fill a top-10 list. Bryant is still going strong in 2012-13 as we get within a month of the playoffs. After a loss to Philadelphia dropped the Lakers to a disa… |
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Dan Devine, yahoo.com When you've got prime NBA real estate — in this case, a just-about-courtside seat right between TNT play-by-play man Kevin Harlan and color commentator Chris Webber for a nationally televised contest between the Portland Trail Blazers and New York Knick… |
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Dime Magazine, dimemag.com Casual fans outside of the West Coast might not know it but right next to Orlando and Dwight Howard stand Portland and Raymond Felton as cities who revile their former player. A quick recap: In Felton’s lone season as a Trail Blazer (a shortened one, at… |
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The answer, of course, is no, nothing else can go wrong with the Knicks. It’s just not possible. |
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Associated Press, ESPN.com Damian Lillard had 26 points and 10 assists to lead the Trail Blazers to a 105-90 victory over the Knicks on Thursday night, outplaying New York guard Raymond Felton in his return to Portland. |
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Blazers hand Knicks fourth loss in last five games |
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The New York Knicks say Carmelo Anthony had fluid drained from the back of his right knee and is questionable for their game Sunday in Los Angeles against the Clippers. |
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Early in Denver's game with Phoenix on March 11, as a deflection sent the ball into the hands of Denver's Andre Iguodala, his teammate Wilson Chandler... |
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In case you were busy trying to pass off a quiche as an acceptable offering at a Pi Day party, here's what you missed in sports on Thursday. Damian ... |
