The Miami Heat win 23 consecutive games and are chasing the LA Lakers' record winning streak; Kobe Bryant has been sidelined; the New York Knicks are walking wounded
We have officially entered that period every year that the NBA is overshadowed by its college counterpart. The question remains will the Miami Heat still be unbeaten when the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament comes to an end? Maybe David Stern could steal a page from the NCAA and turn the NBA Playoffs into a single-game elimination format just to make it fair to everyone else?
*The Miami Heat have won 23 straight games*
The Miami Heat stepped into an always hostile TD Garden with a 22 game win streak, tied for second best all time, facing a Boston Celtics team having a comparatively nondescript 12 game winning streak at home. Despite LeBron James essentially becoming invincible in the past month and a half, the Celtics, even without Kevin Garnett, were not going to make it easy.
It really did seem like the Celtics could somehow square the circle and defeat the Heat, they were up by as many as 17 points in the game, but there are no safe leads against LeBron. Despite their best efforts, including a career-high 43 points from Jeff Green and an absolutely insane Avery "Still My Guy" Bradley block on Norris Cole, the Heat's comeback seemed almost inevitable. Sure enough, thanks in part to 20 Boston turnovers, the Heat clawed their way back into the game. The game was tied at 103-103 with ten seconds left when James untied it. LeBron James won the game, extended the Heat's winning streak to 23 games and, oh yeah, along the way turned Jason Terry into Brandon Knight 2.0 with the Dunk of the Week:
Now that the Heat are in sole possession of the second longest consecutive game winning streak in NBA history, they have the NBA record of 33 straight wins in their sights. Can the Miami Heat rival the run of the 1971-72 Los Angeles Lakers and win ten more games? Can they beat them and win eleven more?
The scary thing is that the Heat are going on this run while many of their competitors in the East are struggling. Before the season began, many believed that only injuries would prevent the Miami Heat from repeating as Eastern Conference champs, instead it's been Miami's would-be challengers who have had the bad luck health-wise. The Celtics will not have Rajon Rondo in the playoffs, and have to rely on aging veterans Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett. The Chicago Bulls have no idea if Derrick Rose will even return this season, and he won't be 100% if he does. The New York Knicks? The Knicks required their own separate sub-section this week (see below) just to go over their injury report.
It's getting so tough in the Eastern Conference, that Celtics head coach Doc Rivers didn't even sound too crushed after their loss to Miami. "Overall, besides not winning the game, we passed the test," Rivers said before adding, "but losing the game is what you'll remember". At this point, moral victories against LeBron James might be all that opposing teams can hope to get. Of course, unless they change the rules so those actually count in the standings, the Miami Heat might in fact be unbeatable.
*Dahntay Jones attempted to eliminate Kobe Bryant*
A turbulent season for the Los Angeles Lakers took a literally painful turn on Wednesday night when star guard Kobe Bryant sprained his ankle on a controversial play involving the Atlanta Hawks' Dahntay Jones. After the injury, the team announced that Bryant was "out indefinitely". Considering that the Lakers are making one last desperate run at making the playoffs as the eighth seed in the Western Conference, and Bryant has been the team's only consistently great player all season, this announcement sounded dangerously close to a death sentence on the season.
The following day all hell broke lose. Kobe Bryant insisted that Jones was intentionally trying to injure him, leading to upset Lakers fans asking that the league do everything short of charging Jones with aggravated assault. The NBA responded by taking to an official Twitter account to admit that, at the very least, the officials should have called a foul on Jones' play that took out Bryant. As one could imagine this late admission placated absolutely no one and probably only served to make the situation worse. Even rapper/actor Ice Cube got into the discussion.
The "Dahntay Jones must pay" talk died down a bit when the "indefinitely out" Bryant actually attempted to play two days later, but even basketball's toughest competitor could only manage 12 minutes in the Lakers' Friday night win over the Indiana Pacers. True to form, Bryant still made his presence felt, acting as something of a player-coach from the Lakers' bench. Kobe wasn't even needed as that for Sunday's win over the Sacramento Kings, presumably he left behind a post-it on an otherwise empty clipboard saying "key to victory: play the Sacramento Kings".
Despite Kobe sitting out Monday night's loss against the Suns, it doesn't look like Bryant's injury will be the effective end of the Lakers' season. The team is playing fairly well at the same time that the Utah Jazz, the Lakers' main competition for the eighth seed in the West, have looked uninspired. The question now is how the Lakers will balance Kobe's health with their need to win as many games as possible in order to clinch a playoff spot. Lakers head coach Mike D'Antoni, clearly angling for a nomination for "Most Self-Evident Quote Of The Season" award, summed up his team's dilemma:
"If we can win, it's a silver lining because he rests and gets his body in shape, but if we don't win, then it's not very good. So it's a double-edged sword".
*Andrew Bynum is done for the year*
It's officially no longer too early to declare the Philadelphia 76ers' trade for Andrew Bynum a bust. On Monday, the team announced that Bynum would be going through season-ending surgery on both knees. The 76ers, who seem to be out of the playoff picture in the Eastern Conference, now have a lot of time to wonder where they are going from here.
The 76ers were one game away from the Eastern Conference Finals last year, so they could be forgiven for thinking they were one piece away from being serious contenders. They jumped into the Dwight Howard four team mega-deal over the summer, surrendering Andre Iguodala to the Denver Nuggets while getting back Bynum from the Los Angeles Lakers. The deal was risky at the time, many thought Iguodala was too good of a player to sacrifice for the talented young center, who had just had one of his most promising seasons but still carried with him significant health risks. Few predicted that the trade would backfire this badly for Philadelphia.
The thing is, if healthy, Bynum can be one of the few dominant centers out there, a type of player close to extinction in the modern NBA. The 76ers gave up a lot to acquire Bynum despite the fact that he was in the last year of his contract, with the idea of signing him to an extension during the course of the year. The 76ers now have a conundrum: Do they let Bynum walk away as a free agent and try to sell their fans that one year after the big trade they essentially gave away their best player for nothing, or do they attempt to re-sign Bynum despite having absolutely no idea when Bynum will be healthy enough to play or even what a healthy Bynum could bring to their team? Does Bynum even want to return to Philadelphia after this disaster of the season? Will his new contract forbid him from bowling ever again?
It's funny that the Bynum news happened on the same day that Jeff Green had his career night against the Miami Heat. The Boston Celtics were in a similar situation last offseason with Green. After a controversial trade where the Celtics acquired the promising young player from the Oklahoma City Thunder for center Kendrick Perkins, Green ended up having surgery that sidelined him for the final year of his contract. Despite not knowing what they had with Green, the Celtics eventually signed Green to a 4-year $36 million year contract, a massive overpayment that many believe GM Danny Ainge was forced into to make the Perkins trade seem less like of a PR disaster. Sound familiar Philly?
*If you are a New York Knick you are probably hurt*
Kenyon Martin. Kurt Thomas. Iman Shumpert. Chris Copeland. Raymond Felton.
Those were the starting five players in the New York Knicks 105-90 loss to the Portland Trail Blazers on March 14th, not exactly the starting lineup of a typical playoff bound team. The Knicks, in fact, look nothing like the team they were earlier in the year when they were establishing themselves as a postseason threat. New York is without Amar'e Stoudemire for the next six weeks and is hesitant to play team MVP Carmelo Anthony, who is ominously claiming that his knee will never be 100%. Last season's Defensive Player of the Year Tyson Chandler is still at least a week away from returning, suffering from a bulging disc in his spine in case you're keeping track. Rasheed Wallace, who has a broken foot, won't be back until the second round of the playoffs at the earliest, that is if the Knicks are healthy enough to even make it that far.
The good news is that Knicks fans won't have to worry about seeing the shaky lineup they put out against the Trail Blazers again. The bad news is that it's because Kurt Thomas will be out for 2-4 weeks with a stress fracture in his right foot. By the time Thomas is back, don't be surprised if New York is shutting down Felton or Shumpert, both of whom had injury problems this season, either for "precautionary reasons" or for good.
After such a strong beginning, age and injuries may be exposing this New York Knicks team as, well, a New York Knicks team. They are literally limping into the postseason. Some of this is just bad luck and bad timing, of course, but plenty of it speaks against how the Knicks constructed this roster. The Knicks began the season with a lot of older players and injury risks, so it's not entirely shocking that hurt players are unable to get back on the court as the grueling NBA season reaches its final stretch. Kurt Thomas, after all, is literally the oldest active player in the NBA. The Knicks probably should avoid cursing fate and instead just marvel at the fact that, despite all of their troubles, Jason "Not That Much Younger Than Kurt" Kidd is not only still moving around, but also learning new basketball tricks.
*Other things we've learned*
• The Denver Nuggets have picked the worst possible time to have their first 13 game winning game streak, at least in terms of media attention.
• Mark Cuban is starting to take the "just a fan like you" schtick to brand new levels. Cuban, the maverick Mavericks owner, let veteran guard Derek Fisher out of his contract to spend more time with his family, only to watch Fisher come out of this "retirement" to join the playoff-bound Oklahoma City Thunder. It's understandable that Cuban is upset, but he took it too far when, speaking before Fisher's awkward Texas return, Cuban proudly admitted "I'll boo him like hopefully everybody else". It's starting to feel like when Cuban says he's a fan like you, he's essentially calling "you" an "entitled, unlikable jerk".
• "It's got to be the shoes?""No Marc." This defensive play by the Memphis Grizzlies' Marc Gasol is officially the best use of a prop in basketball since the heyday of the Harlem Globetrotters.
• There's probably someone I'd take before the Milwaukee Bucks' Monta Ellis if I needed some major offense in the fourth quarter, but after this performance in a comeback victory over the Orlando Magic, I can't think of who that would be.
• Deadspin asks "Why Is One Of The NBA's All-Time Greatest Scorers Working As A Crossing Guard Now?" and the answer may not be what you automatically assume it is.
• *Game Winner That Wasn't Of The Week*: We're going to have to give this one to Joakim Noah of the Chicago Bulls, whose apparent game-winning tip-in against the Denver Nuggets in overtime was wiped away by a goaltending call that handed the win to Denver.
• And finally, best wishes to the Atlanta Hawks cheerleader only identified as Kristen for privacy reasons, who slipped during a routine and was taken off the court in a stretcher during Monday night's game against the Dallas Mavericks. According to reports, she was released from Atlanta Medical Center later that night. Reported by guardian.co.uk 1 day ago.
We have officially entered that period every year that the NBA is overshadowed by its college counterpart. The question remains will the Miami Heat still be unbeaten when the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament comes to an end? Maybe David Stern could steal a page from the NCAA and turn the NBA Playoffs into a single-game elimination format just to make it fair to everyone else?
*The Miami Heat have won 23 straight games*
The Miami Heat stepped into an always hostile TD Garden with a 22 game win streak, tied for second best all time, facing a Boston Celtics team having a comparatively nondescript 12 game winning streak at home. Despite LeBron James essentially becoming invincible in the past month and a half, the Celtics, even without Kevin Garnett, were not going to make it easy.
It really did seem like the Celtics could somehow square the circle and defeat the Heat, they were up by as many as 17 points in the game, but there are no safe leads against LeBron. Despite their best efforts, including a career-high 43 points from Jeff Green and an absolutely insane Avery "Still My Guy" Bradley block on Norris Cole, the Heat's comeback seemed almost inevitable. Sure enough, thanks in part to 20 Boston turnovers, the Heat clawed their way back into the game. The game was tied at 103-103 with ten seconds left when James untied it. LeBron James won the game, extended the Heat's winning streak to 23 games and, oh yeah, along the way turned Jason Terry into Brandon Knight 2.0 with the Dunk of the Week:
Now that the Heat are in sole possession of the second longest consecutive game winning streak in NBA history, they have the NBA record of 33 straight wins in their sights. Can the Miami Heat rival the run of the 1971-72 Los Angeles Lakers and win ten more games? Can they beat them and win eleven more?
The scary thing is that the Heat are going on this run while many of their competitors in the East are struggling. Before the season began, many believed that only injuries would prevent the Miami Heat from repeating as Eastern Conference champs, instead it's been Miami's would-be challengers who have had the bad luck health-wise. The Celtics will not have Rajon Rondo in the playoffs, and have to rely on aging veterans Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett. The Chicago Bulls have no idea if Derrick Rose will even return this season, and he won't be 100% if he does. The New York Knicks? The Knicks required their own separate sub-section this week (see below) just to go over their injury report.
It's getting so tough in the Eastern Conference, that Celtics head coach Doc Rivers didn't even sound too crushed after their loss to Miami. "Overall, besides not winning the game, we passed the test," Rivers said before adding, "but losing the game is what you'll remember". At this point, moral victories against LeBron James might be all that opposing teams can hope to get. Of course, unless they change the rules so those actually count in the standings, the Miami Heat might in fact be unbeatable.
*Dahntay Jones attempted to eliminate Kobe Bryant*
A turbulent season for the Los Angeles Lakers took a literally painful turn on Wednesday night when star guard Kobe Bryant sprained his ankle on a controversial play involving the Atlanta Hawks' Dahntay Jones. After the injury, the team announced that Bryant was "out indefinitely". Considering that the Lakers are making one last desperate run at making the playoffs as the eighth seed in the Western Conference, and Bryant has been the team's only consistently great player all season, this announcement sounded dangerously close to a death sentence on the season.
The following day all hell broke lose. Kobe Bryant insisted that Jones was intentionally trying to injure him, leading to upset Lakers fans asking that the league do everything short of charging Jones with aggravated assault. The NBA responded by taking to an official Twitter account to admit that, at the very least, the officials should have called a foul on Jones' play that took out Bryant. As one could imagine this late admission placated absolutely no one and probably only served to make the situation worse. Even rapper/actor Ice Cube got into the discussion.
The "Dahntay Jones must pay" talk died down a bit when the "indefinitely out" Bryant actually attempted to play two days later, but even basketball's toughest competitor could only manage 12 minutes in the Lakers' Friday night win over the Indiana Pacers. True to form, Bryant still made his presence felt, acting as something of a player-coach from the Lakers' bench. Kobe wasn't even needed as that for Sunday's win over the Sacramento Kings, presumably he left behind a post-it on an otherwise empty clipboard saying "key to victory: play the Sacramento Kings".
Despite Kobe sitting out Monday night's loss against the Suns, it doesn't look like Bryant's injury will be the effective end of the Lakers' season. The team is playing fairly well at the same time that the Utah Jazz, the Lakers' main competition for the eighth seed in the West, have looked uninspired. The question now is how the Lakers will balance Kobe's health with their need to win as many games as possible in order to clinch a playoff spot. Lakers head coach Mike D'Antoni, clearly angling for a nomination for "Most Self-Evident Quote Of The Season" award, summed up his team's dilemma:
"If we can win, it's a silver lining because he rests and gets his body in shape, but if we don't win, then it's not very good. So it's a double-edged sword".
*Andrew Bynum is done for the year*
It's officially no longer too early to declare the Philadelphia 76ers' trade for Andrew Bynum a bust. On Monday, the team announced that Bynum would be going through season-ending surgery on both knees. The 76ers, who seem to be out of the playoff picture in the Eastern Conference, now have a lot of time to wonder where they are going from here.
The 76ers were one game away from the Eastern Conference Finals last year, so they could be forgiven for thinking they were one piece away from being serious contenders. They jumped into the Dwight Howard four team mega-deal over the summer, surrendering Andre Iguodala to the Denver Nuggets while getting back Bynum from the Los Angeles Lakers. The deal was risky at the time, many thought Iguodala was too good of a player to sacrifice for the talented young center, who had just had one of his most promising seasons but still carried with him significant health risks. Few predicted that the trade would backfire this badly for Philadelphia.
The thing is, if healthy, Bynum can be one of the few dominant centers out there, a type of player close to extinction in the modern NBA. The 76ers gave up a lot to acquire Bynum despite the fact that he was in the last year of his contract, with the idea of signing him to an extension during the course of the year. The 76ers now have a conundrum: Do they let Bynum walk away as a free agent and try to sell their fans that one year after the big trade they essentially gave away their best player for nothing, or do they attempt to re-sign Bynum despite having absolutely no idea when Bynum will be healthy enough to play or even what a healthy Bynum could bring to their team? Does Bynum even want to return to Philadelphia after this disaster of the season? Will his new contract forbid him from bowling ever again?
It's funny that the Bynum news happened on the same day that Jeff Green had his career night against the Miami Heat. The Boston Celtics were in a similar situation last offseason with Green. After a controversial trade where the Celtics acquired the promising young player from the Oklahoma City Thunder for center Kendrick Perkins, Green ended up having surgery that sidelined him for the final year of his contract. Despite not knowing what they had with Green, the Celtics eventually signed Green to a 4-year $36 million year contract, a massive overpayment that many believe GM Danny Ainge was forced into to make the Perkins trade seem less like of a PR disaster. Sound familiar Philly?
*If you are a New York Knick you are probably hurt*
Kenyon Martin. Kurt Thomas. Iman Shumpert. Chris Copeland. Raymond Felton.
Those were the starting five players in the New York Knicks 105-90 loss to the Portland Trail Blazers on March 14th, not exactly the starting lineup of a typical playoff bound team. The Knicks, in fact, look nothing like the team they were earlier in the year when they were establishing themselves as a postseason threat. New York is without Amar'e Stoudemire for the next six weeks and is hesitant to play team MVP Carmelo Anthony, who is ominously claiming that his knee will never be 100%. Last season's Defensive Player of the Year Tyson Chandler is still at least a week away from returning, suffering from a bulging disc in his spine in case you're keeping track. Rasheed Wallace, who has a broken foot, won't be back until the second round of the playoffs at the earliest, that is if the Knicks are healthy enough to even make it that far.
The good news is that Knicks fans won't have to worry about seeing the shaky lineup they put out against the Trail Blazers again. The bad news is that it's because Kurt Thomas will be out for 2-4 weeks with a stress fracture in his right foot. By the time Thomas is back, don't be surprised if New York is shutting down Felton or Shumpert, both of whom had injury problems this season, either for "precautionary reasons" or for good.
After such a strong beginning, age and injuries may be exposing this New York Knicks team as, well, a New York Knicks team. They are literally limping into the postseason. Some of this is just bad luck and bad timing, of course, but plenty of it speaks against how the Knicks constructed this roster. The Knicks began the season with a lot of older players and injury risks, so it's not entirely shocking that hurt players are unable to get back on the court as the grueling NBA season reaches its final stretch. Kurt Thomas, after all, is literally the oldest active player in the NBA. The Knicks probably should avoid cursing fate and instead just marvel at the fact that, despite all of their troubles, Jason "Not That Much Younger Than Kurt" Kidd is not only still moving around, but also learning new basketball tricks.
*Other things we've learned*
• The Denver Nuggets have picked the worst possible time to have their first 13 game winning game streak, at least in terms of media attention.
• Mark Cuban is starting to take the "just a fan like you" schtick to brand new levels. Cuban, the maverick Mavericks owner, let veteran guard Derek Fisher out of his contract to spend more time with his family, only to watch Fisher come out of this "retirement" to join the playoff-bound Oklahoma City Thunder. It's understandable that Cuban is upset, but he took it too far when, speaking before Fisher's awkward Texas return, Cuban proudly admitted "I'll boo him like hopefully everybody else". It's starting to feel like when Cuban says he's a fan like you, he's essentially calling "you" an "entitled, unlikable jerk".
• "It's got to be the shoes?""No Marc." This defensive play by the Memphis Grizzlies' Marc Gasol is officially the best use of a prop in basketball since the heyday of the Harlem Globetrotters.
• There's probably someone I'd take before the Milwaukee Bucks' Monta Ellis if I needed some major offense in the fourth quarter, but after this performance in a comeback victory over the Orlando Magic, I can't think of who that would be.
• Deadspin asks "Why Is One Of The NBA's All-Time Greatest Scorers Working As A Crossing Guard Now?" and the answer may not be what you automatically assume it is.
• *Game Winner That Wasn't Of The Week*: We're going to have to give this one to Joakim Noah of the Chicago Bulls, whose apparent game-winning tip-in against the Denver Nuggets in overtime was wiped away by a goaltending call that handed the win to Denver.
• And finally, best wishes to the Atlanta Hawks cheerleader only identified as Kristen for privacy reasons, who slipped during a routine and was taken off the court in a stretcher during Monday night's game against the Dallas Mavericks. According to reports, she was released from Atlanta Medical Center later that night. Reported by guardian.co.uk 1 day ago.