The Silence of the Lakers

 Rumors  No Responses »
Dec 052012
 

Shhh. Hush, Lakers. Not a word. The more they talk lately, the less sincere and solutions-oriented they sound.

Their justifications for firing Mike Brown and hiring Mike D’Antoni aren’t holding up. Their insistence that the return of Steve Nash will solve their losing ways doesn’t fit their post-game assessments of what’s going wrong. In short, they are not a team of their words.

General manager Mitch Kupchak said that one of the reasons the Lakers opted for D’Antoni instead of Phil Jackson was because D’Antoni “plays the way we see this team playing and our personnel executing, the guys that we have on this team.

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Pau Gasol will sit for a while, as the Lakers decide to rest his aching knees (Ball Don’t Lie)

 LA Lakers  No Responses »
Dec 042012
 

The Los Angeles Lakers and Pau Gasol are visiting Houston this week, taking on a Rockets team that Gasol was nearly traded to 12 months ago, though Pau won’t be around to show the Rockets what might have been. The team is sitting their big man for an as-yet-unspecified period of time, citing knee tendinitis and opening the floodgates to all manner of trade rumors about the 32-year forward/center.
Those rumors are bunko, the Lakers aren’t doing anything until they see how a full and healthy roster featuring Steve Nash works out, but it does appear as if Gasol is going to have to take a back seat for a spell. ESPN’s Dave McMenamin was the first to break the news, and this is from his report :
“The biggest thing with him was that he was playing hurt and in this league you just can’t do that,” Lakers coach Mike D’Antoni said. “I just didn’t think he was running fluidly.”
D’Antoni said Gasol made the decision to rest after consulting with the coaching and training staff. There is no set timetable for how long Gasol will sit out. Antawn Jamison will start in his place.

Dwight Howard might be willing to leave Lakers in free agency this summer in pursuit of a championship (Ball Don’t Lie)

 Orlando  No Responses »
Dec 032012
 

After dropping a 113-103 contest on their home floor to the Orlando Magic on Sunday night, the Los Angeles Lakers now sit at 8-9, in third place in a Pacific Division they’ve topped for five straight seasons, and in the uncomfortable position of not knowing quite how to fix what ails them. Injured star point guard Steve Nash is reportedly still 10 to 14 days away from returning to the fold, the relative age and size of Pau Gasol’s pants is a matter of some debate, and Kobe Bryant is seemingly ready to start punching and kicking literally everyone, an approach to problem-solving that seems dubious, at best.
There’s still plenty of time, of course, for Mike D’Antoni’s crew to figure things out and for the Lakers to work themselves into the kind of inside-out/outside-in/everywhere-at-once offensive marvel that nobody wants to play come late spring; with the eventual reintegration of Nash into the lineup and better health and general comportment from (or, failing that, perhaps the trade of ) Gasol, it seems a more reasonable bet that the Lakers will end the season having won more than half their games than that they’ll finish up south of .500. Still, though, the Lakers went from a team that many ( including us ) expected to work as a no-doubt title favorite to a team whose championship chances — both now and going forward, considering the advancing ages of Bryant, Nash and Gasol — seem a bit shaky, to say the least.
This doesn’t sound quite like what Dwight Howard signed up for when — at the end of a long, messy and very public divorce with the Magic that he later attributed to wanting everybody to love him — he made his way west in search of fame, fortune and, above all else, titles. And Howard — who’s still set to hit free agency this summer — apparently intimated as much during a recent conversation with John Denton of the Magic’s official website (emphasis mine):

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The Phoenix Suns are offering money-back refunds to fans that aren’t entertained by an upcoming game (Ball Don’t Lie)

 Phoenix  No Responses »
Nov 302012
 

The surprising Phoenix Suns are sitting pretty — if pretty mediocre — at 7-9 right now. Not ideal, just two and a half years removed from being a few games away from the NBA Finals, but the team has piled up half as many wins in a month as some prognosticators picked them to win all year. More importantly, even after sending speedster rookie guard Kendall Marshall to the D-League on Thursday , the team remains entertaining to watch. That’s a remarkable achievement, considering the fact that the Suns were forced into dealing Steve Nash to Los Angeles last July.
Still, the team ranks amongst the middle of the NBA pack in terms of attendance; though it should be noted that this was the case even during the Nash era. Looking to make some waves, and earn some press in an otherwise anonymous season on the way toward the lottery, the team has instituted a strange and unenforceable gimmick for its Dec. 6 home game against the Dallas Mavericks.
Dwight Howard loses shooting contest to furry NHL mascot ]
You’ll be entertained, or you’re getting your money back. No word on how, exactly, the Suns will determine the level of entertainment in an era that routinely sends ‘The Big Bang Theory’ to the top of the Nielsen Ratings. From the team’s press release:
Win or lose, the Suns are guaranteeing that fans will enjoy their experience at US Airways Center. Those who aren’t completely satisfied can redeem their ticket stub for a rebate equal to the purchase price of their December 6 ticket, not to exceed the face value of the ticket.

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D’An: ‘I shouldn’t have gone to New York’

 New York  No Responses »
Nov 282012
 

Mike D’Antoni told ESPN Los Angeles’ Ramona Shelburne that he regrets leaving Phoenix for New York.

He wishes he would have stuck around in Phoenix — a team he led to two Conference Finals — and tried to win a title instead of bolting to coach the Knicks.

“I shouldn’t have gone to New York,” he told Shelburne.

“I should have stuck in there and battled. You don’t get to coach somebody like him [Steve Nash] too many times. It’s pretty sacred and you need to take care of it.

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Kobe Bryant’s hilarious new nickname for Steve Nash is ‘Gatsby’ (Ball Don’t Lie)

 LA Lakers  No Responses »
Nov 262012
 

The news of Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant’s new nickname for teammate Steve Nash has been bandied about the internet for a few days, but you’ll have to excuse us for the fact that (besides its inclusion in a link round-up ) we didn’t touch on it. There was turkey to eat, dishes to clean, sandwiches to make out of that turkey, then football to watch, then soup to make because we were sick of the turkey sandwiches. I still haven’t gotten to the soup dishes.
It’s still a marvelous turn of phrase, though. Probably because Nash’s new haircut prominently featuring a side-part, Kobe has taken to calling Steve “Gatsby.” We’ve taken to thinking that this is the best NBA nickname in years, as he references F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic ‘The Great Gatsby’ — a book that predates the NBA by a good 20 years.
From the Los Angeles Times , as Kobe discusses the work he has to put in with Nash, currently injured, on the sideline:
“I’m not working too hard, to be honest with you. The shots that I made were all jumpers. It doesn’t take much energy to knock those jumpers down,” he said. “Bringing the ball up and having me kind of initiate the offense and score and stuff like that, it’s making me work a little more than I will when Gatsby gets back.
“When Gatsby gets back, I don’t have to do that. The game’s going to become even more easy for me.”

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