Deron Williams, in his decision to suit up for the Turkish club Besiktas next season should the lockout continue, has officially opened the door for other locked out NBAers to seek employment elsewhere.
With the NBA a bit short on Dwight Howards these days, the prototype for an effective center has shifted to a slightly more attainable model: Tyson Chandler.
The Dallas Mavericks took a 3-2 series lead on Thursday night with a 112-103 win, but their tremendous offense -- the propulsive force that allowed them to pull within a single victory of taking the NBA title -- was immediately tagged as an outlier, and saddled with all of the negative stigma that statistical improbabilities tend to attract.
From where we sit now, it’s so easy to look back at the dissipation of Miami’s 15-point fourth-quarter lead and point incredulously at what went wrong.
As the Dallas Mavericks are doused with the effusive praise that comes with being a conference champion, let’s not forget that their incredible accomplishments have come despite their two X-factors watching in suits from the sideline.
Somehow, it only took the Dallas Mavericks four games to prove wrong just about every prediction and every presupposition that existed going into their series against the Los Angeles Lakers.
The Atlanta Hawks managed to bother Derrick Rose in the first two games of this series by using their bigs to clog the middle of the floor on Chicago’s screen-and-rolls, but Rose seemed to have an epiphany of sorts in Game 3; rather than play conservatively in an attempt to exploit the Atlanta defense with a perfect pass to the open man through the stilted defense, Rose attacked that floating coverage and forced the Hawks to convert deterrence into actual defense.
If Game 1 between the Chicago Bulls and Atlanta Hawks was an aberration -- after all, the Hawks converted tough jumpers at an extremely high rate, and rode the high of those makes into a well-executed defense and an improbable victory -- then Game 2 was oddly typical.
In their Game 1 victory, the Atlanta Hawks pulled off a hell of a trick: not only did they completely negate one of the Chicago Bulls’ greatest advantages, but they did so in a way that flew completely under the radar.
The NBA playoffs are a basketball fan’s dream; there are anywhere between two and four competitive basketball games on every night, each with their own allure, their own stars, and their own evolving narrative.
