Tuesday And-1 Links: Does Pete Carroll know something about Phil Jackson to Knicks?

Here is our regular look around the NBA — links to stories worth reading and notes to check out (stuff that did not get its own post here at PBT) — done in bullet point form. Because bloggers love bullet points more than Bobby Flay loves chili peppers....

• Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll tweeted this, and it makes you wonder what he heard:

Congrats to Phil Jackson on his new role with the Knicks! It's good to have him back in the NBA!

— Pete Carroll (@PeteCarroll) March 11, 2014

• While we are talking Phil Jackson to the Knicks, here is Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo Sports talking about it on the Dan Patrick Show.

• Paul Pierce and LeBron James lead a list of players that shoot better when contested than they do wide open (remember the Spurs in the Finals last year played off James and it sort of worked, up until Game 7).

• The story of the second half of the season was going to be tanking... except how do you wish to define tanking? And are that many teams really doing it? Howard Beck at Bleacher Report makes the case this is the latest wildly overblown epidemic.

As of Monday morning, three NBA teams had sub-.300 records, and 10 were below .400. If we’re measuring widespread futility, these figures are in no way extraordinary. Over the last 10 years, an average of 3.3 teams per season have finished below .300, including a high of six teams in 2010-11 and 2008-09. In that same 10-year stretch, an average of 7.7 teams have finished below .400, with a high of 10 in 2011-12 and 2009-10.

No doubt some teams are tanking and planned to be bad from the start — hello Philadelphia — however there are teams like the Bucks and Lakers that entered the season thinking playoffs and just turned out to be bad.

• Nerlens Noel went through 4-on-4 workouts at the Sixers practice and looked pretty good doing it.

• It will never happen because of money, but here is a call to shorten the NBA regular season. If the NBA wants the regular season more, 60 games starting Christmas day would work for me, but again never going to happen.

• Portland fans thought Jeremy Lin should have got a five second call on the inbounds that led to James Harden’s game-tying three Sunday night.

• Dennis Rodman says he is not going back to North Korea.

• If you haven’t seen Zach Galifianakis “interviewing” President Barack Obama it’s a must watch and pretty damn funny. As for basketball, well, Zach asks the president about “ambassador Rodman.”

• Check out this Denver Nuggets video, it’s pretty awesome.

• Kevin Love is now part of the endorsement team for BODYARMOR SuperDrink, and while he’s at it he has an equity stake in the company.

• Watch Claude Giroux and Wayne Simmonds of the Philadelphia Flyers play some hoops against the Harlem Globetrotters.