Exactly 21 years ago today, Vinnie Johnson made history, sealing Detroit's second consecutive NBA title. NY Times, June 15, 1990: ''After Isiah passed the ball to me, I looked up at one point and saw four seconds left on the clock,'' Johnson said. ''I let two seconds go by, then gave Kersey a head fake. He had to honor it, because there wasn't that much time left. I took one dribble to my left and let it go. There was a lot of pressure. No way I'm going to say I knew that it was going in. But it was just beautiful to see it go in.''
"I'm leaning more towards coming back," [Ben] Wallace said. "It's just a matter of getting myself healthy and getting ready to play."
Associated Press (hat-tip to PP)"Dwane Casey, the defensive architect behind the Mavericks' championship shutdown of the Heat's Big Three, is high on the Pistons' list of head coaching candidates, league sources told CBSSports.com Monday. The Pistons, who already have reached out to former Hawks coach Mike Woodson and received permission to interview Bucks assistant Kelvin Sampson, Celtics assistant Lawrence Frank, and Timberwolves assistant Bill Laimbeer, will reach out to Mavs general manager Donnie Nelson Tuesday with a request to interview Casey." -Ken Berger, CBS Sports
on a list of the most effective NCAA point guards. He ranks above Darius Morris and Demetri McCarney, and Isaiah Thomas in assists/possession... and pretty good in points/possession. If you like stats, you should like Julyan Stone... he'd be a good last pick for us... could be an unpolished gem. and he's 6'7
From NBA.com: Pistons will try to re-sign Tayshaun Prince, but it's not just up to them, and if Prince wants to walk Detroit will need a three to replace him. (Just a thought: doesn't a sign-and-trade between the Pistons and Clippers, with Compton-born Prince going home to L.A. and Grand Rapids-born Chris Kaman going to Detroit make too much sense not to happen? The Clips desperately need a veteran presence in their locker room, as well as a three, and the Pistons could use a center that would allow them to move emerging Greg Monroe to power forward. Trade for Kaman, take Leonard at eight and, voila! A frontcourt is born.) So, to sum up: Phase One: Trade for Kaman, draft Leonard. Phase Two: ? Phase Three: Profit!
Bilbao Basket isn't something you find in the Shire, it's a finalist in the Spanish basketball league. Aaron Jackson is their PG and he looks like he could start for half the NBA in this video. The other team's PG is Ricky Rubio. Unlike Rubio, Jackson is a FA.
Maybe they're upset he's going to be coughing all over the trophy?
MIAMI—Broadcasters covering the NBA finals for Spanish-speaking fans from different parts of the world do it from a Tower of Babel where a dunk is not a dunk, but the play-by-play guys disagree about just what to call it. As the Miami Heat and Dallas Mavericks vie on the basketball court for the championship title, two of their broadcasters are duking it out with each other. "Some say donquear. That'd be Spanglish," says José Pañeda, the announcer calling the play on Miami's WQBA-AM radio. But donquear doesn't work in Argentina, where dunk is volcada, he says. In Spain, it's mate, which literally means "the kill," as when a matador administers the lethal thrust in a bullfight. None of those terms work for Victor Villalba, radio KFLC's Latino basketball jock, who is handling the finals this week for the Dallas Mavericks. Spanglish, a mixture of Spanish and English, makes his Texas audience uneasy, says the 51-year-old broadcaster. So for the word dunk, he prefers clavada, which comes from clavo, the noun for "nail." Messrs. Pañeda and Villalba are just two of the broadcasters who are confronting the vagaries of Basketball Spanish for an immigrant audience increasingly interested in the game. Basketball in English is already tricky, full of arcane terms like "cross-over dribble," "tomahawk dunk" and "alley oop pass." In Spanish, the challenge is magnified because listeners to Spanish broadcasts hail from or live on three different continents where language and dialects vary. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304906004576369841345801116.html