My Sports News Digest

NBA (Helin) – We keep talking about the teams talking playoffs – who gets home court, Boston or Atlanta, or can Phoenix catch Utah and get the last spot in the West – but there is a tight race among teams who have long forgotten about the playoffs. A lot of lottery odds are still to be decided this week as teams are bunched up near the bottom. A lot of team’s chances of landing Anthony Davis or taking a risk on Andre Drummond ride on this week. Make no mistake, the Bobcats will clear and away have the best [...]

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LOS ANGELES (NBA/Moore) – The Los Angeles Lakers defeated the Oklahoma City Thunder Sunday, 112-106. In five years, that’s all that will remain from this game, in searched box scores. Those are the facts. But what happened is such a bigger story. I’ve been sitting here struggling to find a way to accurately portray this game. Can you deny that the Lakers played a fantastic round of basketball down the stretch, with Kobe Bryant putting in a virtuoso performance even for him? You can’t. Can you ignore the fact that the Lakers not only took out the Thunder’s third best [...]

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NEW YORK (NBA/Helin) – This is getting ugly. First NBA players’ union president Derek Fisher convinced the executive committee of the union to do a full-scale audit of the union and its business. Then union executive director Billy Hunter convinced the executive committee to both kill that audit and ask Fisher to resign. He refused. They asked again. Then Fisher released this statement on Friday night. We take it from Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo. “I along with many others are extremely disappointed with the executive committee,” Fisher wrote in an email distributed by his publicist Friday night. “Their demand for [...]

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Los Angeles, CA (Helin) – Normally, this kind of game – the two seed Spurs vs. the three seed Lakers – is the kind of contest where we try to gain clues about what would happen if they meant in the second round of the playoffs. But this time, the game may be hard to read. For one, Kobe Bryant is likely to miss another game, tweets Mike Bresnahan of the Los Angeles Times. Kobe Bryant did some light shooting today but isn’t expected to play tomorrow vs. San Antonio. It would be his 6th game missed (sore shin). On [...]

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LOS ANGELES (HELIN/NBA) – Ramon Sessions will tell anyone who will listen he is enjoying his time as a Laker – he has come in and provided some quickness and playmaking at the point guard the team desperately needed under new coach Mike Brown. He said he really wants to return to the Lakers next season. Just not enough to pick up his player option for next year. Rather, he is likely to opt-out and become a free agent so he can get paid. But he told the Los Angeles Times he’d like to get paid by the Lakers ideally. [...]

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MIAMI (NBA/Helin) – Everyone will want to watch the Bulls and the Heat and discuss how this is a preview of the Eastern Conference finals. It’s not. Oh, these are the two teams that will be there, you can bet on that. But after two rounds of the playoffs teams change and evolve – the Bulls and Heat that take the floor Thursday night will be different than the ones that could face off about a month from now as the last two standing in the East. Especially if Derrick Rose and Luol Deng don’t play Thursday. They are both [...]

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OKLAHOMA CITY (NBA/Pollakoff) – Before the Suns faced the Thunder on Wednesday, Alvin Gentry had some high praise for Oklahoma City’s James Harden. Phoenix’s head coach said that he and his staff were talking about Harden in preparing for this matchup, and once they got past Kobe Bryant and Dwyane Wade, they were hard-pressed to name a two-guard in the entire league who has played as well as Harden has this season. Maybe it was a premonition, or maybe it was simply observation, based on the way Harden torched the Suns for what was, at the time, a career-high of [...]

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LEXINGTON, KY (RIVALS/CBB) Kentucky’s starting lineup of three freshmen and two sophomores did most everything together. Now, they will go their separate ways in the NBA. Freshmen Anthony Davis, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist and Marquis Teague, and sophomores Terrence Jones and Doron Lamb declared for the draft in a nationally televised news conference Tuesday night. “We made it work,” Jones said. “We all wanted to be there and do it together like we’ve done everything else together.” The group, all clad in similar blue UK golf shirts, came into the season largely untested before ascending to No. 1, winning the Southeastern Conference [...]

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