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A remarkable thing has been happening in New York's Madison Square Garden the past few days: Jeremy Lin, a charming 23-year-old with an economics degree from Harvard College, has somehow become the city's ultimate underdog and talisman. More »
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Here's a messed up story and proof that those steak heads you went to high school with never, ever change. From a tipster who wishes to remain anonymous, a youth basketball league in California is about to kick off its playoff season next week and sent out a friendly reminder to coaches notifying them of the rules going forward. In part and [sic]'d: More »
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Donovan McNabb: always keeping in shape. More »
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If you were going to pattern your club after an NBA team, it'd have to be the Wiz, right, right? Al Kuwait, which plays in, yes, Kuwait, is getting some press after photos of their jerseys made the rounds. It's nearly identical to the Wizards' new jerseys, right down to the red white and blue representing our nation's capital, and also not the Kuwaiti flag. [NBC Washington] More »
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This has apparently been making the rounds (to the point where the local news did a story on the "viral video"), but it's new to us, and it's fantastic. It shows a high school game from Washington State, and a series of (uncalled) flagrant fouls at the hands of two Connell High School players who are straight wrecking shit. More »
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The following is an abridged preview of an abridged NBA season, culled from the team chapters of the ever-incisive Pro Basketball Prospectus. Buy the book as a PDF for $9.98. More »
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Dennis Rodman and a few other bloated NBA retirees played a basketball game in Macau yesterday—tagline: Relive the glory days of basketball—but only Rodman played in full, Cirque du Soleil-style face paint. Consider this your bimonthly reminder that Dennis Rodman is still bleeping insane, and that even former NBA players resort to heaving threes in old age. More »
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Kim Jong Il is dead. In 2009, we met his youngest son and presumptive heir, Kim Jong Un—a basketball fan, it turns out. Originally published July 16, 2009. More »
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Look at that poster. Just look at it! Those were the players you'd play against in NBA Jam, but never choose for your own team. More »
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Let's cleanse the palate a bit after all that high school basketball ugliness from earlier today. Here is the game as it should be. Down one with 11 seconds left. The poise, the confidence and the shot. The exhilaration of victory. The agony of defeat. And some lady, taking Fran Drescher's voice and having her way with it. More »
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This thing's going to be all the rage at Lollapalooza 2032. [BarackObama.com, H/T @sports_follow] More »
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The Philippines is a nation crazy about basketball. Sick of always losing to China in the FIBA Asia Championships, which act as qualifiers for the Olympics and World Championships, the country has taken advantage of some lax laws on citizenship to stock their team with talent from around the world. It doesn't matter if you have Filipino bloodlines, only that you're willing to play. More »
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"Towards the end of a closely fought exhibition game, the CBA's Foshan Dralions got into a bench-clearing brawl last night with Australia's Melbourne Tigers, after a player from the Aussie team (in maroon) gave a tentative love-tap to a Foshan player (in white)." [Shanghaiist] (The action starts at 0:35 and ends around 1:05). More »
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Midway through an early season Hornets-Heat contest the screen cuts to a promotion telling me Friday night, Kobe Bryant and the Lakers take on the Denver Nuggets at Staples Center. Sounds like a good game, I think to myself. What time is that on? 7:30 p.m., the screen tells me. More »
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Roster update. In sports video games, it's not a selling point as much as it is a term of abuse, one that implies that accurate rosters in annual titles have almost no value to a discerning video gamer. Well, in a couple of weeks, we may find out how important this baseline expectation really is. More »
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Three of the country's best high school players traveled to Italy for the FIBA 3x3 Youth World Championships. Just 90 seconds in their semifinal game, Rebecca Greenwell went down with a knee injury. It fell to Linnae Harper and Kaela Davis to play 2-on-3, and the pair did their best, going all the way to overtime before falling to host Italy. Unable to field a team, the US forfeited their third-place game, but were awarded honorary bronze medals by FIBA. More »
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Sometimes we get a tip in the ol' inbox here that speaks to us for personal reasons. Early this morning, one came in about Will Thomas, a 12-year-old seventh-grader in McLean, Virginia, who decided to spend his Labor Day weekend shooting baskets to raise money for the families of the 17 Navy SEALs killed in a helicopter crash last month in Afghanistan. Thomas shot baskets for 50 hours, made 20,317 of them and raised over $34,000. Impressive stuff. More »
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Edgar Sosa, a former Louisville guard who's now playing for John Calipari's Dominican Republic team in the FIBA Americas Championship, broke his leg after going up for a shot in a game against Panama today. There's video here of the break itself and a look at the totally unnatural state of Sosa's shin, but be forewarned: This is one of those injuries that will make you want to stop watching sports for a spell. More »
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2K Sports attempted to include basketball great Charles Barkley in NBA 2K12's "NBA's Greatest" mode, showcasing dozens of superstars spanning the game's history, but the two sides were unable to reach an agreement bringing the hall-of-famer to the video game. He will not appear in NBA 2K12. More »
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Lots of young white men have been dunking basketballs in northern Vermont this summer. In about a decade of watching and playing a lot of high school basketball in the Green Mountain State, I saw a total of four successful dunks in live game play. One of those, I remember, came in the 2002 boys' state finals between my high school, Brattleboro, and a northern rival, Spaulding. It was late in a close game at the University of Vermont's Patrick Gymnasium—filled to capacity with about 3,300 people—when a Spaulding player took off on a fast break and threw down a two handed jam. We, the Brattleboro fans, sat in an impressed, stunned silence as the Spaulding crowd went ballistic. For a lot of people there that night, it may have very well been the first dunk they'd ever witnessed live. More »
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Basketball! Because of the lockout, doesn't it seem like it's been an extra-long time since we've seen meaningful games, even though it'd still be the middle of the offseason in a normal year? I don't know that the glorified exhibitions at Rucker Park count as "meaningful," but last night's fireworks display of a game assured us of one thing: Kevin Durant is still really, really, really good. More »
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Shawn Kemp, Jr. (not pictured), a 6'9" center from Canton, Georgia has signed with the Washington Huskies and has already started classes at the university. It's not the Sonics, but it is a Kemp. [ESPN] More »
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In the photographs of that moment, he doesn't show an expression of power, of joy, of triumph or even relief. His eyebrows are arched back, his eyes are wide, his face drawn into a grimace. N.C. State's Lorenzo Charles does not look like a man dunking a basketball, but rather a man returning to Earth, to a world that had changed forever in the time he spent floating above it. More »
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It's time for the Passion of the Jimmer, and, allegedly, lots of other young men. Come for the comically sized suits, stay for David Kahn's asinine decisions! More »
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Basketball Has A Bright Future In The Garden State: Oh, Newark. Newark. The Nets got tired of looking at New Jersey, filed for divorce, and moved out of the Meadowlands. Brooklyn is so much richer, more sophisticated-it's just a better match. Don't you want the Nets to be happy? Oh, but Brooklyn's place isn't ready yet. Could the Nets maybe sleep on the couch, at Newark's Prudential Center? Just for a little while. More »
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The NBA playoffs are over; the NBA Draft is here. Time to stop watching Dirk Nowitzki, LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Kevin Durant, Derrick Rose, and Chris Paul, and to start dreaming about the future—a future in which, honestly, none of this year's prospects have much hope of being better than the league's existing stars. Here's how various players, experts, and analysts have sized up (that is, sized down) the class. Players listed in the order of Chad Ford's ESPN mock draft of the moment. More »
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CNN and Daily Beast star Howard Kurtz, who has built his career as a media expert through his keen sensitivity to the prevailing conventional wisdom, also follows basketball. And "follows" is the word, to judge by his Twitter observations over the weekend. More »
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It's quite simple: The Oklahoma City Thunder have to win in Dallas tonight, then at home on Friday night and then again in Dallas on Sunday night or the Oklahoma City Thunder's season is over. Whenever it happens, maybe that's when somebody can explain who at The Oklahoman newspaper decided to run this deepthroating interview with Dirk Nowitzki yesterday. A fucking defeatist, that's who. More »
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Our French tipster Antoine sent this in with the subject line "ro basketball team training with robots," perhaps because he's aware of our constant fear of the Robot Uprising. But the Futuroscope that helped Poitiers Basket 86 develop their spatial recognition or some such nonsense doesn't inspire the same kind of fear. Certainly the giant claw could pop our skulls like grapes, or hurl us directly into the sun. But there's no uncanny valley; it can't look at us before it ends us. More »
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The Miami Heat can put the Celtics down like a mangy mutt that was good for about a fifth of its lifetime tonight. And you know what? Good for Team Olbermann. And good for the United States of America. Rondo might as well have smeared some of Schilling's ketchup on his jersey. More »
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Golden State backup guard Charlie Bell has a bizarre web series called the "Truth Doctor" in which he doles out love advice to the masses (relatively speaking: most clips get about 500 views) and takes people on tours of his sparse apartment. Another interesting tidbit about Charlie Bell: his wife was charged with assault after allegedly attacking him with a box-cutter Sunday night. More »
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In honor of the Heat/Celtics series, this guy has made a video of how to wash your car and clean your ceiling fan with a Paul Pierce jersey. And he did it all while wearing this obnoxious custom-made Big Three jersey. More »
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Mark Cuban take note: three teams in the Premier Basketball League have left the organization after some decidedly one-sided refereeing in the finals. More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5793619&view=rss&microfeed=true For a brief moment Tuesday, I wasn't sure we'd be seeing any basketball video game this year, even though I'd taken for granted that NBA 2K12 would release, a death-and-taxes sure thing in October for more than 10 years.… [Kotaku] More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5790542&view=rss&microfeed=true After the disastrous, last minute cancellation of NBA Elite 11, Electronic Arts is keeping its basketball sim video game on the bench for another year, saying that it won't ship a new entry in the NBA Live/NBA Elite franchise until… [Kotaku] More »
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Melissa McCafferty knew something was up yesterday, what with the police cars, front-end loader and dump truck carrying a pile of basketball hoops around the corner from her Claymont, Delaware house on Friday. More »
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You know you were curious. More »
]]> http://deadspin.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5784405&view=rss&microfeed=true March Madness is here, spring training is afoot, and fantasy players of all sports are honing their picks. Sports fans have unprecedented access to games, scores, and sports news from anywhere with there smartphones. Today we're rounding up the best… [Lifehacker] More »
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This week, we were tipped off to two free throw highlight videos, which are never really highlight videos at all. One was of human coach Tubby Smith, and the other was of a fuzzy robot seal from Taiwan. The natural response was to set the two against each other, with their original soundtracks included. In a head-to-head competition, the robot seal is the clear victor. Tubby hits 84 of 88 attempts in his video, while the robot seal from the National Chiao-Tung University shoots an astounding 99% from the field. It is impressive, we know. And also quite trippy. More »
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Last night, West Virginia upset No. 16 UConn in Morgantown, 65-56. Alex Oriakhi went to the line with the game tied and just a few minutes remaining the first half, and he took what was mostly a nice-looking free throw, especially for a big man. But the ball bounced around the rim a few times before resting, almost naturally, on the small rectangle of space behind the rim. And it stayed there. The unusual incident has already led to some philosophical analysis using, crucially, an episode from "The Adventures of Pete & Pete"; we thought we'd add to the dialogue by compiling video of some of the strangest basketball shots on the net. More »
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