Nba '06-'07 - Page 3

Originally Posted by fabfunk

IVERSON WATCH!

-Sacramento offers, then rescinds Mike Bibby and Kenny Thomas.

-Clippers offer Shaun Livingston and Corey Maggette.

-Warriors offer Baron Davis and Andris Biedrins.

-Celtics offer Theo Ratliff, Delonte West, Sebastian Telfair, and Al Jefferson.

If you're Philly, what deal do you take? Any of them?

Also, in other news, apparently the Knicks are committed to keeping Isiah Thomas until next year. Why?

Originally Posted by juan23

I say the Bulls would be a good fit. Don't know about Skiles with A.I., but at least this year, it get's them back into contention.

Originally Posted by Dan Wetzel, Yahoo! Sports

Beyond the sucker punches and sorry stunts at Madison Square Garden on Saturday came the most pathetic part of all for the NBA – Isiah Thomas whining about run-up scores and poor sportsmanship, like the once proud New York Knicks are nothing but a lowly college mid-major in need of mercy.

Just when you thought Zeke couldn't embarrass this franchise any worse, just when you thought he couldn't let down this city any more, just when you thought building and coaching a dog team wasn't enough, there is this: a whiny coach making excuses for dirty fouls and poser players.

Oh, there were all sorts of people at fault when the Knicks and Denver Nuggets decided Saturday night was all right for fighting, and David Stern will certainly hammer them the way he did Detroit and Indiana for their brawl in Auburn Hills. Carmelo Anthony is going to sit his 31.5-point scoring average for a long time.

Isiah Thomas isn't the only one in the wrong here. But his postgame press conference performance was the most disappointing, if telling, of them all. He blamed Denver's perceived running up of the score, complete with a highlight reel dunk, as simply too much for his humble guys to handle.

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"Up 19 with a minute and a half to go, (Carmelo Anthony) and (Marcus) Camby really shouldn't be in the game," Thomas said. "We had surrendered. (Those) guys shouldn't even be in the game at that point."

Thomas is correct about this much. The Nuggets were brutalizing the Knicks on their home court, 119-100 with 1:15 remaining, making a mockery of Thomas' salary rich club. And yes, stars Anthony and Camby were still in the game, maybe even because Denver coach George Karl wanted to hit up Thomas for firing Larry Brown, Karl's old University of North Carolina buddy.

Whether or not Thomas told Mardy Collins to exact some revenge by tackling a breaking J.R. Smith around the neck is something Stern will decide. But Thomas may not have had to say anything. The boorish play might simply be Collins responding to his coach's unspoken outrage at the injustice of once again having his team get its ass kicked.

It's certainly telling that Collins did nearly the same thing – a late flagrant foul – in Indiana's beat down of the Knicks on Friday. So that's back-to-back flagrant fouls in back-to-back blowout losses for New York.

But those are Isiah's Knicks. This is on him. If he had an ounce of self-respect, he'd realize there is only one person to blame for this disaster and it isn't George Karl for his substitution pattern.

Instead, he went with some sad, victim routine.

"They were having their way with us," Thomas said. "I think J.R. Smith had just made one dunk when he reversed and spun in the air. And I think Mardy didn't want our home crowd to see that again. So he fouled him."

Said Nate Robinson: "It's like a slap in the face, saying we're going to embarrass you like that."

Boy, thank goodness the NBA has a coach and a player willing to stand up for sportsmanship like these two.

We know a respectful sort such as Robinson would never, ever show up an opponent by, say, bounce-passing a ball off the backboard to himself so he could dunk it. And we know if, say, such a thing happened on his watch, say Nov. 29 in Cleveland, Thomas would never, ever leave Robinson in the game like it was completely acceptable.

Of course not. Not these virtuous souls.

"If we're up 20 points, we're not going to play Stephon (Marbury) and Eddy (Curry)," Robinson said.

Of course not, because if the Knicks were up 20, Robinson would just honor his fallen opponent. Like when he botched that ESPY-campaign self-alley-oop and claimed humbly, "I won't be trying it again unless we're up by 20."

The good news is the Knicks aren't getting up 20 on anyone anytime soon.

If Robinson really wants this to end, if he wants the MSG boos silenced, then he should get his teammates to compete hard the first 46 minutes, not just foul hard in the final two.

If Thomas wants to stop people from running up the score on him, then he should have built a better club. He shouldn't have wasted all that money on illogical signings, outrageous trades and heartless characters.

No, Thomas and his guys weren't the only ones in the wrong Saturday. The Nuggets have their own issues. But when it was over, at least they weren't crying, at least they weren't punking.

It's all gone in New York now – the pride, the respect, the dignity. This isn't just a bad team; this is a bad act. A once proud franchise and fan base brought to its knees as its pathetic coach makes excuses and whines for mercy.

Dan Wetzel is Yahoo! Sports' national columnist. Send Dan a question or comment for potential use in a future column or webcast.

Originally Posted by By Adrian Wojnarowski, Yahoo! Sports

So David Stern imposes his will to slowly, surely reshape the NBA, with collared shirts and ticky-tack technical fouls on players for belaboring calls ruling the league's days and nights. The commissioner scrubs and scrubs, desperate to cleanse the league of the stain from The Palace at Auburn Hills two years ago. If nothing else, these orders of dress codes and indiscriminate T's were populist offerings to a disillusioned public.

And yet for all of the commissioner's surface touch of his players' appearance and behavior, it turns out to be worthless when all hell breaks loose at Madison Square Garden, a Saturday night at the fights leaving the worst of the NBA to wash over the world again.

Whatever the reason, these are the NBA nights that stay with people. There's superstar Carmelo Anthony looking like the worst kind of flailing fool, sucker-punching and running under the bright lights of Broadway.

The rules are different in the NBA, where boorish behavior gets treated differently than the rest of sports. These images stay with the public, shaping stereotypes of those beneath the headbands and tattoos. Albert Haynesworth can smash his cleat-clad foot into the unmasked face of a Dallas Cowboy and baseball can empty benches with beanball brawls, but those acts are never made to stand up for the entirety of the sport.

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Basketball has a different burden, born out of Ron Artest's treatment of a wayward soft drink cup as though it had been a jagged piece of glass. The rules for Stern's sport were forever transformed that night in the suburban Detroit stands, when the NBA lost its compass, lost its way.

Two years later, the New York Knicks and Denver Nuggets were the worst kind of posers, all false bravado and fake tough-guy posturing.

On every level, this was an embarrassment. Everything started with New York's Mardy Collins clocking Denver's J.R. Smith on a breakaway in the final moments, a rookie hit job that had the resemblance of a coach's order. From there, the NBA could've lived with Nate Robinson wrestling Smith into the beautiful people in the Garden's front row, but everything changed when Anthony – one of the faces of the league – turned the court into an unruly mess with a right-cross upside Collins' head.

Anthony should be suspended a minimum of eight games for that, a glancing blow that could've turned Collins into Rudy Tomjanovich had it connected with the ferocity with which it was unleashed. The top scorer in the league and an MVP candidate, Anthony dissolved into knucklehead tendencies, escalating a sorry scene into something far more dangerous.

Mostly, this melee had no basketball nobility in its roots. No redeeming value. When this kind of thing happened in the past with tough, physical basketball, people weren't so fast to brand the whole NBA for it. That'll be the case on Saturday night, though.

The Knicks and Nuggets don't defend. They preen. They pose. They talk tough games, but they play finesse basketball. Isiah Thomas and his Knicks were puffing their chests, pretending as though they had upheld some kind of code. From the cheap-shot foul to the bellyaching over Denver running up the score, they were an embarrassment. They don't defend the paint, don't defend the Garden, and they need to understand that grabbing Nuggets players around the neck doesn't defend the franchise's honor. They started a humiliating night for the NBA, even if Denver emboldened it.

Strange as it sounds, when it was Larry Johnson and Alonzo Mourning trading haymakers in the 1998 playoffs, there was no lingering damage to the NBA. They didn't throw sucker punches and start backpedaling, the way Carmelo did. L.J. and 'Zo, they had a history. They had reasons. They held hatred in the hearts, inspiring intrigue in the rivalry of the Knicks and Heat.

For good reason, those fights didn't label the league as a thug's game, because the people had the good basketball sense to see its context within the spillover of serious basketball. Just like the brawl at the Palace two years ago, though, this was garbage at the Garden. Yes, J.R. Smith had a right to get into Collins' face for dragging him down, but the rest of it insulted everyone's sensibilities. For the Knicks, it's a sorry testament of Thomas' regime when the team's enforcer is 5-foot-6 Nate Robinson. As it turned out, the Garden hadn't seen this kind of midget mayhem since Vince McMahon had Sky Low-Low working the WWF undercard.

Even so, no one in Olympic Tower should be laughing today. Barnum and Bailey snuck into the Garden, its elephants leaving a mess on the floor. These teams, they don't play tough enough to dare fight on the floor. What they did was leave the rest of the NBA with the residue of Auburn Hills, the kind of video clip that lives on in the 24-hour news cycle.

Hit play, over and over, and watch the commissioner's vision for cleaning up the NBA's image go directly into the crapper. Midget wrestling and a superstar swinging for a suspension at the Garden, the kind of pro basketball night that stays with the public, that comes back to haunt this league once again.

Originally Posted by swedish miyagi

"Hard fouls" are a bullshit way of saying cheap shots and are only used by players/teams who can't compete with their own merits and have to resor to cheating.

Originally Posted by fabfunk

White people fight too, you know.

Originally Posted by fabfunk

I like how, at the end of the article, there's a link to buy tickets to a Knicks game.

Originally Posted by fabfunk

Nelson has never met a NEGROE!

Originally Posted by MoNkaholic

Cheating? That was Basketball, and it's been Basketball for as long as I can remember. Ask Chicago Bulls fans what would've happened to Jordan or Pippen had they been running up the score in the Garden.

Originally Posted by swedish miyagi

I guess they didn't suspend Isiah because that would help the Knick's chances of actually winning a game.

JR Smith should've only been suspended for 5 games max.



pfft, oh the Knicks and Pistons used to hard foul aka cheap shot Jordan and Pippen. Gee I didn't know that obvious piece of basketball history thanks for pointing that out. They took cheap shots at Jordan for the same reason that Collins took a cheap shot at JR Smith, because they couldn't compete with his basketball ability so they had to resort to cheating. It's the sign of a pathetic unethical little bitch to do that. "And it always has been." Ignorant people don't understand that "cheap shots" are not "part of basketball", nowhere in the rules of basketball does it say "if you are getting beaten by players with more ability than you have, then just cheap shot them." So it's not part of basketball, it's something that douchebags who happen to be playing basketball might do. And just because douches of the past have done it before, it doesn't make it any less wrong.

Originally Posted by Isiah Thomas

"I can't speak for him(Nuggets coach George Karl), but he put his players in a tough situation."

Originally Posted by George Karl

"He's full of shit, he's a total asshole and he should be held accountable for what his actions are."