Source: YardBarker.com

For basketball geeks the summer can be almost as exciting as the regular season. This particular summer generated more buzz than usual due to the amount of free agents and the amount of teams with large amounts of cap space with which to make changes.
While the Miami Heat can boast about snagging the top three available free agents, we shouldn’t forget they also got themselves another from the top-15 in Mike Miller, and another from the top-30 in Udonis Haslem.
It would be hard to think that anybody could ever top the summer Miami [...]

 
This has been the greatest off-season in NBA history. That’s because when it’s all said and done, it will be remembered as the shortest. You could count the number of days when there wasn’t anything NBA-related worth talking about on one hand. Free agency news, coaching hires, Team USA, endorsement deals, the draft, Summer Pro League, trade rumors, etc. There were plenty of obvious winners this summer. Joe Johnson, Wesley Matthews, Drew Gooden, and Travis Outlaw come first to mind. Nobody should be surprised those guys were winners but the extent to which they won has to come as [...]

Shaquille O’Neal is a Boston Celtic. Yes, you read that correctly. The three-time Finals MVP for three separate Lakers championship teams is now a member of their most hated rival.
It’s been a little more than six years since Mitch Kupchak, on orders from Lakers’ owner Jerry Buss, traded Shaq to the Miami Heat. Since then, Shaq has been traded twice more. That would make the Celtics the fourth team that Shaq has played for in the last four years and the sixth of his career.
There are a lot of Lakers fans who still feel burnt by Shaq’s departure in 2004—me [...]

The champagne has barely dried and already the World Champs are preparing for this week’s draft and the start of free agency next week.
The Lakers have six potential free agents on their current roster in rotation regulars guards Derek Fisher, Jordan Farmar, Shannon Brown, as well as forwards Adam Morrison, DJ Mbenga, and Josh Powell.
Brown has a player option for next season and Farmar is a restricted free agent. But the other three, including co-captain Fisher, are all unrestricted free agents.
There’s very little doubt that Fisher is the one free agent that Lakers fans [...]

One of the most overly used phrases in sports is the “must-win game”. That’s because 90 percent of the time when fans and pundits use the phrase it’s used inappropriately.
You could make a strong case that the Celtics headed into Sunday night’s Game 2 knowing that it was a must-win game. Teams that have gone down 0-2 in the NBA Finals have lost the series 93 percent of the time.
So the Celtics approached the game knowing that if they went down 2-0 they would have to win four [...]

There has to be a reason why the freedoms of speech, press, and religion were all chosen to be a part of the First Amendment. It was as if future generations of Americans needed to be reminded that these were the three most important freedoms on which the foundation of this country would be built.
The freedoms of speech and of the press can be both a gift and a curse because there are consequences to saying or writing certain things. Whether they come in the form of boycotts or backlash, the freedom of speech is a two-way street. If you [...]

I don’t want to get too ahead of myself here but it’s hard not to start thinking about a potential Lakers/Celtics rematch in the 2010 NBA Finals.
With the Celtics holding a 3-0 lead on Orlando and the Lakers up 2-1  their series with Phoenix it wouldn’t be premature to at least start thinking about what the series would mean to both the NBA and the two storied rivals.
For starters, there hasn’t been a rematch or a semblance of a rematch in the NBA Finals since the Chicago Bulls and Utah Jazz faced one another in the 1998 Finals.
Since then, we’ve [...]

Radio host and ESPN Page 2  contributor Bomani Jones posed an interesting question (via twitter) the morning of Game 6 of the Boston/Cleveland series. He wrote “Forgive me if this is hyperbolic, but can you name a game in the last 20 yrs more compelling than tonight’s Cavs-Celts?”
I wrote him back with two suggestions–Game 7 between the Lakers and Blazers in 2000 and Game 7 between the Lakers and Kings in 2002.
For starters, there’s nothing like a Game 7. It’s the closest thing that the NBA, MLB, and NHL will ever get to a Super Bowl. It would be [...]

It’s amazing how one or two games under playoff lights can determine whether an athlete will be rich, super rich, or über rich when he hits the open market.
Based on just the past few days you’d think that Kyle Korver was the one getting the max deal this summer and Joe Johnson was the one who might be lucky to get a mid-level offer.
While that example is a bit of an exaggeration, there are plenty of examples where an athlete has parlayed a playoff performance into the type of contract that could be the difference between having to become a [...]

The 2008-09 Los Angeles Lakers accomplished something that hadn’t been done in 20 years: They became the first NBA Finals runner-up since the 1988-89 Detroit Pistons to win a championship the following season.
If you were to look at the 20 championships won in the years between, you’d realize how big a part experience plays.
Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls managed to repeat four times en route to six titles. The Shaq/Kobe Lakers did it twice on their way to a three-peat, and Olajuwon’s Houston Rockets did it once in winning consecutive rings in 1994 and [...]