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Say goodbye to 2012 and the prediction of the Mayans.
2013 is here!
May the New Year bring us plenty of exciting and unexpected moments from the NBA.
So what are some of the things we can look forward to in the upcoming year? Here are some notable questions heading into January:
A gut punch, indeed, if you are the New York Knicks.
Jerry Ferrara – star of hit TV show “Entourage” – watched his Knicks come all the way back from 27 points down against the Sacramento Kings on the road, only to see it end in heartbreaking fashion.
Up by two points with 16 seconds left in the fourth quarter, Jason Kidd, the most reliable Knick of all, turned the ball over on an errant lob pass to Tyson Chandler.
Then, this happened:
Did Dwyane Wade intentionally kick another player in his jewels?
The groin kick against Charlotte Bobcats guard Ramon Sessions proved to be costly for Wade, who was suspended for one game without pay by the NBA on Thursday. Here is the play in question.
The play looks bad simply because of where the kick ended up, but it’s hard to tell if the action was done with direct intent. As Wade will tell you himself, however, in no way was it done with any kind of purpose:
We’ll give Wade a pass on this one, just because he put his parenthood on the line in the tweet above. In terms of being recognized as a dirty player, though, he may be on thin ice.
The job security of an NBA coach can be quite fragile when things go badly.
Fair or not, the coach is always the first to blame when a team does not perform up to what is expected of them. We’ve seen this with former Lakers coach Mike Brown, who was the first to lose his job this season after just five games.
On Thursday afternoon, it was announced that Brooklyn Nets coach Avery Johnson would be the second coach to be relieved of his duties this season, as Chris Sheridan predicted earlier in the morning.
Johnson, who wasn’t concerned over his job security when asked about it just a week ago, was certainly surprised by the decision. Here are his thoughts, from Roderick Boone of Newsday:
“This is a really disappointing day for me and my family,” Johnson said at a news conference at the PNY Center. ” . . . This is a difficult time. It’s something that I didn’t necessarily see coming, especially after a pretty good November. Then, obviously we lost a few games in December and you never think that when you are a .500 team, then you’re going into two more home games that something like this would happen.
“But this is ownership’s decision. This is what we sign up for. This is part of our business fair or unfair. It doesn’t matter. But again, it’s time for a new voice and the team will have a new voice and hopefully they will get back on track.”
Johnson wasn’t the only one surprised of his firing, as plenty of current and former NBA players chimed in on the matter:
Jamal Crawford never fails to do something spectacular when the Los Angeles Clippers are on national television, and it was no different on Christmas day, when he decided to pull out the good old “shake and bake” move against an unsuspecting Andre Miller:
