Last Saturday, Alex Kennedy of HoopsWorld reported that the Los Angeles Lakers have “expressed interest” in signing Gilbert Arenas. On Sunday, ESPN’s Chris Broussard confirmed the report, saying the Lakers have “considered the idea” of adding the guard to their roster. On Monday, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Lakers had yet to interview or work out Arenas. On Tuesday, via Kevin Ding the Orange County Register, Lakers coach Mike Brown acknowledged that team personnel had “just conversation” about the former Wizard, also confirming that there had been no workout, nor a review of Arenas’ past game video by Brown.

After Monday’s Wizards-Bulls game, I spoke with Nick Young, a good friend of Arenas, about how his former teammate was doing and about his prospects of joining the Lakers.

You said you talk to Gilbert just about every day. How is he doing? Is he just down in Orlando working out?

“Yea, he’s been working out. He said he got the — I don’t know if I’m supposed to say this — but he got that Kobe treatment on his knees…”

[I make some lame joke about the "Kobe System" commercials. -- NOTE: This past June, Kobe Bryant underwent treatment on his knee in Germany.  Orthokine Therapy, developed by German doctor Dr. Peter Wehling, also a former physician to Pope John Paul II,  involves "centrifuging the patients blood and using the serum as an anti-inflammatory drug." Tracy McGrady reportedly introduced Wehling to Bryant, who in turn recommended the therapy to Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees. In addition to a clinic in Germany, Wehling is said to have a small outpost in Los Angeles.] Read more »

In the seeming eyes of fans, media, Internet trolls and bar room sports pundits, Ernie Grunfeld should lie awake in his bed at night, restless over what to do with the sixth pick in the 2011 NBA Draft. The Wizards slipped two whole spots from where they finished the season to achieve No. 6 on Tuesday night, and the team president of basketball operations better put it to good use.

But it’s not all about this draft and this pick, it’s about the move behind the move which begets two more moves. Grunfeld should be up late into the evening, but not because he’s worried for his job, because he’s doing his homework. Because he and his team are adapting their creativity. Because he must be able to assess players beyond skills and exhaust trust in analysis to the statistical end. Because of course the pressure is still on.

A look across the NBA landscape yields a wide set of diverse circumstances: Aging dynasties, teams close to the next level, teams looking to rebuild, teams wondering where to go, and teams searching for how. Each of these situations must be ready to adapt to what will be a drastically different structure on the other side of the NBA’s pending labor issue.

With hype mounting for the 2011 draft, albeit a deemed weak one, as the last fun act of the league before the current CBA expires on June 30, beads of sweat may develop on Grunfeld’s brow due to the spotlight. But with a relatively secure position to manage the Wizards generally – likely for the next two seasons — it will be all about how Grunfeld can use a post-lockout environment to Washington’s advantage.

The Wizards have young and promising assets (unfortunately, several hold considerably more value to their current team than to others), draft picks and potentially minimal salary on the future books. Impatience toward the way to achieve success should be tempered by the fact that at least Washington has flexibility.

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Remember that goofy Bobby Knight “Game Face” display during some press conference long ago? Whether you do or you don’t, let’s take it to YouTube (it’s No. 2 in the countdown of top Knight soundbites):

But what about pre-game faces? Well, thanks to TAI’s Adam McGinnis, we have some of those faces from last Tuesday’s Wizards-Lakers game below. But first …

Truth About It is giving away more free Wizards tickets, this time two lower-level tickets to Saturday’s Wizards game versus the Miami Heat, courtesy of StubHub.

How do you win the tickets? Like last time, at around 3 PM EST this afternoon, Friday, December 17, I will be posting a Wizards-related trivia question on the TAI Twitter account: @Truth_About_It. The first person to email, NOT Tweet, the correct answer to truthaboutit@gmail.com will have two (2) tickets — Section 117, Row F — waiting for them at the Verizon Center Will Call for Saturday night’s 7 PM game.

The trivia question last time was: “Before playing last game @ US Airways Arena in 97, the Wash. Wizards signed a player who prev. played in 345 total gms as a Bullet. Name him”

And Brent Sanet chimed in first with the right answer, which was Ledell Eackles. What will the question be this time? You’ll have to stay tuned to find out. Read more »

[Kobe Bryant looks to discover more about Sam Cassell - photo: Adam McGinnis]

How does one evaluate a performance like the Washington Wizards gave in a 103-89 loss to the Los Angeles Lakers on Tuesday night? They didn’t play their worst, but weren’t even in sight of the perfect game they would have needed to beat the reigning champs. Washington did their best to fight, but continued to make the same exact mistakes that fans should sadly be becoming immune to now. Each key defensive gaffe became mundane, blending in with the others.

Already severely out-manned with no Andray Blatche, John Wall and Josh Howard, Yi Jianlian went down about five minutes into the game with just about the same injury to the same knee. That’s when the Washington Post’s Michael Lee invoked the ‘Curse O’ Les Boulez’ on Twitter. Great.

Lesser than a tale of two halves, it was a tale of two quarters, the first and the second. The Wizards “hung around” in the first quarter, moving the ball well (7 assists, 11 field-goals, 0 turnovers) and playing aggressive defense. Of course, that aggressiveness combined with the aura of a champion that seems to possess referees pinned the Wizards for 10 fouls — although some of those should certainly be credited to bad defensive positioning. After the game, Al Thornton also denoted a couple early call against him as “cheap.” Pretty much what you can expect when you have to guard Kobe Bryant and his ability to draw fouls. Watching the referees pay meticulous attention to Kobe’s presence with their whistles is akin to walking by a construction site behind of bevy of Hooters waitresses.

Gilbert Arenas went 1-6 from the field to open the game, but he also had six assists as the Wizards took a 24-22 lead after one quarter. Arenas finished the game with 11 points on 5-15 shooting, dipping his field-goal percentage on the season to .392. The first quarter play that epitomized the night’s match-up happened late in the period when Andrew Bynum powered through Kevin Seraphin’s well-positioned chest on his way to the basket. Seraphin is a big dude, no question he sets the toughest screens on the Wizards, but he was reduced to mere flesh in the way by Bynum.

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[Gilbert Arenas takes a bow after his 60 point game vs. the LA Lakers on December 17, 2006.]

Twenty-two down with game 23 coming tonight in D.C. against jersey No. 24 and his LA Lakers. 60 games to go on the season for the Wizards? Seems like a lot … until it isn’t. What also seems like a lot is the fact that a Los Angeles purple and gold team will be gunning to avenge the moral victory Washington recently achieved on their court … while gaining an Andrew Bynum back against a Wizards team likely to be without Andray Blatche, perhaps without John Wall, and with Gilbert Arenas “generally sore” … whatever that means.

So do you want to see the Wizards take on the Lakers tonight for free anyway? Sure you do. Because guys like Trevor Booker and Kevin Seraphin, a duo who helped fuel Washington’s valiant attempts in LA, are expected to see their fair share of time on the court with the swollen knee of 7-Course-Meal-Dray expected to keep him inactive. The Nick Young-Kobe Bryant Show Part II could be fun to watch as well.

Hence, TAI is giving away more free tickets courtesy of StubHub … this time, three tickets to an upper level suite (I know, three tickets is an odd number, but three is also company.)

How can you score these free Wizards-Lakers tickets? At around 3 PM EST this afternoon, Tuesday, December 14, I will be posting a Wizards-related trivia question on the TAI Twitter account: @Truth_About_It. The first person to email, NOT Tweet, the correct answer to truthaboutit@gmail.com will have three (3) suite tickets waiting for them at the Verizon Center Will Call for tonight’s game. Seems easy enough.

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Sure, you’ve seen Nick Young’s sweet 360 spin move, but why not watch it again (via the bootleg TAI remix version)?

So in honor of Nick’s move against the Lakers in Los Angeles, Truth About It.net is giving away four free tickets to see the Lakers play the Wizards in D.C. next Tuesday, December 14 … in a suite no less.

Yep, exactly … more free tickets (and again, courtesy of StubHub — they keep providing TAI with free tickets, and we, in turn, are glad to provide them to readers … everybody wins). Here at the details:

What?

Wizards vs. Lakers

When?

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If you tucked yourself into bed early last night, snug as a bug on a cold December evening, nice job of letting something as silly as sleep usurp your Wizards fandom, because you missed a helluva game.

With people already checking mock drafts and college prospects for roster potentials, it’s worth notching Washington’s 115-108 loss to the Los Angeles Lakers as moral victory No. 3 on the season, after Orlando at home and Miami on the road, and last night’s game certainly holds to the top spot as the Wizards’ most entertaining game of the season, win or loss.

There were so many highlight plays by both teams that several will surely fall between the cracks (and did in the highlight video above). From a Wizards’ perspective, he’s a quick overview:

Trevor Booker is a man, and not just in physique. The four-year college player from Clemson showed veteran confidence against the Lakers on his way to 14 points, four rebounds and two steals in 21 minutes off the bench. But should he start in front of Andray Blatche? (BTW, Blatche sat out the Lakers game with a left hip bruise last night. Speaking of, why are so many Wizards sitting out with bruises lately — or “contusions” as they are called? First it was Nick Young sitting out against the Blazers and now Dray — and I’m not here to say those contusions don’t hurt and make it hard to move, but sitting out with a bruise would seemingly indicate inherent softness … just saying.) Anyway, Mike Prada on Bullets Forever writes:

“I would be careful to overreact to this game and call for sweeping changes to the starting lineup.  While Booker played great, this was also a fast-paced game with a lot of instinct rather than thinking, and he excels in that kind of setting.  That said, maybe it’s time to make some changes in the rotation.  Less Andray Blatche, much less Yi Jianlian and more Young at small forward.  I’m not talking something as drastic as a lineup change necessarily, but if Booker T and the Frenchman don’t earn more PT going forward, then you’re essentially saying playing the Lakers this close is meaningless.”

While I agree with Mr. Prada’s well-balance assessment for the most part, here’s where I would be inclined to disagree … at least in terms of replacing Blatche with Booker in the starting lineup. Sure, it’s just one game for Booker and one could certainly say that Blatche’s knowledge of defensive rotations is better for the simple fact that he’s been in the league longer (of course, Blatche could have been fooled by Kobe’s spin move just as Booker was around the 0:35 mark in the above highlight video). However, here’s what we also know: Read more »

“I tend to think of myself as a one-man wolfpack.  But when my sister brought Doug home, I knew he was one of my own.  And my wolfpack, it grew by one, so there were two of us in the wolfpack.  I was alone first in the pack and then Doug joined in later.  And six months later when Doug introduced me to you guys, I thought ‘wait a second, could it be?’  And now I know I added two more guys to my wolfpack.”

- Alan from the movie, “The Hangover”

Just last week I wrote an article about how many former Wizards have now found a home with the Charlotte Bobcats. The list included Dominic McGuire, Shaun Livingston, Michael Jordan and Kwame Brown (and according to Michael Lee, we can now add Javaris Crittenton to that list).  The reunion of Jordan and Brown in Charlotte is particularly intriguing given their failures in Washington.  Now it appears as if the first major personnel move Jordan made upon leaving D.C., is headed this way.

Adam Morrison, who Jordan drafted third overall in the 2006 draft when he was manager of basketball operations in Charlotte, has accepted an invitation to join the Washington Wizards in training camp, according to the Washington Post’s Lee.

Morrison averaged a modest 11.8 points as a rookie with the Bobcats, but his second year was prematurely ended when he tore his ACL in an exhibition game against the Los Angeles Lakers.  He returned from the injury in 2008-2009, but he clearly was not the same player, and right before the all-star break, the Bobcats traded him– ironically enough to Lakers.

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It was one of those “it is what it is” games. The Wizards gave effort and got beat by a very good team, falling 115-103 to the champion Lakers. Flip Saunders told his players that if they would have played with the same effort against the Heat and the Clippers, they would probably be looking at four wins during the now complete season long six-game homestand instead of two.

The second quarter was where the match was lost. Los Angeles put up 30 points, the Wizards put up 15. Otherwise Washington outscored L.A. by three. In the second, and for pretty much the entire game, the Lakers resembled the time-tested analogy of a well-oiled machine. Even though they were 1-7 from three in the period, they shot 56% on 14 made field-goals, got three steals, two courtesy of Shannon Brown, and shot 9-11 in the paint.

Meanwhile the Wizards turned the ball over seven times leading to nine Lakers points and only got one assist. They also gave L.A. six second-chance points in the second. Instead of a well-oiled machine, the Wizards played like they ate butter drenched popcorn for a pregame meal. Unforced turnovers served as the calling card of the hapless.

Wizards 2nd Q Lineups

>> time on court together, points scored-points given up (turnovers in parenthesis)

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Most know about the time Ernie Grunfeld spent in the New York Knicks front office. And many probably have an idea that Madison Square Garden was Grunfeld’s home court for the final four seasons of his nine year NBA playing career. But did you know that Big Ern was on the floor the night Patrick Ewing made his NBA debut?

After playing his first two seasons in Milwaukee, and his next three with the Kansas City Kings, Grunfeld began his tenure in NYC in ’82-83 with the likes of Bill Cartwright, Bernard King (Grunfeld’s teammate at Tennessee), Paul Westphal, and one of my all-time favorite NBA names, Rory Sparrow. Grunfeld was 10th in minutes per game on a Hubie Brown led, 44-win Knicks team that made it to the Eastern Conference semifinals. But the Philadelphia 76ers, with Moses Malone, Julius Erving, and Mo Cheeks, swept the Knicks, advanced to beat Sidney Moncrief‘s Milwaukee Bucks in the conference finals, and swept the LA Lakers to win the ’83 NBA title.

Grunfeld and the 47-win Knicks fell short in the ’84 playoffs as well. This time going down in seven games to the Boston Celtics led by Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, and the Chief Robert Parrish. Just as the 76ers did the previous season, the Celtics subsequently beat the Bucks in the East finals, and won the ’84 NBA championship, taking the Lakers in seven.

Tough times found the Knickerbockers in ’84-85. Cartwright missed the entire season and King only played 55 games. Not even Darrell Walker, in his second season and averaging a career-high 13.5 ppg, could help. A mere 24 wins and a frozen envelope later, Patrick Ewing magically landed in the Big Apple.

Fast forward to the night of October 26, 1985, the official arrival of the John Thompson-groomed Georgetown product in New York. I just happened to be watching NBA TV the other day and caught a replay of Ewing’s first game ever. The Knicks were up against the familiar 76ers, featuring Malone, Cheeks, a stout Charles Barkley, Dr. J, and one of my favorites, Sedale Threatt.

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Everyone is talking about Courtney Lee’s missed ‘layup’ that would have won the game for Orlando. Some even compared it to Nick Anderson missing four late free-throws  in game one of the 1995 NBA Finals, also played on June 7th  [via Slam].

Mentioning Nick Anderson sounds very “woe is us” from Orlando. Thing is, true fans aren’t making the association, rather some professional MSMers.  These hacks need to be called out:

1) D-bag from the AP [via Sports Illustrated]:

A shot that couldn’t have been much easier.

Uh … no, a-hole. If you’ve played basketball before, you know how difficult Lee’s shot was — to time his jump, catch the pass, be concerned about an oncoming Pau Gasol, while slowing down uncontrollable momentum to lay the ball softly off the glass … exactly.

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As I’ve stated, Ron Artest was unjustifiably tossed from Friday night’s game against the Lakers, which has since been downgraded to a flagrant 1.

The best part about Arest’s ejection wasn’t the quiet exit, but in the midst of slapping dejected fives to anything that moved, Ronnie tossed one the cheerleader’s way, via her pom-pom, and moved on in a matter of fact manner.

Seriously. It’s supposed to be the EENNN BEEEE AAAAA playoffs. Teams send messages to each other. Let it be.

Instead, NBA refs get to be the ones sending messages. Is that what fans want? Doubt it.

So I’m watching Ron Artest, who was having a terrible ‘crazy pills = horrible shot selection’ Ron Artest kind of night in the first place, get kicked out of game three in Houston with a flagrant 2 for no apparent reason.

Hard foul on softy Gasol, no biggie … just a sharp knock of the ball out Pau’s hands, the Euro goes flop-flying, and all of a sudden it’s D-Day. Artest gets kicked out because there is less than a minute on the clock, the Lakers have the game in hand, and because he’s Ron Artest.

“I don’t think that was a flagrant …. You know, I’m an 80s baby, so that shoulda been two shots and be done with it.” -Kobe Bryant

Back to game two.

Ronnie Artest had an intentional break down which was over-reacted upon by the refs who tossed him from the game. Here is the anatomy of that breakdown:

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