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Shawn Kemp charged with drug posession...Again

Shawn Kemp was arrested in Houston and charged with misdemeanor possession for allegedly carrying less than two ounces of marijuana on Friday.

After countless posts on Rotoworld.com about how Kemp was getting in shape, cleaned up and ready to make a serious run at a return to the NBA, this should end future speculation that we'll see the 36-year-old in the league again.

A čovek je mislio da se vrati igranju...

1. cuo si za inactive list?
2. pa dokurcilo mi je da gledam vase copy/paste-ove, a i hteo sam da vidim Bartucov komentar

Ma,vazno da je vama dvojici zanimljivo,a za ostalo - lako cemo...

evo malo insider mishljenja o usa repki...

How Coach K's initial message misses mark

LAS VEGAS -- It didn't take long for Mike Krzyzewski to screw up royally in his new job as coach of Team USA. He did it before day one was even in the books.

Rather than tell the team its job is to win the World Championship on the night of Sept. 3, Coach K gave the players exactly the kind of misguided advice they didn't need to hear.

"We have to go out there and be dominant for 56 quarters -- every quarter of every game we play. That's our mission," Gilbert Arenas told me following Team USA's first practice Wednesday.

"Who on earth told you that?" I asked.

"Coach Mike," Arenas replied.

Well, Coach Mike or Coach K, or whatever you want to call him, is dead wrong, and Insider is not afraid to say so. This isn't 1992 anymore. This isn't about playing like the original Dream Team, for which Coach K was an assistant under Chuck Daly. And this should not be about restoring American dominance following three losses at the 2002 World Championship and three more losses at the 2004 Olympics.

This should be about having the U.S. team playing at its peak when the games really count, and that won't happen until the single-elimination stage of the World Championship arrives at the end of August with the Round of 16, then the quarterfinals, the semifinals and the gold-medal game -- the only four games that will really matter. Sure, it'd be nice to beat Senegal by 107 in the opening round, but nobody back home will care all that much about that if, when the games really mean something, France or Spain is one or two points better.

You know what would have been a better message, Coach K? How about this: "I don't care if you lose, and I don't want you losing your confidence if you do lose. I want you playing at your peak seven weeks from now. I want us at our best when this mission finally gets serious."

You can't be dominant if you're not even superior, and right now there's a team in Argentina that has first dibs on worldwide rights to being the best. Manu Ginobili and Co. earned that distinction fair and square in Athens, and they get to keep it until somebody knocks them off their perch.

You want to see dominant, Coach K? Go back and look at a tape of the third quarter of the Argentina-U.S. semifinal in Athens when the Argentines back-picked and back-doored the Americans into submission. That's what you're going to be up against next month, and if you infect your players with the wrong mind-set, it's going to happen again.

Better yet, Coach K, have someone from USA Basketball bring you a tape of the gold-medal game from the Tournament of the Americas in Puerto Rico in 2003, when the U.S. actually did perform like the original Dream Team and crushed Argentina with a stunning display of dazzling dunks in rapid succession at the end of the first half to turn that game into a rout. Those players were so sick of hearing assistant coach Gregg Popovich tell them how good Argentina was, they poured it on extra heavy just to shut him up.

The U.S. team Larry Brown took to Athens in 2004 talked early on about being dominant, too, but when the Americans got trounced by Italy on the way to the Olympics and by Puerto Rico in their opener, they were finished mentally. First-round losses shouldn't do that to any team, because first-round losses do not knock you out of international tournaments. The elimination games don't happen until the Round of 16, and the job in the opening round is simply to win enough games to advance to the elimination round.

But is anybody in USA Basketball explaining that simple reality to the players?

Four years ago at the World Championship, the team then known as Yugoslavia was in such disarray during the opening round in Indianapolis, Serbian journalists were actually shouting down the coach as he walked off the floor. But by the time that tournament ended a couple weeks later, Yugoslavia was the champion after an overtime victory over Argentina. Sure, Vlade Divac and his teammates looked terrible in the opening round -- even worse than the Americans would look two years later when they lost to Puerto Rico and Lithuania in Athens. But they hit their peak when it mattered, and no one back in Belgrade cared at all about the first round by the time the tournament ended.

During this past NBA season, I asked Ginobili how Argentina could have looked so bad in its quarterfinal victory over Greece at the Olympics before playing so cohesively in the semifinals against the U.S. and the gold-medal game against Italy.

"Well, every team has one bad game in every tournament, and we had ours that night but were fortunate enough to win. Our team has been through enough of those tournaments to know there's going to be a letdown somewhere along the way," Ginobili said.

Memo to Coach K: Steal Manu's words of wisdom and pass them along to your team.

This whole focus on restoring U.S. dominance is so misguided, it's actually mind-boggling. It ain't 1992 anymore, Coach K, and opposing players aren't going to be asking your players for autographs after humbly being beaten into submission. The best of the rest of the world have already proved they can stand up to the U.S., and when the rest of the basketball world hears that you want to dominate 56 quarters, they're going to laugh.

They see a U.S. program that's gone 11-6 over the past four years and is showing up with another roster bereft of America's best big men and shooters. Think they're scared of being dominated? Fat chance. They're thinking about how they're going to try to pick you apart.

This should be about one thing, Coach K: winning the gold in Japan and earning an automatic berth into the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. That's the prize here, and it's your job to keep the players' eyes on it. What happens if your team is not dominant in a preliminary-round game against Slovenia or Italy? What if they actually lose? You want that loss to get into their heads like the loss to Puerto Rico did two years ago?

If you set the bar too high, your chances of failure increase. And if you're telling them they need to dominate 56 quarters, Coach K, you're setting them up to fail.

Speaking as an American here, do us all a favor and stop trying to turn back the clock to the Age of Barcelona. Go tell your team the truth, that their only job is to continually get better as the gold-medal game in Japan draws near.

We can talk about dominance 26 months from now when y'all get back from Beijing. Until then, let's just worry about winning. And if the path to winning includes a loss along the way, let's not create a collective mind-set among the players that makes such a loss so mentally devastating.

Just tell them to do what the Miami Heat did: Tell 'em to win their final four games, and stage one of their mission will be an unqualified success. That's the message they needed to hear on day one.

Garbahosa, za evropski Toronto


Jedan od najboljih evropskih košarkaša, Španac Horhe Garbahosa, kao što je i najavljivano, potpisao je ugovor sa NBA ekipom Toronto Reptors.

Predstavnici jedinog kanadskog tima u NBA ligi saopštili su da je sa ovim igračem potpisan ugovor na tri godine, vredan 12 miliona dolara.

Garbahosa (Hor -hay Gar - ba - hosa, kako je objašnjeno na sajtu Reptorsa), dve godine za redom MVP finala plej ofa španske lige, ima 28 godina, a nastupao je za nacionalnu selekciju i na poslednje dve olimpijade.

Dolaskom Garbahose, Toronto i defitnivno dobija "evropsko lice", sobzirom da je od prošle godine u ekipi i sjajni Španac Huan Kalderon, a da su ovog leta dovedeni prvi pik sa drafta Italijan Andrea Barnjani, Slovenac Rašo Nesterović kao i dugogodišnji lider Makabija, Amerikanac sa "evropskim šmekom", Entoni Parker.

Reptorsi su takodje saopštili da će bivši pobednik u zakucavanju na Ol star vikendu, bek Indijane Fred Džons, uskoro potpisati ugovor sa klubom iz Toronta.

Salmons (konačno) u Sakramentu

Bek Filadelfije Džon Salmons potpisao je višegodišnji ugovor sa Sakramento Kingsima.

27-godišnji Salmons nije imao garantovan ugovor sa Siksersima, a u poslednjih nekoliko dana američka košarkaška javnost zabavljala se njegovim slučajem.

Podsetimo, Salmons je početkom jula odbio petogodišnji ugovor sa Finiksom, a onda nekoliko dana kasnije i sa Torontom. U Reptorsima je trebalo da zaradi oko 23 miliona dolara.

Prošle sezone u Siksersima je prosečno ubacivao oko 8 poena,ali je na ceni u NBA jer može da igra na pozicijama 2 i 3, pa čak po potrebi i „jedinici“.

Finansijski detalji ugovora nisu saopšteni.

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Opet "trejd" Dalasa i Indijane

Ekipe Dalasa i Indijane obavile su u ponedeljak trejd. U Indijanu odlazi veteran Derel Armstrong, Džoš Pauel i Rol Maršal, u zamenu za beka Entonija Džonsona.

Armstrong je najveći deo karijere proveo u Orlandu, kasnije i Nju Orliansu i Dalasu, a svakako najveći učinak priznaje mu se u svlačionici gde kao iskusan veteran ima ulogu mentora. To je radio i u Dalasu gde je mnogo uticao na razvoj Markiza Denijelsa, koji je pre mesec dana takodje prešao u Indijanu.

Entoni Džonson je nešto viši, bolji odbrambeni igrač što će dati novi kvalitet bekovskoj liniji Teri – Heris.

31-godišnji Džonson je prošle sezone u 6 plej of mečeva postizao čak 20 poena uz 6 asistencija. Priredio: AP

Izvor: B92-Sport

For some reason, there’s more news this offseason from former NBA players than there is from current guys. The latest comes from South Florida, where a man has filed a lawsuit in “excess of $15,000″ against former All Star forward Jamal Mashburn. The man says both he and Mashburn were playing golf, when Mash hit a tee shot that hit him in the eye.

And this has nothing to do with anything, but anyone remember that old story in Sports Illustrated where Mashburn and some of his teammates went to a baseball game and a woman at the game mistook him for Tyrone Hill? Talk about needing a warning…