Rajon Rondo Admits Kendrick Perkins Trade Affected Celtics 'More Than It Should Have'

From Feb. 24 until Game 5 against the Heat, you couldn't talk about the Celtics without talking about Kendrick Perkins.

He was no longer on the team, of course, but his absence was too obvious to ignore from the moment he was traded away by Danny Ainge in the final minutes before the NBA's trade deadline. There were statistical charts that probably said the Celtics were better without the offensively limited Perkins, but if you watch basketball with your eyes and not through a spreadsheet, you saw that the Celtics were never the same.

Rajon Rondo, the team's point guard and Perkins' closest friend in green, admitted as much this week.

Rondo told Yahoo Sports' Marc J. Spears that the Perkins trade affected the Celtics "more than it should have."

"It wasn’t like the man passed away or something," Rondo told Yahoo. "I think we put too much emphasis on it. It's a business. He got traded. He's very happy where he's at. We still talk and I'm always going to have his back. It shouldn’t have affected us the way it affected us."

The Celtics won 76 percent of their games (41-14) before trading Perkins, though the center was only active for 12 of those games, during which the Celtics went 8-4 while Perkins averaged 7.3 points, 8.1 rebounds and 0.8 blocks per game. After the trade, the Celtics went 15-12 the rest of the way in the regular season before a 5-4 showing in the postseason, ending with a five-game series loss to the eventual conference-champion Heat.

Kobe To turkey!

LOS ANGELES - Los Angeles Lakers All-Star guard Kobe Bryant’s representatives will meet with officials of Turkish club Besiktas next week to discuss the possibility of him playing in Turkey during the NBA lockout.

Seref Yalcin, head of basketball operations for Besiktas, told reporters in Turkey he was hopeful of landing the five-time NBA champion and Olympic gold medallist.

“At the moment there’s a 50 per cent chance that Kobe may come to Turkey,” Yalcin was quoted as saying. “Everything will be clearer after the meeting on the (July) 30th.”

Besiktas already has signed New Jersey Nets guard Deron Williams to play during the lockout and last year signed former NBA MVP Allen Iverson.

Bryant has not confirmed his plans but has said he would be interested in playing in either Turkey or China if the NBA season was delayed because of the lockout. He already has an endorsement deal with Turkish Airlines.

The 13-time All-Star, 32, has three years remaining on his Lakers’ contract and Yalcin said Besiktas, which begins play in October, had asked the international basketball federation for its approval of any Bryant deal.

“Kobe wants some time to think about it,” Yalcin said. “We believe that his response is going to be positive. Money will not be a problem.”

Other NBA players also have expressed interest in playing overseas during the lockout and the players’ union has encouraged athletes to make the trip while there is no basketball in the NBA.

NBA owners locked out the players on July 1 after the talks failed on a new collective bargaining agreement. Both sides are far apart and no new negotiations have been scheduled, leading to possibility all or part of the 2011-12 season could be cancelled.

Kevin Love to compete in Manhattan Beach Open

NEW YORK -- Locked out of NBA arenas, Kevin Love is headed to the beach.

Beach volleyball, that is.

The NBA's leading rebounder plans to play in next month's Manhattan Beach Open on the pro volleyball tour, finding himself a paycheck while he's not earning one on the basketball court.

"I thought it was a great idea, a way for me to be out in the sun, be active and have fun during the lockout," Love said Tuesday after practicing with pros for the first time. "It's sport, it's active, it's a way to stay in shape, so I just thought it was a home run."

The Minnesota Timberwolves All-Star doesn't have a partner yet and hadn't played much lately before working out Tuesday on a court set up in Times Square, but says he hopes to survive the first day of the three-day, $200,000 event to be held from Aug. 26-28.

"More than anything, I'm just going to be having fun with it, playing as much as I can up to that point and just working on my craft," Love said.

Love has deep ties to the sand. His uncle Mike was a member of the Beach Boys, and Love was born in Santa Monica, Calif. and has spent his offseasons there since playing for UCLA. His father, who used to play volleyball against Wilt Chamberlain, asked him a couple of years ago if he was ever going to get into beach volleyball.

The opportunity came when Love was approached by representatives of Jose Cuervo, the tour sponsor that has four events scheduled this year.

The versatile Love averaged 15.2 rebounds last season and is a reliable 3-point shooter who had the NBA's first 30-point, 30-rebound game in 28 years. The adjustment to the sand will be difficult, but he said he was pleased after hitting the ball around and even diving for some shots Tuesday.

"I'm not necessarily expecting to win, but I'm expecting to go out there and compete," Love said.

Love said he has respect for the pros he'll compete against and acknowledged they may target him as a weak link, but said he's "hoping to surprise them."

His preference would be to return to the basketball floor, coming off his breakthrough season and hoping a good follow-up could land him on the U.S. Olympic team next summer. And he's not worried about the risk of injury in the meantime.

"That's the elephant in the room right now, but at the same time it's like with basketball. If you go out there and play hard most of the time, you're not going to get hurt," Love said. "If you're loafing and not going 100 percent, then you're more likely to suffer." 

Former Portland GM explains Oden/Durant decision

Kevin Pritchard was the man in charge of the Portland Trailblazers when the team took Greg Oden with the #1 overall pick in the 2007 NBA Draft instead of Kevin Durant. Pritchard joined 95.5 the Game with John Canzanoand discussed a wide range of topics, including that decision.

“I have never studied a person or players like I did Durant/Oden. It was every single minute of every single second of their entire careers. We were going back into AAU and the one thing that kept hitting us really hard was Greg Oden lost three games until he got to Ohio State, then he got hurt again and only lost a couple there and that was over hundreds and hundreds of games. The overwhelming thing that we got from everybody we talked to was the cat doesn’t care if he scores or does anything, but he’s about winning. We had been really trying to change our culture for guys who really put the team first, not care about stats, and really be about winning. We thought he was the pick at the time. We did the same thing with Durant. They said he’s gonna be the best scorer in the league, he’s going to be an amazing player, and he’s gonna win. We just felt like Greg was going to be that guy that just doesn’t lose basketball games. Right before he got hurt we were talking as a management group and we were like man doesn’t it feel like this is becoming a little bit like Greg’s team because in the locker room after a loss he would get really, really upset and he demands out of his teammates probably more than any other player I’ve been around other than Larry Bird. When he lost, he let his teammates knows what they have to do the next game. We were feeling so comfortable going into the rest of the second half of the season that we were going to be good because Greg was coming along.”

At the time, it was not easy to see that Durant was going to have the better career because it was impossible to know that Oden was going to have so much bad luck with injuries. Durant was definitely the better offensive player, but franchise centers don’t come around very often, and Oden was a major force on the defensive end (not unlike Dwight Howard). He also was capable on the offensive end, and already had a couple of post moves when he came out of Ohio State.

He may not be able to stay healthy, but the guy can play. His 36-minute splits over his first two seasons are impressive: 15.3 points, 11.9 rebounds, 3.4 blocks, 6.4 fouls…wait, ignore that last one. But seriously, lots of big men have trouble adjusting to NBA officiating.

Even if Oden can stay healthy, he’ll never overtake Durant in terms of overall value, but he can close the gap a bit…if he can just stay upright.

Ian Mahinmi: The Most Interesting Man in the World

The Dallas Maverick’s backup to the backup center, Ian Mahinmi, says Kobe Bryant is more arrogant than Lebron James.

First, this will be the only time in his career that Mahinmi’s name will lead a story featuring the likes of Kobe and Lebron. Secondly, he’s right. Thirdly, these are the kinds of stories the sports world that American’s care about (sorry soccer) is left with in the absence of a labor agreement in two of the three major professional sports.

Let’s tackle Mahinmi’s point before we get to the greater topic. Kobe is as arrogant as they come, and has been so throughout his 15 seasons in the NBA. It’s why most people, fans of the game or not, don’t like him.

(Well, that and the whole Colorado thing.)

Its’ not a bad thing to be arrogant as a professional athlete, so it’s not really an insult to say that one is more arrogant than another. Lebron James calls himself “King”, but at least there is some cultural relevance to his self-imposed nickname; King James is credited with one of the more popular misinetrpretations translations of the Christian bible.

Kobe started calling himself the “Black Mamba” three years after Kill Bill 2 was already on DVD.

Lame.

So that’s just one example of how Mahinmi, an NBA nobody, is right about the arrogance of Kobe and Lebron, but there are countless others: Kobe’s rap video, his first all-star game against Michael Jordan, wearing the different throwback jerseys before each game of the 2002 NBA Finals, ball-hogging during the 2004 Finals, talking to strangers about trading a teammate on video, calling local radio shows demanding a trade, reneging on the trade demands within 24 hours, the damn jaw-scowl he unveiled in the 2009 Finals, etc…

Lebron’s not self-aware enough to be as arrogant as Kobe is.

Would Kobe ever do an elaborate dance/picture-taking routine with a Boobie Gibson, and Delonte West on the court before a game? No.

click the picture for an example

Would Kobe ever allow his childhood friends to manage his finances? No. Hell, Kobe doesn’t even have childhood friends.

It’s bad enough for Lebron that he comes up extremely short to Kobe, as a winner (not going to bring Michael Jordan into this discussion for the same reason I don’t bring Tupac into arguments over the greatest present-day rapper). But even Lebron as a villain pales in comparison to Kobe as a villain.

The people that I care the most about are women. I like em brown, yellow, Puerto Rican, and Haitian. Some women first turned on Kobe back in high school when he dumped his then girlfriend in order to take R&B starlet Brandy (Ray J’s sister who was once more famous before he started keeping up with a certain Kardashian). Then more black women turned on him when he married Vanessa against his parent’s wishes. By the time the incident in Colorado happened, you were hard-pressed to find a female fan of Kobe who didn’t have a lifelong allegiance to the Los Angeles Lakers.

By contrast, Lebron has done more to endear himself to the female NBA audience than any player since A.C. Green announced that he had successfully kept his jheri curl away from the female gender well into his 30′s.

Lebron smiles. He is engaged to his high school girlfriend who is also the mother of his two kids. In 2011, that’s considered being extremely chivalrous. In eight years as a pro, he’s never been linked to a high profile celebrity woman, which gives unpopular women the illusion that he’s faithful, and also leaves them without an imaginary cat-fight nemesis (every woman’s favorite pastime). That’s something even Dwyane Wade couldn’t do.

(Lebron’s fiance’ is black by the way, and if you think doesn’t play a role in this then you don’t watch the right combination of BET, Fox News, and ‘Tosh.0″ ).

If one player is supposed to be the NBA’s bad guy, but the other player has 99 percent of an entire gender detesting them, then the other player is the greater bad guy.

So let’s lay off Mahinmi, the 24 year-old Frenchman whose lone claim to fame before the interview with BasketUSA was hitting a buzzer beating fade-away at the end of the third quarter of Game 6 in this year’s NBA Finals. 

FORMER BOXING LEGEND MIKE TYSON ASKED TO SLEEP WITH LA TOYA JACKSON FOR $100K

Strange, and crazy, but a La Toya Jackon, (sister of Micheal Jackson) went on the CBS talk show "The Talk", as she was promoting her new autobiography "Starting Over". Inside the book, she talks about how her EX husband/manager Jack Gordon "tried" to TRICK her out to former boxing star Mike Tyson for $100,000, (this during the time Mike Tyson was riding high on wins in the boxing arena).

Tyson must of had a kind heart, because he went back, and told Katherine Jackson, (La Toya's mother) and a few friends that Gordon tried to pimp out La Toya to him. Maybe Tyson is just into models.