Filed under: Pistons

There's gunk clogging up the Pistons. Lots of it.

Gone are the days when Detroit would cruise annually to the Eastern Conference finals. Now, the Pistons are on a road to nowhere.

You can't say this team is rebuilding. It used gobs of salary-cap room last summer on ill-fated signees Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva when the Pistons could have waited until the big free-agency summer of 2010 to try to lure a real big-time player (Chris Bosh?).

The city of Detroit has been falling apart during this tough economy. OK, so the Pistons play in Auburn Hills. They've just brought more despair to the suburbs.

"It's sad,'' Denver point guard Chauncey Billups said of the Pistons, 22-41 and losers of six of their past seven.

 

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Filed under: Bucks, Cavaliers, Celtics, Jazz, Lakers, Magic, Mavericks, Nuggets, Suns, NBA Power Rankings, Thunder

The Mavericks might be the hottest team in the NBA, but the Bucks might be the scariest -- especially for the elite teams in the Eastern Conference. Since dealing for scorer John Salmons at the deadline, Milwaukee has won 10 of its 11 games, with the last two coming against the Cavaliers and the Celtics.

With their recent surge, the Bucks find themselves in the top 10 this week. As for everyone else? Read on to see where your favorites landed in this edition of our rankings.

 

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Filed under: Mavericks, Nets

DALLAS -- Remember last season, when Nets point guard Devin Harris was the talk of the league? He was running circles around defenders and diving through defenses en route to a well-deserved All-Star berth for the Eastern Conference and second-place finish in the Most Improved Player voting.

Remember last season, when people were killing Mark Cuban and Dallas GM Donn Nelson for swapping Harris for Jason Kidd in Feb. of 2008? Kidd, at times, looked slow on defense and even less adroit on offense and his scoring average dipped to a career-low 9.0 points per game.

It's interesting how that's worked out lately. Now, it's Kidd and his Mavs who, with a 12-game win streak, have been the topic of conversation lately. As for Harris and his Nets, they've been talked about for all the wrong reasons -- 57 of them. When the two face off against each other tonight in Dallas, both point guards want to look ahead.

Then again, why would Kidd crane his neck and look back at the ashes of a franchise he led to two Finals earlier in the decade, especially with the Mavs' future ahead of him?

 

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Filed under: Mavericks, Nets

It was 5 a.m. and the Middle Eastern house music had stopped. This would be a good time as any to break the bleary, pre-dawn silence.

"Do you follow the NBA," I asked the driver of the town car.

"Oh, yes, I love it," he replied, "but I like soccer a lot too."

He was a good talker, Ya-Ya, an American citizen for eight years by way of Egypt. He didn't initiate the conversation, but once it started we touched on plenty of subjects -- the World Cup, the price of salt in his home country, the NCAA tournament, but least of all, the NBA -- during the rare traffic-free, 20-minute ride from my Hoboken apartment to Newark Airport.

So why was I up at 5 in the morning darkness and in the back of town car listening to Egyptian electronica and to an explanation as to why Egyptians are willing pay twice as much for American salt as they would for an their own brands?

 

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Former sprinter Marion Jones, who lost her freedom and her Olympic medals over her use of steroids, is returning to the sport that introduced her to the public, basketball.

Jones, 34, who has not played organized basketball in 13 years, signed a free-agent contract with the Tulsa Shock of the WNBA after trying out over the weekend for Nolan Richardson, Tulsa's coach/general manager.

Jones served a six-month jail term after she admitted that she lied to federal grand juries convened to probe the use of performance-enhancing drugs in conjunction with an investigation of BALCO, a San Francisco-area lab from which the drugs were allegedly distributed.

Jones had strongly denied that she had taken steroids after she won five medals -- three gold -- in Sydney during the 2000 Summer Olympics. However, in Oct. 2007, Jones admitted that she had taken a substance known as "The Clear," though she continued to maintain that she had not knowingly used performance-enhancing drugs.

In November, FanHouse reported that Jones, who gave birth to her third child eight months ago, was working out in San Antonio with a goal of getting in basketball shape to attempt to play professionally.

 

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