When Luke Walton wins an NBA championship, you know it hasn’t been a good year in sports.

Ages ago, a fashion star named Rick Fox played for the LA Lakers. Like Walton, he was extremely self-important, and kind of good, yet an absolute hack at the same time. When Rick Fox retired, we thought it was the end of a kind-of-good-but-yet-an-arrogant-hack era for LA Lakers role players, but Luke Walton dashed that dream for all of us. 

That’s why the Onion has saluted Kobe Bryant – Kobe is the only NBA player in history to win a championship with Luke Walton on his team! Never thought I’d say this, but congrats Kobe!

Excerpted from the Denver Zephyr:

One casual acquaintance of Andersen, who wished to remain anonymous, said the Birdman’s been focusing his off-season efforts into taking the Denver Nuggets to the NBA title on his X-Box 360 version of NBA Live 2009.

“He was really devastated by the loss to the Lakers in the Western Conference Finals, so I think this is a bit of redemption for him.”

“He’s really been logging some hours.  I think the virtual Birdman’s been averaging a triple double during the playoffs.”

“It’s pretty impressive actually.”

Read more news satire at News Grift.

I’m no rocket scientist, but it seems like it would be common sense for the gallery to stand *behind* any non-golf, sports star who’s about to tee off in a celebrity or pro-am tournament.

Especially one who has a well documented history of being as poor a golfer as Charles Barkley.

Especially if you’ve got your frickin’ kid with you.

(via Al and Big Lead)

NeoSabonis will be doing a live-tweet of the Blazers - Jazz game tonight.  All the Deron Williams/Brandon Roy goodness starts at 7PM Pacific time and can be found at the link below:

http://twitter.com/neosabonis

Attention NBA bigshots: David Stern is listening to your tweets, and he’s not happy!

David Stern’s NBA has long been known for nailing any league employee who questions a referee’s calls  (or pretty much anything else having to do with the NBA).  Usually the perpetrator slips up during a post-game interview, and that slip-up comes out in print or on television. But this time it happened on Twitter, courtesy of basketball mastermind Marc Cuban:

how do they not call a tech on JR Smith for coming off the bench to taunt our player on the ground ?

But Cuban isn’t the only NBA personality to get carried away with Twitter during a game. Milwaukee Bucks forward Charlie Villanueva tweeted at halftime during a huge victory over the Celtics. A few days later, Phoenix Suns center and former rap star, Shaquille O’Neal, aka @the_real_shaq, followed suit, cleverly shushing the entire Twitterverse at the 3rd quarter break of a game versus Washington.

Shaq of course received no punishment or rebuke of anykind…nothing – just like when he used to body slam my cousin Arvydas during the NBA playoffs, using nothing but his ginormous rear. The absence of any punishment was as Shaq predicted:

Attention all twitterers I’m a tweet at halftime and not get fined like vill a new wave a whteva his name is

I’ve always wondered if Jimmy Johnson is a mean drunk and it’s nice to have that lingering doubt put to rest.

Unfortunately, they don’t have these archived in the Library of Congress, but the Drunk Athlete site does a pretty good job chronicling these Golden Gods.

Damnit!  Get this guy over to the Middle East, stat!

“Israel, Numerous Countries That Hate Israel, this is Gheorghe Muresan and he’s going to be your mediator this week.”

And world peace…

(wonderful photo provided by Busted Coverage)

I’m, of course, referring to letting himself be used as a prop for Nate Robinson’s final dunk in the 2009 Slam Dunk Contest.   I can’t conceive of many other competitors in previous Slam Dunk Contests allowing themselves to be shown up in that way.  Can you imagine the glare Michael Jordan would have given ‘Nique back in the day had Wilkins even begun to bring that up?

Bravo, Dwight Howard, for being such a good sport.

Video below: