Court Vision: Brand playing with broken hand

Elton Brand has been playing with a fracture in his left hand for about a month. (Gary Dineen/NBAE via Getty Images)

• Nice work from Jonathan Abrams of The New York Times, getting Sixers president Rod Thorn to concede that Elton Brand has been playing with a fracture in his left hand for nearly a month. Thorn reveals that Brand is having a bit of trouble catching the ball.

Brand is going to play through it, obviously, but the Sixers’ margin for error keeps getting slimmer with every bit of injury news.

• Ethan Sherwood Strauss on how the Nuggets’ performance since the Carmelo Anthony trade — they are oh-so-close to leading the league in both offensive and defensive efficiency in that time — reminds us that it’s always going to be a little dicey predicting the impact of player transactions in a sport in which five guys rely on each other as part of continuously moving organism. I find that refreshing, actually. I also enjoyed this observation from one of Strauss’ friends on Anthony: “Carlos once remarked on how Carmelo tipped-in his misses with a zeal that couldn’t be found elsewhere in Anthony’s game.”

Seriously — is there a non-center who goes after his own in-close misses as aggressively as ‘Melo does?

• The Nets have started a campaign for Kris Humphries to win the Most Improved Player award and a spot on one of the All-Defensive teams. He has had a nice season, and if you’d prefer the Most Improved award go to a non-star, you could do worse than considering Humphries. But it comes across as shameless, rah-rah pandering when a franchise that wants to be taken seriously campaigns for Kris Humphries to make an All-Defensive team. Come on.

• K.C. Johnson of the Chicago Tribune pushes Jerry Krause’s Hall of Fame candidacy. I’ll say this for now: The reaction if Krause were nominated as a finalist would be all over the map.

• And here’s Sam Smith, veteran Chicago NBA writer, reflecting on Artis Gilmore, the ABA, Tex Winter and what it was like to sit on a plane next to Phil Jackson during Jackson’s early Chicago years. Fun read. Side note: It seems to be a rule that anytime people write about the ABA, they must mention Marvin Barnes’ famous “I ain’t getting on no time machine” quote, which is fine by me.

• Omri Casspi writes that he’s unhappy with his recent benching in Sacramento. That’s bad news for him because the Kings control his rights for the next two seasons. Coach Paul Westphal issued this brief response.

• A California state legislator will propose a bill that would prevent the Kings from moving unless their current owner (the Maloof family) repays the city of Sacramento a $77 million debt first.

• As a New Yorker (but not a Brooklynite … yet), I laughed, repeatedly, at this essay on the coming hipster popularity of the Nets.

• The Hawks are playing worse, particularly on offense, with Kirk Hinrich on the floor. This is certainly not what they hoped for when they dealt Mike Bibby, Maurice Evans, Jordan Crawford and a first-rounder for Hinrich and Hilton Armstrong. The trade could not be turning out any better for the Wizards, who managed to buy out Bibby and have gotten promising play of late from Crawford.

• Cleveland’s Samardo Samuels is playing with a torn ligament in his right (shooting) wrist. He had this to say about how tough it is to even shoot free throws in his condition (via the Akron Beacon Journal): ”I’m glad I didn’t shoot no air balls.”

• A video look at how Steve Nash’s pelvic instability has affected his play.

• Brian T. Smith of the Salt Lake Tribune catches up with Kyle Weaver, who is getting a new NBA chance with Utah. The end of the piece contains this tidbit about Utah’s bizarro season:

According to the Elias Sports Bureau, Utah is just the second team in the past 17 seasons to win seven consecutive games and lost eight straight in the same year, joining the 2008-09 Detroit Pistons. Only eight teams in NBA history have achieved both marks in the same season.

• Anyone watching can tell Dwight Howard has made huge strides developing a usable mid-range jumper, but Evan Dunlap digs in and finds that Howard is shooting a very specific kind of jumper — and shooting it relatively often.

• Kevin Eastman, an assistant with the Celtics and a pretty inspiring guy to follow on Twitter, tweeted Monday night in defense of the Butler-UConn NCAA championship game. And Gary Parrish of CBSSports reminds us all of the UConn unpleasantness too many stakeholders all agreed to ignore during the Final Four.