Court Vision: The latest around the league

Rudy Fernandez has many options with his new deal with Real Madrid. (Juanjo Martin/EFE/ZUMAPRESS.com)

• Rudy Fernandez signed a deal to play for Real Madrid of the Spanish ACB. The deal calls for Fernandez to return the NBA, and the Mavericks, once the lockout ends, but it also gives him the option of returning to Real Madrid once the 2011-12 NBA season ends. Options everywhere! At the Mavs-themed blog The Two Man Game, Rob Mahoney thinks about Fernandez’s fit with the Mavericks for this season and beyond.

• Also heading to Europe (Italy, in this case) for the duration of the lockout: Danilo Gallinari, loyal son of Italian hoops.

• Tom Liston of Raptors Republic has some ideas for how the owners and the players might compromise. The headliner here is an escalating luxury-tax system, where penalties get steeper as a team’s collective salary commitments rise. But Liston makes another good point: Lots of people want to abolish the rule that says teams over the cap must send out salary in any trade just about equal to the salary that trade is going to bring in. I’m convinced that about half the support for such a massive change comes from people who are tired of seeing if their wild trade proposal fits the NBA’s salary-matching rules — and of being disappointed when they find it does not.

Liston’s point is this: If you take away the matching requirements, teams could theoretically send out a ton of salary, take almost nothing back in return and find themselves below the salary floor. Should the league ban trades like this? Give the low-payroll team a limited time frame in which to get their payroll back up above the floor? It’s just another example of the ripple effect each mini-proposal brings.

• The SBNation countdown of the top 99 players in the NBA — in 2015 — is getting nuttier and more controversial as it approaches the top. Today’s edition has an incoming college freshman cracking the top 15 and DeMarcus Cousins ranked above John Wall. I love the descriptions of Cousins as Al Horford’s direct basketball opposite.

• Remembering the paltry 10 games the 1995-96 Bulls lost in their record-setting season, including a game that ranks among the very best — or most memorable, anyway — in Canadian basketball history.

• More stories of teams overseas failing to pay their players.

• Ramon Sessions, in a Q&A with Dime, talks about the weather in Cleveland:

Dime: What about Cleveland as a city? What are some of the spots you like to check out?
RS: There’s a couple of spots downtown. XO, a nice little restaurant downtown. There’s a Sushi Rock downtown when it ain’t snowing out. It snows a lot out there but city-wise, it’s a small, little city. Blue-collar-type city, but the fans are great for us.

Dime: How’s the weather compare to South Carolina?
RS: Day and night.

Dime: How do you deal with that?
RS: It’s different, but I was in Minnesota, Milwaukee (laughs) so Cleveland was almost like “Oh, this ain’t too bad.” But you just adjust to it while you’re in town.

This somehow feels relevant to the collective bargaining talks, doesn’t it?

• Want to get up to speed on how revenue sharing might work, and how it interacts with the other key issues in the CBA talks? This piece by Steve Aschburner on NBA.com has everything you need.

• Bill Bayno, the former Blazers’ assistant now headed to Minnesota on a four-year contract, explains why he left Portland to take essentially the same gig with the Timberwolves:

“My first choice was to stay and I did everything in my power to do that. But in the end, I had to take this offer. It was too good to pass up.”

As a general policy under the current management, the Blazers do not offer assistant coaches more than one-year contracts on a year-to-year basis. Coach Nate McMillan lobbied on Bayno’s behalf when the Timberwolves’ interest surfaced, but the Blazers were unwilling to budge on a multi-year offer.

• Dwight Jaynes, a long-time Blazers reporter and watcher, is worried about how the league is going to react to Bayno’s departure:

Do you realize the ramifications of that policy? You’re almost always asking an assistant-coach candidate to move his family from one part of the country to another to take a job with a team in a strange city for a ONE-YEAR contract? Nice security for a family there. Particularly when a lot of assistant-coach jobs don’t pay all that much in the first place.

• Tom Ziller with a must-read analysis, with easy-to-digest charts, of how five good NBA offenses and one bad one distributed shots and the responsibility of creating those shots.

• I’m at the point with the Kobe Bryant-overseas reports where I just want someone to wake me in the unlikely event that he actually signs a deal. Here’s the latest offer that would appear too good for him to refuse.

• An effort to figure out Robert Sarver’s tenure so far in Phoenix also touches on the question of whether Phoenix is a big- or small-market team.

• The Nets, courting Brooklynites.

• Remember this later: J.J. Barea, a free agent, says he doesn’t care about starting.

• This is going to be fun: Hardwood Paroxysm is ranking the best and worst trades in the respective histories of all 30 NBA franchises, starting today with the Hawks. If you’re an NBA history buff, you know well which trade is going to be headline the “worst” list.

• A vote for Steve Nash as the league’s funniest player.