Court Vision: Lakers eye Jason Kapono

• The Lakers are closing in on free agent Jason Kapono for the veteran’s minimum. Kapono is one of the world’s best shooters, and the Lakers need shooting, but he hasn’t played much over the last two seasons. If the Lakers lose Shannon Brown to free agency, they have zero veteran NBA shooting guards on their roster behind Kobe Bryant. Kapono is something of a wing tweener, in terms of size (he’s 6-foot-8), and he certainly doesn’t have the quicks to defend shooting guards, even in a limited backup role.

This is where players such as Ron Artest and Matt Barnes, who willingly defend multiple perimeter positions, become so useful. The Lakers will have the luxury of hiding Kapono wherever they’d like if the right people are on the floor.

• What a day in Magic land. First, the basics: Ken Berger of CBS Sports reports that Dwight Howard hasn’t told Orlando officials whether he wants to stay or go, and if he wants to go, where and how he’d like to do that.

• Meanwhile, a crazy twist: Magic CEO Bob Vander Weide, who is married to owner Rich Devos’ daughter, has stepped down to take a vague role as a consultant. The team is characterizing the move as a retirement, and Vander Weide says he’d like to spend more time with his family. In an exclusive interview with David Baumann of the Bright House Sports Network, Vander Weide admitted calling Howard earlier this week at about 1 a.m. after what Vander Weide characterized as some minor drinking:

“I was playing paddle with friends and had a couple of glasses of wine,” Vander Weide told BHSN.  “Maybe Dwight thought it was inappropriate to talk business after a couple of glasses of wine… Maybe I should have waited until the morning.”

• NBA teams often feel the need to do something on the free-agent market, even if doing nothing might be the best long-term option. This piece in The Classical gets at that dynamic.

• The NHL is realigning, and ESPN.com’s J.A. Adande says the NBA should adopt a similar four-conference model. I’m still letting Adande’s argument sink in, but he’s dead-on about one thing: Divisions have outlived their usefulness, especially in terms of playoff seeding.

• At SB Nation, Tom Ziller on the impossible bind in which the Chris Paul saga has placed the Hornets and the NBA itself, which still owns the team after bailing out its previous owner (George Shinn):

Now add in the other 29 owners, 28 of which will be steaming mad if Stern allows CP3 to be traded to the Knicks for a pittance (Frozen Envelope Part 2) and 28 of which will riot if a Stern-owned team deals another superstar to the Lakers, the league’s richest team who survived the lockout relatively unscathed and has missed the playoffs all of four times in 51 years since moving to L.A. Seriously, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban was pissed at the trade deadline because the Hornets took on something like $750,000 in extra salary in a Carl Landry-Marcus Thornton swap, presumably because picking up Landry made New Orleans more formidable in the playoffs, where the teams might have met. Cuban was getting twisted up over Carl Landry. What’s he going to say if the Hornets pawn off Chris F. Paul to the hated Lakers for a bargain price?

• At NBA.com, Steve Aschburner sifts through the Paul and Howard situations, reads the summary of the new CBA and wonders if anything has really changed, in terms of “competitive balance” and a small-market team’s ability to keep its own superstar:

“The system didn’t change that much,” said the general manager of one such team Monday. “There are a couple of new restrictions, but the system basically is the same. One or two things got better [for teams] but one or two things got worse. I think it’s almost a push.”

As Aschburner notes, the real change doesn’t happen until 2013-14, when the new luxury-tax rates kick in and sign-and-trades become more difficult. We live in a rush-to-judge age, and while the early returns suggest stasis, the real judgment on this CBA will come later.

• Vote for the Sixers’ new in-arena mascot! I’m all in for Ben Franklin, though Phil E. Moose is an intriguing runner-up. The third choice, a dog named B. Franklin Dogg, has a bit of a Poochie vibe to him (for you fans of The Simpsons).

• Should the Kings be chasing Tyson Chandler?

• Grizzlies owner Michael Heisley has often seemed out of touch with the complexities of the NBA. He revealed last summer that he didn’t understand an important nuance of rookie contracts, and he admitted a few weeks ago that he hadn’t been paying all that much attention to the lockout. But read this Q&A Heisley did with Ronald Tillery of the Commercial Appeal in Memphis, and it’s clear he knows the on-court dynamics of his team — what O.J. Mayo needs to do better, why it’s unlikely Shane Battier will be back, the need for outside shooting and more. Also: Heisley is still willing to sell, if only the right buyer would come forward:

Q. Have you dropped the idea of selling the Grizzlies?

A. I don’t have a broker out selling the Grizzlies. The situation has never changed. I’m 75 years old and I live in Chicago. The right, and by that I mean a local owner — and it could be somebody willing to move there — would be a better owner than Mike Heisley. I have never changed that position. But we don’t have anybody interested in seriously buying the Grizzlies. And I’m not shopping the Grizzlies.

• The lockout is almost over, but Piston Powered is carrying on with its rankings of every Pistons team. We’re getting toward the top now, and if you want to learn your basic Pistons history, this is a great place to start.

• Knicks rookie Iman Shumpert, is learning fast that New York fans can be a bit nutty, per Newsday‘s Alan Hahn:

He’s already enjoying the intensity of Knicks fans, who respond at full blast on Twitter to even the most innocuous tweets.

“They demand a lot,” he said. “I may tweet, ‘I’m with my Mom’ or something like that and Knicks fans are like, ‘You should be shooting 1,000 shots!’”

• D.J. Foster, writing at ClipperBlog, says the Clippers should pass on Caron Butler.

• Claudio Sabatini, owner of the Italian club Virtus Bologna and Kobe’s biggest fan (in the Kathy Bates/Misery sense), is somehow still talking about how close he was to signing Bryant. Stop. Please.