There has been a growing impatience among the Golden State fan base, grumbling that the Warriors’ new ownership lacks a grander vision, the guts to break up a failing team and the ability to put together a roster that might back up the boasts of coach Mark Jackson. That kind of skepticism comes with grand entrances and big promises, and it grows when you do things like use the amnesty provision on Charlie Bell’s $4 million expiring deal instead of Andris Biedrins’ $9 million annual sunk cost.

But look carefully, and you can see something: Golden State was in on Tyson Chandler until the last moment. They amnestied Bell to chase DeAndre Jordan. When that failed, they used their cap space on Kwame Brown, a solid, if overrated, post defender. The message was clear: We know we need a stud, defense-first center to cover for Stephen Curry and David Lee, and we’re skeptical that Ekpe Udoh, a defense-first lottery pick with an outstanding plus/minus two years running, is going to develop into a 36-minutes-per-game, two-way player fast enough to achieve our goals.

And so on Tuesday, the Warriors acted boldly in trading Udoh, Brown’s expiring deal and Monta Ellis, a beloved player in Golden State, to Milwaukee for Andrew Bogut and the toxic contract of Stephen Jackson. The move creates major 2012-13 cap savings for the Bucks, who save nearly $10 million in 2012-13 salary and could get down to about $45 million on the books for next season, even without using the amnesty provision. It has the potential to help Milwaukee in the Eastern Conference playoff race (thus hurting the Knicks) and torpedo Golden State’s slim playoff chances, making it more likely that the Warriors keep the top-seven protected first-round pick they would otherwise owe Utah. The Warriors weren’t doing any damage in the playoffs this season, and any move that increases their chances of keeping that pick in a loaded draft is a smart one. Read More…

Andrew Bogut is expected to miss 8-12 weeks after fracturing his ankle in a game against the Rockets. (Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE via Getty Images)

The science of injuries, and specifically of predicting injuries, is among the least-advanced types of analysis in professional sports. People who study this sort of thing are pretty certain at this point that very tall people — 7-footers — are more likely to suffer foot, ankle and knee injuries. And it seems logical to exercise caution when a player enters the NBA with pre-existing health issues — knee surgeries, concussions, whatever.

But the holy grail is for teams to be able to place two equivalent, healthy players side-by-side, conduct a series of tests and determine whether one is more “injury-prone” than the other. And at this point, what we don’t know about the notion of being injury-prone trumps what we do know by such a large degree, that even throwing around the phrase injury-prone seems dicey.

“There is no data, anywhere, NBA or otherwise, to predict who gets injured,” says F.D. Kharrazi, a surgeon at the Los Angeles-based Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic who also consults for the Lakers. Trainers and executives around the league wish such data existed in even a semi-reliable form; if some tech company comes up with an acceptable way to test for injury predictability in sports, it will make a huge amount of money. A team in the English Premier League has experimented with genetic tests, but a major subset of NBA players and their advocates would resist such testing, since it raises privacy concerns and brings the possibility of a player testing out as injury-prone on shaky scientific grounds and losing millions of dollars.

“It’s very unscientific at this stage,” says Will Carroll, an expert on sports injuries and a contributor to SI.com. “You have doctors and trainers and coaches looking at it, but it’s still a whole lot of guessing.”

Carroll, by the way, believes in the concept that an individual’s genetic makeup can make him or her injury-prone. The connection between tall people and leg/foot injuries is real, he said. And some people likely have weaker ligaments, just as some people are at greater risk for heart attack. Read More…

The fact that Andrew Bogut is eager to start competing again is good sign for his health. (Jeff Hanisch/US PRESSWIRE)

Whether it’s out of comfort or patriotism, it’s cool that Andrew Bogut has decided he’s going to play ball in his native Australia in the event of an extended NBA lockout. Bogut would face better competition playing in Spain’s ACB and perhaps earn better money, but he seems to care more about being at home and raising the national profile of Australia’s domestic National Basketball League. The NBL got a boost this week when Patty Mills, an Aussie and a restricted free agent tied to the Portland Trail Blazers, signed a deal with the NBL’s Melbourne Tigers that includes an out clause, allowing him to return to the NBA when the lockout ends.

Bogut is on a different level, and the executives chasing him on behalf of the Perth Wildcats know it, according to this piece in the West Australian:

“We’re not talking about Patty Mills, we’re talking about a superstar of the NBA living in Perth and playing in Perth.”

That’s some cold truth. But that Perth exec, Nick Marvin, reminded readers how difficult these signings will be when you start talking about NBA stars with massive contracts — contracts that must be insured for those stars to feel comfortable risking injuries overseas:

The Wildcats would need to come up with $500,000 for every three months that the Milwaukee Bucks centre was based in Perth.

“For Andrew Bogut to play for us, and if that is the only hurdle we have to cross, I would hope that government and corporate Western Australia would support us and make it work,” Marvin said.

“I don’t have $500,000 sitting in my back pocket, but would it be important to the people of Western Australia? Absolutely.”

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Brandon Jennings' affinity for difficult floaters and mid-range jumpers added to the Bucks' offensive woes last season. (Mike McGinnis/Cal Sport Media)

The Bucks now have four guards capable of playing the point, which was the main reason I put Brandon Jennings atop a list of players who were “on notice” after the draft and its accompanying trades. Jennings has the most upside of the bunch, but with Beno Udrih, Shaun Livingston and Keyon Dooling all aboard, Scott Skiles could shorten Jennings’ leash a bit on those nights when all those step-back jumpers aren’t falling.

The Bucks’ offense has been abysmal since Jennings took over the point, and he probably hasn’t gotten as much blame for that (outside of Milwaukee, at least) as he deserves. There are caveats, of course: Jennings is only 21, and Milwaukee has surrounded him with marginal offensive players and a coach who isn’t exactly known for his creative offensive system. But nonetheless, it’s hard to not hurt your team when you take a lot of shots and hit less than 40 percent of them, as Jennings has done in each of his first two seasons.

The problems with Jennings and the Bucks’ offense go deeper than their point guard’s love of step-back, mid-range jumpers and difficult floaters. This is a team that simply does not produce good shots, and Jennings is part of that. He averaged just 4.8 assists per game last season, the fewest of all starting point guards, save for the non-distributors in Atlanta and Miami. Only 1.5 of those were at the rim (the best kind of assists) to rank 45th in the league, below all non-Hawks/Heat starting point guards except for Indiana’s Darren Collison, per Hoopdata.

This inability to penetrate and create good shots shows up in another way: Nearly 16 percent of Milwaukee’s offensive possessions ended with a pick-and-roll ball-handler either shooting, drawing a foul or turning over the ball. Only Orlando saw a greater percentage of its possessions end this way, according to the stat-tracking service Synergy Sports. The roll men on those Milwaukee pick-and-rolls finished only 5.4 percent of Milwaukee’s possessions; only the Magic, Thunder and Lakers had a larger gap in terms of the ratio between pick-and-rolls finished by the ball-handler versus the roll man, and one of those teams ran the triangle offense.

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John Salmons is on the move again, this time to Sacramento. (Jeff Hanisch-US PRESSWIRE)

Draft day has been heavy on rumors and light on action so far, but now we have a three-team deal involving the Bucks, Kings and Bobcats. The particulars:

• The Kings traded the No. 7 pick to Charlotte and sent Beno Udrih to Milwaukee. Sacramento received the No. 10 pick from the Bucks and (gulp) John Salmons.

• The Bobcats snagged that No. 7 pick to go with the ninth pick they already own. To do so, they acquired Corey Maggette from the Bucks and sent Stephen Jackson and Shaun Livingston to Milwaukee.

• If you got all that, you know Milwaukee dealt Maggette (to Charlotte), Salmons and the No. 10 pick (both to the Kings) for Jackson, Udrih, Livingston and the No. 19 pick.

Whew.

Let’s start here: If the Kings don’t have a second trade lined up for later Thursday, they have done something very puzzling here. They have voluntarily moved down three spots for the privilege of taking on Salmons, who is owed $24.16 million guaranteed over the next three seasons — and another $1 million for the season after that, just for kicks. Udrih is the only current player the Kings sent away in this deal; he is on the books for $14.3 million over the next two seasons.

In other words, the Kings took on an extra $11 million in payroll, dropped three spots in the draft and acquired a 31-year-old swingman who was one of the very worst heavy-minutes offensive players last season. In Salmons’ defense, he was banged up from the start, and he’s a much better scorer than he showed last season. He also fills a need in Sacramento because he can swing between shooting guard and small forward.

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• Paul Coro, Arizona Republic: [Robin] Lopez averaged 7.2 points and 4.9 rebounds in 19.3 minutes per game last season and is playing and producing less this season, getting 7.2 points and 3.5 rebounds entering Tuesday night. His shooting percentage dipped from 59 percent to 51 percent, but that is because he has taken more mid-range shots, an area of improvement in his game.  “That’s probably been the biggest mystery for our team,” coach Alvin Gentry said when asked why Lopez’s progression has stopped. “In actuality, we really thought that he would probably be the second-most-important guy on our team, especially if he took a big leap. I’m not real sure if it’s the injury or what, but he hasn’t been able to give us the consistent play that we thought we’d be able to get from him.  We could use it. It’s something that has hurt us a bit. We haven’t really had much inside play. [Marcin] Gortat gives us some. Other than that, we’ve been pretty much resigned to the fact that we’re a perimeter team. That hurts you when you’re going to rely on jump shots night in and night out, even as good of a shooting team as we are.”  Lopez, who turns 23 on April 1, began Tuesday’s game with an offensive rebound that he could not put back on two tries, failing to rise and getting his shot blocked for the fourth time in the past three games. His vertical leap has decreased.

• Ronald Tillery, Memphis Commercial Appeal: However, [Rudy Gay's] surgery to repair his partially dislocated left shoulder should be routine.  “No surgery is 100 percent but he has a very good chance. We expect him to make a full recovery,” said Grizzlies physician Fred Azar, who is the lead orthopedic surgeon at Campbell Clinic. “As a track record, this surgery is a successful surgery. The odds are he’ll do very well.”  Gay suffered the injury Feb. 15 as he was fouled while attempting a shot. His shoulder slipped out of his back and popped back into place, which is rare.  About 90 percent of the time, the shoulder slips out of the front socket and that scenario presents the best prognosis.  Gay suffered a capsule tear that lines the joint. That means arthroscopic surgery is required to repair damaged tissues that occurred at the time of injury. Read More…

• Sam Amick, NBA Confidential: “Carmelo Anthony joined Amar’e Stoudemire in New York, of course, with eight months of maneuverings mercifully ending with the nine-player trade with Denver that made Madison Square Garden his new home on Feb. 22. But a Monday visit from Utah brought with it a retroactive hypothetical, as Jazz general manager Kevin O’Connor made Knicks president Donnie Walsh aware for the first time that it could have been Deron Wiliams wearing the Knicks jersey and not Anthony if those days and dealings had gone differently. As O’Connor told Walsh approximately an hour before the game and would later repeat in an interview with NBA Confidential, he targeted the Nets’ and Knicks’ assets and decided to play the waiting game. Somebody would lose in the Anthony sweepstakes, and that team would immediately hear from O’Connor to discuss a marvelous Plan B. New Jersey played that role in the end, jumping at the chance to give the Jazz the same package they’d presented to the Nuggets in order to land Williams after Anthony went to New York and signed a three-year, $65 million extension.
  O’Connor said other teams had inquired about the All-Star point guard in the days leading up to the deal, but not the Knicks or the Nets. New Jersey general manager Billy King said the possibility was first raised after Anthony was traded. … While Walsh is certainly thrilled to land Anthony, he admitted the notion of landing Wililams would have been appealing had he known he was on the market. Asked if things might have turned out differently if he was privy to that information, Walsh said with a shrug when asked by NBA Confidential, ‘it might have.’”

• Jonathan Feigen, Houston Chronicle: “Rockets center Yao Ming can’t know whether he will play again, but he is certain he’s not ready for his career to be over yet. Facing the possibility that his inability to play without injury would end his career or prompt him to choose to retire, Yao said for the first time since his injury he hopes to come back from the stress fracture that ended his season in November. ‘I’ll try continuing,’ Yao said Thursday. ‘A lot will depend on this foot.’ Asked if he believes he will play again, he said, ‘That’s the direction.’ In the final season of his contract, Yao added he hopes to be back with the Rockets.” Read More…

Darren Collison and the Pacers have perhaps the best shot at earning the last playoff spot in the East. (AP)

The race for the last playoff spot in the Eastern Conference is as pathetic as the race for the bottom four spots in the Western Conference is exciting.

The Pacers, current holders of the eighth slot, have lost four straight games and have gone into a major defensive slump. The Bobcats, pursuing the Pacers as if they were lazy house cats and not predators, have lost five straight. Their combined ineptitude has allowed the Bucks to stay in it even though they’ve been declared dead several times and had lost four of five before blowing out the putrid Wizards on Tuesday.

You know I have a soft spot for the Bucks, and that I’ve been rooting for them to find their 2009-10 groove, sneak into the playoffs and give the top seed some Andrew Bogut-style hell. But the more I watch Bogut struggle with a rib cage muscle strain and a right elbow that clearly still isn’t right, the more I wonder if it might be best for Milwaukee to miss the playoffs, get its core players healthy, take a swing in the lottery and hope Brandon Jennings makes a leap next season.

Even if the Bucks were actually trying to tank (which won’t happen), the Pacers and Bobcats just won’t let them escape playoff contention. This battle for the eighth spot — combined with the sterling play of the Sixers, who are seventh and only a half-game behind the Knicks for sixth — has made it clear that whoever wins the battle for the top seed between Boston and Chicago will have a small but important edge in the playoffs.

As things stand now, facing the Pacers instead of the Sixers or Knicks is a big deal, particularly for an older team such as Boston. Philadelphia and New York always seem to play Boston tough, and having an easy five-game series against Miami last year — as opposed to the bloodbath seven-gamers of Boston’s prior two playoff runs — helped set up the aging Celtics for a Finals run.

So does any team have the edge in this three-team race? I’d rank them like this:

1) Pacers: The heavy favorite, with a one-game lead in the loss column over Charlotte and a two-game lead over the Bucks — and the most favorable schedule of all three clubs.

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• Adrian Wojnarowski, Yahoo! Sports: “For all the flexing and preening, the third-person proclamations and South Beach parties, LeBron James finally delivered these Miami Heat something pure and authentic in the privacy of the locker room: Full of emotion, he apologized for his big-shot, big-games failures and promised redemption. ‘I told my team I’m not going to continue to fail them late in games,’ James told reporters in Miami. ‘I put a lot of the blame on myself.’ James has used the words ‘fail’ and ‘blame’ a lot of times, but seldom in context of his own performances. His idea of accountability has always been his cronies and him nudging you in the direction of the guilty parties – his coach, GM, teammates – but never the global icon in the mirror. LeBron didn’t promise to do different. LeBron promised to do better.”

• Israel Gutierrez, Miami Herald: “When this talent-rich, superstar-heavy version of the Miami Heat was built, the only tears were expected to come as players wrapped their arms around a trophy or drenched themselves in champagne. They weren’t supposed to come from frustrated superstars soaked in failure. The only moving speeches given in the middle of a quiet locker room were supposed to be inspirational pre-game messages from a coach. It was never supposed to be LeBron James apologizing for repeated failures in critical situations. This much disappointment, this kind of emotion was never supposed to be part of the package deal that came with James, Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade. And yet, there was crying Sunday inside the Heat locker room. There was a humbled James. There were crushed hearts and somber superstars. And it’s all because the Heat lost a fourth consecutive game, and for the third time in that stretch did so by missing last-second shots that could’ve changed the entire portrayal of the team. And the situation isn’t going away.”

• T.J. Simers, Los Angeles Times: “Folks awoke here Sunday morning to shocking news. The front-page headline in the San Antonio Express-News read, ‘Alamo Falls at Dawn!” Forget the fact news travels slowly here in backwater country, as the day would only get worse for the locals. Their favorite sons, the San Antonio Spurs, would get wiped out by the Lakers playing at their season best. In a town noted for having no quit, Andrew Bynum added yet more embarrassing commentary on San Antonio’s collapse. He said the Spurs’ ‘starters definitely quit.’ They were certainly no match for the Lakers’ size. Bynum and those in attendance (Jerry Buss, Jim Buss, Magic Johnson and George Lopez) were probably too much for these quitters. The Spurs’ starters combined to score 29 points, and although Bynum scored only four — a dunk to start the first half and another to start the second half — he took only two shots. It was his energy, his 17 rebounds for a second consecutive game and three blocked shots that seemed to take the zip right out of the Spurs, who had won 22 straight at home.”

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• Adrian Wojnarowski, Yahoo! Sports: “Several sources describe a locker room frustrated with [Carmelo] Anthony chasing shots and points over winning games, a resistance to listen to coach George Karl and a distancing of himself throughout the season from the rest of the team.  For these reasons — and a fear of losing him for nothing in free agency — few are buying the bluff of the Nuggets believing they can still convince him to sign a three-year, $65 million contract extension.  ‘With the way he’s distanced himself from the team, the organization, they’re kidding themselves if they think he’s signing a new deal,’ one league official told Yahoo! Sports. ‘He hasn’t checked out on the season because he never checked in.’ The Nuggets are working on a contract extension for Karl, and no one close to him believes he can muster much enthusiasm to keep coaching Anthony. Karl has played along with the company line on wanting to re-sign Anthony, but sources said he’s far more at peace with coaching a rebuilding roster than this mix of Nuggets.”

• Al Iannazzone, Bergen Record: “Most NBA executives believe Carmelo Anthony will be traded by Feb. 24, with the Knicks as the front-runners. But the Bulls are a possibility as well as the Nets, if Denver decides to reengage them in talks. The two sides haven’t spoken since Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov directed general manager Billy King to end talks with Denver last month. But a source said the Nets could get involved again. They continue to have the most to offer in terms of salary-cap flexibility and draft picks. … Trade talks will heat up over All-Star weekend, when team owners and executives descend on Los Angeles for the annual event, to attend some meetings and exchange trade proposals. Prokhorov and King will represent the Nets. If the Nets and Nuggets reopen dialogue, it’s possible Prokhorov and Anthony, who was voted a starter for the West All-Star team, finally could meet and discuss a contract extension. The Nets won’t trade for Anthony if he doesn’t sign one.”

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