National Basketball Association

National Basketball Association

Come on! Come on! Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? He didn't even get hit in the face! Take a look at this, folks. I gotta show it to you. Take a look at this.

Teams that finish in the bottom four of the Premier League have a 14% chance of getting the first pick in the draft. But with every place you climb, your chances of acquiring a top pick and turning everything around actually deteriorate. So what would you do in this scenario? Tell your players to keep fighting and maybe edge up a place or two? Or would you discreetly try to lose for Lamine or collapse for Cubarsi by resting big names and letting sporting gravity take its course?

St. John's and Connecticut, the top two seeds, are heavily favored to meet in Saturday's championship game. They are the only Big East schools ranked in the Associated Press top 25 poll: UConn is sixth and St. John's is 13th. Both are locks for the NCAA tournament, as is Villanova, the No. 3 seed.

Ejiofor propelled the 18th-ranked Red Storm (25-6, 18-2) to their second consecutive outright regular-season title, averaging 17 points, seven rebounds, four assists and 1.8 blocks in league games. He is the lone player in high-major college basketball to lead his team and rank among the top 10 in his conference in all four of those statistical categories.

After helping lead UConn to its third straight undefeated Big East regular season, Strong was named the conference Player of the Year and Defensive Player of the Year. Strong averaged 18.6 points, 7.6 rebounds, 3.2 steals and 1.6 blocks through 30 games this season. She recorded 13 20-point games and eight double-doubles, and she ranks seventh in the nation in steals.

St. John's and UConn have been far and away the two best teams in the Big East this season. The Red Storm and Huskies combined to go 35-5 in conference play. St. John's suffered a single loss, which came at the hands of UConn, since January 6. UConn stumbled a bit in February with three losses, but it also held St. John's to 40 points on February 25.

Achiuwa has been a flickering light of hope for the Kings, who have the worst record in the entire league. He's been on fire over his last eight games, racking up a slew of points, rebounds, steals and blocks, while shooting a crisp 59% from the floor. With Domantas Sabonis shut down for the season, it's Achiuwa who has been the real star.

They were just ruled out for the rest of the game. We'll evaluate them tomorrow, but when they went out they weren't coming back. Both players were ruled out midway through the fourth quarter of a Thunder win that extended their lead over the San Antonio Spurs for the top seed in the Western Conference to 3.5 games.

The goalposts always move for me. We got a top-five defense, and it's like I've heard nothing about it. ... I do think I should be on an All-Defensive team. I feel like that's understood. But people might try to pick other dudes or whatever the case may be. They try to use anything. I don't even know what the criteria is anymore because at first it was about winning, and then you got guys that aren't winning that are on the team.

You got people that are alcoholics, you got people that are drug addicts and stuff like that. What was Zion's problem? Food! Food addict!

Billups and Jones are accused of luring unsuspecting players to poker games rigged by the mob. They and the rest of the defendants, who include purported organized crime figures and suppliers of equipment to rig the games, have pleaded not guilty.

Even the games we haven't scored a lot of points, like at Chicago and then Houston, our defense has gotten better. We had five guys on a string. They shut down Houston in the fourth quarter a week ago in a dramatic comeback and gave up just 99 points to Chicago on the road before losing decisively to Cleveland.

It's an unnecessary move and a necessary reaction. There is no such a thing -- I think there's not supposed to be those things on a basketball floor. So it was just an unnecessary move and a necessary reaction by me.