NBA Top 10 Power Rankings

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How do you think O.J. Mayo is playing?

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The Answer to the Palace?? Allen Iverson sent back to the Eastern Conference where do the Nuggets and Pistons stand after this trade?

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The shakeup promised by Detroit Pistons president Joe Dumars after last season's Eastern Conference finals has materialized just two games into the new season. The Pistons have reached an agreement in principle with the Denver Nuggets to acquire guard Allen Iverson in exchange for Detroit mainstays Chauncey Billups and Antonio McDyess, club sources told ESPN's Stephen A. Smith.

Power Rankings: Celtics begin on top, back and ready for more

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Power Rankings: Best and worst over past six seasons

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1 San Antonio Spurs 59 23 .720 1 10 3.17 High: Wk 18, 2007-08 (most recent of 36) | Low: Wk 7, 2002-03 (most recent of 2) | Rankings archive Surely this outcome doesn't surprise you. The Spurs wound up halting the Lakers' three-peat run and winning the championship in the first season that the committee (of one) presided over these rankings and won two more titles after that. Then they've got a string of nine consecutive 50-win seasons going and generally rank as the franchise, from top to bottom, every other team wishes it could emulate. Who else could occupy this perch? 2 Dallas Mavericks 58 24 .707 1 15 4.23 High: Wk 12, 2006-07 (most recent of 30) | Low: Wk 22, 2007-08 | Rankings archive Snicker all you want about the Mavs' playoff exploits since the 6:30 mark of the fourth quarter in Game 3 of the 2006 NBA Finals. None of that considerable misery can change the fact that these rankings are a regular-season enterprise, which has made it impossible not to notice that Dallas has posted an average record of 58-24 over the past six seasons … and thus impossible not to rank these tortured souls accordingly. 3 Detroit Pistons 56 26 .683 1 13 5.15 High: Wk 16, 2007-08 (most recent of 25) | Low: Wk 2, 2006-07 | Rankings archive Hard to imagine that anyone would claim that Detroit hasn't fully deserved its regular spot in our top five. Frustrated as Pistons fans might be to come away from six consecutive trips to the East finals with only one championship, there's been only one source of positive consistency emanating from the Leastern Conference since Michael Jordan's retirement … and this team is it. 4 Phoenix Suns 51 31 .622 1 27 8.59 High: Wk 4, 2007-08 (most recent of 15) | Low: Wk 16, 2003-04 (most recent of 2) | Rankings archive Yet another illustration of Steve Nash's impact in his second stint as a Sun has been playing out right here in our domain. Even though Nash has been back on Planet Orange for just four of the past six seasons -- and even though the two seasons before his return were mostly forgettable -- Phoenix has nonetheless crashed the top five comfortably.

What do you think about Josh Howard's disrespect to our National Anthem??

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DALLAS -- A YouTube video from a charity flag football game in July has Dallas Mavericks forward Josh Howard embroiled in controversy yet again. The video, from Allen Iverson's event, shows Howard, as the national anthem is being sung, saying: "'The Star-Spangled Banner' is going on. I don't celebrate this [expletive]. I'm black." Howard also makes a hard-to-hear reference to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama (see the video here; some viewers may find content offensive).

Hawks' Smith signs Grizzlies' 5-year, $58M offer sheet, report says

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Team USA: D-Wade the embodiment of Redeem Team

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SHANGHAI, China -- If the Redeem Team moniker is going to stick, we'll have to anoint Dwyane Wade the embodiment of that nickname. Two years and two months ago, he was the young phenom the NBA couldn't embrace enough. Six months ago, he was the broken-down, human-turnover machine whose best work was being done in television commercials. But as we move into August -- the month in which we'll all learn whether Wade and the rest of Team USA will end America's eight-year gold-medal drought -- we're seeing a Wade 2.0 who's finally back to looking like the Wade who led the Miami Heat to the 2006 NBA championship. "Last year was not a fair indication of the player he is," Kobe Bryant said Saturday. "He's healthy, he's strong, he's ready to go. The other night he caught a lob and windmilled it, so he's back all the way." Wade has been the second-leading scorer for Team USA through its first three exhibition games, averaging 17.4 points on 71 percent shooting (80 percent on 3-pointers) as the Americans have rolled past Canada, Turkey and Lithuania. Wade scored 15 of his team-high 19 points in just seven second-half minutes Friday as the Americans defeated Lithuania by 36 points, pulling away after a 19-point lead had dwindled to nine early in the second half. Wade was the offensive catalyst in the decisive surge, earning player of the game honors as the Americans finished off their five-day trip to Macau with a performance that boosted both their individual and their collective self-confidence. Wade's teammates lauded him for his three-game body of work, but also for the work he's been putting in behind the scenes, working overtime to add the catch-and-shoot jumper to a repertoire best known for his ability to get to the hoop. "Well, first of all, any compliment you get from your peers or your teammates means more than compliments that come from outside," Wade said. "So I appreciate LeBron [James] and the guys for saying that and really being behind me the whole time. Like I've been preaching and I've been saying, I've worked my tail off to get healthy. I haven't been healthy in two years after going through that long season, winning the championship, coming right back to compete in the FIBA World Championship. "I didn't have time to rest my body, so it wore down over the next year, and that's when I had two surgeries. I'm healthy again, I'm as healthy as I've been in two years, and I'm excited not only about this opportunity, but I'm excited about the rest of my career because now I know what it takes, and that weight room has become my best friend." Like his teammates, Wade bounded off the team bus with a little extra zip in his step late Saturday as the team arrived at its new hotel in Shanghai and immediately made a beeline to an adjacent California Pizza Kitchen, outfoxing the few fans who had received advance notice of their impending arrival and were staking out the front entrance. [+] EnlargeMN Chan/Getty Images Wade says he's 100 percent healthy and is showing it with explosive moves to the hoop. Bryant, Jason Kidd and Dwight Howard represented the team at an early evening news conference, whispering and passing inside jokes to one another as they sat through English and Mandarin translations of every question and answer. (The only time they all knocked off the goofiness and snapped to attention was when a question was posed regarding Argentina's comeback from a 19-point deficit against Australia the previous night -- a game in which Luis Scola scored 28 of his 32 points in the second half as the defending Olympic champion squad showed itself to be starting to hit its stride at last after two exhibition losses to Spain and a closer-than-expected victory over Iran.) The Americans' next match comes Sunday at 3 p.m. local time (3 a.m. ET, ESPN2) against defending European champion Russia (there won't be another afternoon game until the final day of the Olympics, Aug. 24), and coach Mike Krzyzewski already has told them they can have Monday off before playing their final pre-Olympic tune-up Tuesday against Australia. Chief American scout Tony Ronzone sat outside a Starbucks and greeted the American players as they disembarked from their bus after a two and a half hour commercial flight from Macau to Shanghai. He dispensed nuggets of information gleaned from his trip to Nanjing, China, to scout the FIBA DiamondBall Tournament -- and wondered aloud why Lithuania had used two of its best players, Ramunas Siskauskas and Linas Kleiza, so sparingly Friday, and why the Lithuanians had not given any playing time to one of their more versatile big men, Darius Lavrinovic? As impressed as he was with the accounts he had read and heard about the victory, Ronzone seemed to believe the Lithuanians were playing possum to a certain degree, showing the Americans very little of their repertoire in the hopes that Team USA would be lu

Nuggets Send Camby to Clippers

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Ten things that should happen in the draft … but won't

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1. Kevin Love gets love In a perfect world he'd be gone by 8 p.m. ET. But that won't happen. In any other recent draft -- with the exception of 2003 -- Kevin Love would have been an automatic top-five selection. Blame his moms and pops for not getting busy a few years earlier, because he would have had his own sweepstakes in 2005 and 2006, when Andrea Bargnani and Andrew Bogut were the top choices. Jamie Squire/Getty Images The best for Kevin McHale to get fans to forgive him for trading KG? Draft O.J. Mayo. 2. "And with the third pick, the Minnesota Timberwolves select … O.J. Mayo The whole Miami thing (Shawn Marion not opting out, Pat Riley having questions about Michael Beasley's "character," last-minute secret workouts of point guards) messed up the most perfect fit in the draft. Mayo is perfect for the Wolves. The perfect complement to Al Jefferson, the perfect mystique and sexiness to build a PR campaign around, the perfect draft pick to make up for Rashad McCants and not have Minnesota rely on Marko Jaric's eight points per game at shooting guard. The perfect player who in a few years could make a city forget the hell Kevin McHale put them through for getting rid of KG. 3. The Bucks pick anyone but Joe Alexander The center/power forward-by-committee continues. At 6-foot-8, Alexander is the type of high-risk player the Bucks have been stockpiling since the Ray Allen era ended five years ago. Still in search of that big-time big (Yi Jianlian, Bogut, Charlie Villanueva, Dan Gadzuric), the Bucks are addicted to spending high first-round draft picks on players considered "projects." Alexander is no Kevin Pittsnogle, but he's still a project. 4. The Nuggets trade J.R. Smith and a future No. 1 pick to the Sonics for the fourth pick … And draft Russell Westbrook. How beautiful would that be? Westbrook in the backcourt with AI? The enigma that has become J.R. Smith can move elsewhere, taking the mental mistakes that have haunted him in the past two playoffs. Regardless of whether Melo is in a Nuggets uniform in November or whether George Karl is the coach in January, Westbrook -- the second coming of Baron Davis -- would fit in Denver as Tim Russert did in the "Meet the Press" chair. 5. The Spurs draft a player from America Be honest, it's time for Pop to stay home. It's time for him to draft east of Crenshaw and west of Brooklyn. The Spurs need to rethink their international approach and realize that they already have two of the three best foreign players in the world, and the chances of getting one more are anorexic. It's time to find another Bowen instead of discovering the next Ginobili. The Lakers lost to Boston in six but took the Spurs out in five, so shouldn't DeAndre Jordan or Chris Douglas-Roberts seem attractive to San Antonio? 6. The Pistons pick CDR to become Rip Hamilton's protégé Every star needs an understudy, someone who can carry on his legacy. Think of how Detroit lucked out with Rodney Stuckey "studying" under Chauncey Billups this season. As one of the best backcourts of this generation starts to age, Dumars could lay the blueprint for the next phase by drafting the player everyone knows is going to be Rip reincarnated. That's much more important right now than trying to trade Sheed. 7. J.R Giddens (New Mexico) and Mike Taylor (Iowa State) hear their names In every draft, certain players remain on the board because of persistent questions about their character and professionalism. In this year's draft these two will be affected the most. (Michael Beasley also will be affected, but for him to drop from No. 2 to No. 3 is essentially irrelevant.) Each has major talent but has not been able to shake the baggage attached to him during his college career. (Taylor was kicked out of school after his junior season and played last season in the NBA Development League; Giddens was suspended at New Mexico in 2007 for "not being a good teammate.") It's always said that the "B" in NBA stands for business, not basketball. Giddens and Taylor are about to discover how real that really is. 8. The Lakers trade Lamar Odom and the 58th pick to Sacramento for Ron Artest Someone from the Lakers needs to go, and they need Ron-Ron to beat the Celtics next season. Odom is the most attractive trade bait GM Mitch Kupchak has with which the Lakers would be willing to part. 9. A GM takes a real risk on Bill Walker He's been labeled as the new Vince Carter … which may not be a good thing. Walker, if he chooses to seriously work on his game in the next three to five years, could be the steal of this draft. He could make the Vince analogies an insult. With the right team and the right amount of patience, he could be another Gerald Wallace or Jason Richardson, but more athletic and more explosive. Scary, ain't it? 10. "The Chicago Bulls select … Michael Beasley" Derrick Rose is too good to pass up, but once GM John Paxson finds out he can't move

TLock21's Mock NBA Draft

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Anthony's plea results in probation, community service

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Carmelo's agent assured forward will not be traded

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Anthony's representatives, Nuggets' brass to address trade rumors

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Are the Lakers and Celtics the favorites for next year???

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Another NBA Blockbuster Trade Brewing That Includes 6 NBA BIG Names: Melo, Camby, Kenyon Martin, and Chucky Atkins to Detroit for Chauncey Billups, TayShaun Prince, Rasheed Wallace, and the 29th pick in this years draft. What do you think of this Trade

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The Nuggets' and Pistons' plans for this season didn't work out. The Nuggets can't get out of the first round in the West. The Pistons didn't get back to the Finals in the East. If they do this deal, there will be new, improved plans in Denver and Detroit. And I just love it when a plan comes together.

The Lakers Know Powe's Name Now

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Nuggets Coach George Karl has hip replaced- Shouldn't he be replaced?

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The Denver Nuggets say coach George Karl has undergone left hip replacement surgery. All the best to Karl and a speedy recover. However I can't help but think Karl should rest up and take a permanent break as head coach of the Denver Nuggets. A team in dire need of a turnaround.

All NBA defensive team

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KG, Kobe, Marcus Camby, Bruce Bowen, Tim Duncan

Bryant expected to be named MVP at Tuesday press conference

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