Empty the Bench

NBA Basketball Photo Credit: Jeff Lewis/Icon SMI

- Team unity is a beautiful thing on the NBA hardwood… and especially in pre-game dance circles. I’m not sure which part is best: Rasheed Wallace’s turtle-slow, old-school strut into the middle of the ring, or Primoz Brezec and Walter Hermann doing their Euro-best to get down.

- Knicks legend Willis Reed still thinks that Zach Randolph and Eddy Curry can not only co-exist but flourish lining up next to each other in New York’s frontcourt. He suggests they stop reading the papers and not worry about the buzzsaw of criticism that seemingly chases this franchise at every turn. We humbly propose, instead, that Randolph and Curry dedicate themselves to playing at least sub-par defense, to hitting the boards with purpose, to sharing the ball and not worrying about getting their own shots, to making a consistent attempt to block shots, to….

- TrueHoop’s Henry Abbott has a nice piece on Pierre Pierce, an NBA hopeful with a checkered past who’s doing his best to turn his life around and to not slip any further through the cracks.

- Washington Wizards’ guard DeShawn Stevenson wears a robe around the team’s locker-room facilities. Something tells me he’d never admit how “comfy” it is.

- It’s that time of the year when some NBA pundits come this close to confirming that anywhere between 5 – 10 big-name stars are going to be traded. Of course, it’ll soon be that time of the year when very little happens save for a few low-level exchanges of role players. Yahoo!’s Kelly Dwyer on why the NBA’s trade-deadline season and the various scenarios involved in it do not have to be so far-fetched.

- The Ghosts of Wayne Fontes write a heartfelt, post break-up love letter to Ben Wallace: “You were the prize of the free agent market a couple summers ago. You “claimed” Detroit was your home. And still, when you left I promised to bear no hard feelings. However, Chicago? Come on. I still wonder why? Wait, I know why–it was the money, no it was the respect. There you went on your way to turn the young Bulls into the elite team of the Eastern Conference. Father time is a bitch…ain’t it?”

- This list could probably be expanded to about 20, but Stop Mike Lupica does a bang-up job of proposing, then answering, six questions those lovable New York Knicks need to (try and) answer before next season.

- The good people at YAYsports! were kind enough to include the good people at Empty the Bench twice in the latest NBA Carnivale.

- That Brian Scalabrine is one stand-up guy. Instead of blowing off steam by hitting the casinos after his Celtics lost to the Bobcats this week, everyone’s favorite chubby redhead did what oh so many of us have considered at one time or another: he plunged a screwdriver into a hobo’s neck. Gently.

- Jon Barry for ESPN.com’s Daily Dime writes about five of the NBA’s most surprising teams (surprising in how good they’ve been so far, not in how bad they’ve been–Jalen Rose covered the latter here).