Wednesday Bullets

• "I dunked on a girl, I got beat in a 3-point contest by a musician, and complained about a call -- which I didn't think I'd do in a charity game." Matt Bonner is fantastic, as is this Basketball Jones video of straight Canadian hoops.
• I really don't get into the whole cultish if-you-like-Kobe-you-can't-like-LeBron thing. But seriously, that's messed up.
• Allan Houston's charity website says 90 percent of homeless kids come from homes without fathers. There are tons more stats like that. One thought I often have about that: The NBA schedule does a miserable job of prioritizing parenting. NBA players are never home! This issue is clearly huge and important, and tricky for players and the league. Is someone who took a job spending half the year on the road in a position to lecture on spending time with kids?
• Before he saw it, Michael Lewis was just sure the movie of "Moneyball" would be terrible. And he wrote the book!
• Sounds like I have talked to Scottie Pippen more than Dennis Rodman has.
• Denver's Stan Kroenke is said to be a real hardliner in CBA talks. But the labor uncertainty that hard line is causing has cost his team plenty, with a reported three Nuggets committed to play in China. That same link includes the interesting idea that while the Chinese league won't allow contracts with NBA outs, perhaps those players could simply be cut and then be free to play elsewhere -- as has happened many times in the past.
• J.J. Hickson's butt wins a cameo in a John Wall highlight.
• Jamaal Tinsley wins this highlight reel of the Vegas "Lockout League."
• Instead of revenue sharing, why not a really steep luxury tax, that gets steeper the more you spend? It has a lot going for it. NBA people have told me they're not so into it because it still gives rich teams the ability to make mistakes. As in, they can make a dumb signing, pay the guy off, and then try again. That's a huge competitive advantage, and they are trying to make it so low revenue teams can compete on something like a level playing field. Hence the hard cap talk. All that said, if we're headed for some kind of softish cap system, maybe this idea rides again. What I like about it is that if James Dolan wants to pay a ton for NBA players, far be it from the NBA to make him pay a little. Only thing to work out is how much he has to bribe the other 29 owners to get that right.
• Beckley Mason of HoopSpeak responding to smart stuff from Tom Haberstroh: "The problem there is that moving Steve Nash for younger talent amounts to swapping out an older, borderline elite player, for a younger one on a team that still needs to be demolished, not remodeled. Nash is like a beautiful old bell tower on top of a crumbling Cathedral -- replace him with something shinier or louder and you do little to fortify against total collapse. And that’s why I think it’s unlikely Nash will be traded, barring some unforeseen change to the new CBA that makes it easier to move mega contracts. If Nash leaves the Suns to become a free agent after another year of entertaining (but not necessarily successful) basketball, the Suns will get bupkis in return. At that point, it’s possible that Phoenix would have the worst roster in the NBA. This is a good thing."

Source: http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/32071/wednesday-bullets-208

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