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    Adrian Wojnarowski

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    Adrian Wojnarowski is the NBA columnist for Yahoo! Sports. His book "The Miracle of St. Anthony: A Season with Coach Bob Hurley and Basketball's Most Improbable Dynasty"; was a New York Times best-seller. He is a 1991 graduate of St. Bonaventure University, where he considers Butler Gymnasium's rims to be the most giving in the game.

    • Boylan right to let Bulls decide Noah's fate

      Sometimes NBA coaches, drunk on false power and endless ego, tell themselves that they’re running the locker room. They think they have control. The good ones understand that arrogance eventually costs them everything.

      Suddenly, there is a suggestion Jim Boylan is soft for honoring his Chicago Bulls players vote that insisted on a longer suspension for rookie Joakim Noah’s belligerent behavior.

      Boylan isn’t soft.

      As an interim coach, trying to win the full-time job, he looks smart today.

      No one wins until a locker room, until a basketball team, takes ownership of itself. Noah had been trying people’s patience with late arrivals and borderline attitude this season. Finally, the Florida rookie unleashed a nasty, personal diatribe on an assistant coach correcting him on the practice floor. Boylan suspended him for Friday’s game, but the Bulls players agreed that they wanted to send a sterner message to Noah.

      They called for the suspension to take him out of a second game. The Bulls think

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    • Last Shot: Cousy thrilled Boston's back in hunt

      He buried his coach – “Arnold,” Bob Cousy called Auerbach – and realized that it had been 20 years since Red had seen something to the standard of Boston Celtics greatness. Red died a year ago and the Celtics still were an embarrassment. The way it had gone for so long, Cousy started to believe he would never see the Celtics chase a championship again.

      “I’m 79,” Cousy said by phone this week, “and I didn’t think I would experience this again in my lifetime. This has been…”

      He hesitated to think of the word.

      “…emotional for me.”

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      • It was one thing for ESPN’s Jay Bilas to keep defending Tommy Amaker’s brutal run as coach at Michigan, but another to start going after his successor, John Beilein, for being honest about the pitiful program left him in Ann Arbor.

      The more Bilas shills for Amaker, the more people in basketball laugh at him.

      Unlike Amaker, Beilein never had the ultimate coaching godfather to pick up the phone and get him a job.

      “C’mon Jay, that is
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    • Scott no longer blinded by Hollywood lights

      As Byron Scott kept notes under Pat Riley and Larry Brown, the biggest coaching seat in Los Angeles was always in the back of his mind.

      He wanted to be a coach.

      He wanted to go home again.

      As an Inglewood kid raised in the shadows of the Fabulous Forum, the Showtime running mate for Magic Johnson, there would turn out to be one more connection that could’ve delivered Scott to the Staples Center. Eleven years ago, Kobe Bryant had come to the Lakers and Jerry West brought Scott back to mentor him. Bryant insists that Scott taught him his most important lessons on professionalism.

      “As long as Kobe is there, you would think about that job because of the relationship I had with him,” Scott said.

      As much as a part of the New Orleans Hornets coach will be a Laker for life, the strangest thing has happened in his four years with the most fragile franchise in the sport: Out of the rubble, and losing and moving boxes, Scott has come to an improbable truth: His dream job found him.

      The Lakers

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    • West helping lead Hornets' rise

      As a young star at Wake Forest, Chris Paul would listen to his coach, Skip Prosser, raise his name over and over. Here's how David West played the game. Here's how David West worked. Here's how David West acted.

      "David West," Chris Paul sighed on a cell phone Thursday. 'He was all I ever heard about."

      Prosser had moved to the ACC out of the Atlantic 10, but his heart was forever with a self-made player who stayed four years at Xavier and made himself the National Player of the Year. A different breed of college coach, the late Prosser was a sincere, self-deprecating high-school history teacher who never played the part of the used-car salesman. When a kid connected with Prosser, it spoke something of his soul.

      "When Coach Prosser first got to Wake, he kept telling me about the young guy he got there," West said Thursday. "And I know the kind of guy that Coach recruited."

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      • Please explain this to me: Seton Hall recruited a player with fairly dubious academic
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    • The NBA's five most disappointing teams

      More than anyone, Houston Rockets owner Les Alexander believed Jeff Van Gundy was holding back his basketball team. Alexander berated his ex-coach for playing too deliberately on offense and costing him customers. Why, the owner lamented, can’t we play like the Phoenix Suns?

      As it turns out, Van Gundy wasn’t holding the Rockets back.

      He was holding them together.

      After Alexander dropped Van Gundy for Rick Adelman, new general manager Daryl Morey had sold people on the Rockets as a serious challenger for the Western Conference championship. He traded for Argentine forward Luis Scola, signed Steve Francis and activated Bonzi Wells. There was a growing belief that he had constructed a roster to benefit Adelman’s accomplished offensive mind.

      Yes, the Rockets insisted, the handcuffs were gone. Now, the Rockets could let loose.

      And how’s that going?

      They discovered the truth about this team’s limitations. From Tracy McGrady’s mental and physical fragility to an absence of athleticism, they

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    • Last Shot: Lakers' youth starting to develop

      Once the roster had been determined in training camp, Phil Jackson gathered his players for a meeting at the Lakers hotel in Hawaii. All around the room, they were required to stand one by one, give their name and say something about themselves.

      And so, the rookies, Javaris Crittenton and Coby Karl, rose, and the old returning champion, Derek Fisher, and finally, the most famous man in the room climbed to his feet.

      “Hi, I’m Kobe Bryant and I want to win a championship.”

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      • So Eddie Sutton didn’t like how his career ended at Oklahoma State? You mean, slumped over a wheel drunk?

      And he doesn’t like that he isn’t in the Basketball Hall of Fame?

      So, this is the University of San Francisco’s problem?

      For them to hire Sutton to coach the rest of this season is a disgrace. He keeps saying that he just wants to get two more victories to reach 800 in his career, and you have to question the motives of a coach returning just long enough to stockpile victories to get into
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    • Parker returning to Miami

      Smush Parker has returned to Miami where his agent said the Heat front office has invited the banished guard to rejoin the team.

      “(Heat general manager) Randy Pfund called me (Wednesday) and told me that they need Smush back down there,” the agent, Billy Ceisler, said Thursday afternoon.

      Parker flew from New York to Miami Thursday afternoon.

      President and coach Pat Riley made Parker leave the Heat after an altercation with a valet parking attendant on Nov. 27. Upon signing a two-year, $4.6 million free agent contract over the summer, Parker played just nine games before the exile. He had been working out in New York recently, waiting to learn of Riley’s next move.

      Parker, who had been the Lakers starting point guard for two seasons, became eligible for a trade on Dec. 15, but league executives have been wary based on Riley removing him from the team. The Heat aren’t required to announce his activation until an hour before game time on Friday night against Orlando at American Airlines

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    • Mourning never took the easy way out

      Everyone told Alonzo Mourning to walk away with the Miami Heat’s championship two seasons ago. What else was left? Perhaps the parade down Biscayne Boulevard would’ve been a perfect storybook ending for everyone else, but ’Zo’s journey had been so different, so dramatic, maybe it wasn’t perfect for him.

      His life, his story, had never been neat and tidy this way.

      So yes, the disturbing tearing of tendons and muscles on Wednesday night was a horrible scene. Mourning crumpled to the floor clutching his knee, his basketball season, his career, over. And then, there was ’Zo. They wanted to carry him off the court, but he bit his lip, climbed to his feet and declared that he’d be damned if they were going to wheel him out of the gymnasium. He threw his arms around his teammates, and Alonzo Mourning, the last tough guy, limped to the locker room.

      BASKETBALL PLANET
      Just one for Christmas…

      • You might remember the story of Brian Dux, the ex-Canisius college star who had become a popular
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    • Revamped Celtics bring out best in Pistons

      BOSTON – Karma, Joe Dumars was saying. He's taught the Detroit Pistons to believe in karma, taught them that the good comes back to you. This is the reason he never got angry with Chauncey Billups for playing the part of buddy to Kevin Garnett, for telling him it would be wise to take that trade to the Celtics.

      Back in the summer, Billups shrugged and explained himself this way to Dumars: "Hey, it's good karma, man. I did what's right."

      Five months later, on a cold December morning at the new Boston Garden, Dumars considered the consequences of Billups' act of friendship for an old Timberwolves teammate.

      Chauncey, you told KG to do … what?

      "I did have to swallow hard," Dumars said with a smile, "but I accepted the good karma."

      As it turns out, these Celtics are the best thing to happen to these Pistons. Deep down, Dumars loves it. Hours before Billups punctuated a magnificent performance with old-school guard play on Wednesday night, beating the Celtics with guile and guts and two free

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    • Blazers found way to reach, teach Outlaw

      The look in the poor kid's eyes told Bob Hurley that the long, spindly kid out of Starkville, Miss., was lost. Drills? Offensive sets?

      Just a blank stare.

      As diligently as the St. Anthony of Jersey City (N.J.) coach tried to direct Travis Outlaw to play LeBron James in the 2003 Roundball Classic in Chicago, it felt useless. The difference between the first two high school players picked in the 2003 NBA draft – No. 1 and No. 23 – promised to be monumental.

      If James had been the most prepared prospect to ever make the prom-to-the-pros leap, Outlaw looked like the longest of shots.

      "He had a hard time getting through the organization of one of those practices," Hurley said. "He was totally unprepared."

      Just imagine how lost and confused Outlaw would be upon arrival in Portland as a teenager out of that small Southern town, an earnest, naïve kid walking into the backend of the Jail Blazers era. At 6-foot-9, a specimen selected on the rawest of athleticism, Outlaw could've been considered a

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