After general manager Billy Knight delivered an abrupt resignation on Tuesday, Hawks ownership is expected to reach out to several candidates, including Billy King and Bernie Bickerstaff, NBA sources said.

King was the 76ers president and GM for five years, until getting fired in December. Nevertheless, several of his trades and draft picks reflect much more favorably on his tenure after the Sixers surged to the seventh seed in the Eastern Conference playoffs. King and Knight are also considered strong candidates to join New York Knicks president Donnie Walsh in New York as general manager.

Unlike Knight, who pushed for his coach’s ouster this past season, King has a good relationship with the Hawks’ Mike Woodson. After pushing the Boston Celtics to a seventh game in the opening round of the Eastern Conference playoffs, Woodson is expected to receive a contract extension.

Bickerstaff, a 30-year NBA executive and coach, had been Charlotte’s top executive until Michael Jordan bought into

BOSTON – His eyes squinty, his feet shuffling, James Posey hobbled to his locker like an old man. Even when you've played a part in delivering one of the most stunning defensive performances ever thrust on LeBron James, the Cavaliers star still leaves you feeling like a running back the linebackers pounded on a long, cold December day.

Reaching down to clip the tape on his ankles had turned into pure agony Tuesday night, Posey's body too sore to bend one more time. For a defender, this is the most taxing job in basketball: Defending LeBron, and giving up your body for the greater good.

"He's strong," Posey said. The Celtics sixth man isn't interested in talking about his ability to use those long wiry arms, that innate understanding of the angles and lanes that a superstar never wants you to take away. No, he isn't much on talking about stopping James, just doing it.

"He's just very strong," Posey said.

Once in Game 1, Posey had been swinging at the ball and caught James' headband in

The Phoenix Suns’ contending run is over, a franchise that is leaning on older legs and a failed premise for championship parades has reached the end of Mike D’Antoni’s desert mirage. This hustle out of town isn’t so much about a new boss meddling with D’Antoni’s methods, but the coach sniffing out a buyer’s market on the bench. He’s leaving Steve Nash in the dust to chase a $25 million contract score.

This way, D’Antoni won’t have to listen to Steve Kerr’s painful truths about the fatal flaws in his genius. Gimmick coaches don’t have staying power. He’s a younger, fitter Don Nelson. He’s a sharper-dressed Doug Moe. Yet, there is still a glow on his four seasons and a star-less coaching market makes him an attractive hire.

So, he’s requested a chance to talk with other teams and wants out of Phoenix. Who knows who the Suns will hire, but this is for D’Antoni’s own good. Had he stayed with the Suns, and Nash started breaking down, and Shaq struggled, he wouldn’t have been so marketable

BOSTON – Ray Allen had been texting his teammates near midnight, "You still up?" and again at 2:30 a.m, and ultimately the responses trickled into him as Saturday bled into Sunday morning. Out of nowhere, the Atlanta Hawks delivered one final victory over the Boston Celtics, a sleepless night.

Together, the sheepish Celtics dragged themselves to the Garden for Game 7 and delivered a predictable pounding of these young, immature Hawks, whose legs and leaping didn't travel in the NBA playoffs.

Once the Celtics had stepped out of the way of the biggest playoff series disaster in NBA history with a 99-65 victory Sunday afternoon, the owner, Wyc Grousbeck, had come out of the winning locker room with a cheerful declaration that he had given the game ball to Doc Rivers, to commemorate Rivers' first playoff series victory as a coach. "If anyone is interested, Doc did get the game ball (for) winning this series, the first of his career."

And so to watch Kevin Garnett give the throat slash

Here was the most improbable moment on the way to the most improbable Game 7 in NBA playoff history. Late Friday night, late in a series that should've been long over, late in the career of too many stars, Doc Rivers talked to his Boston Celtics the way that you would've expected Mike Woodson to be talking to his fuzzy-cheeked Atlanta Hawks.

"Slow down," the Celtics coach confessed to saying.

"Breathe."

How about that?

Kevin Garnett. Paul Pierce. Ray Allen.

Slow down.

Breathe.

Here comes a Game 7 for the Celtics that no one saw coming, basketball's best team with 66 victories, a steamroll season, and still they are unable to shake the go-go Hawks. A No. 8 seed, a someone-had-to-make-the-Eastern Conference-playoffs afterthought with a losing record, a losing history, and they were standing with 20,000 delirious and stunned fans in Philips Arena chanting, "Seven … Seven … Seven," on Friday night.

Game 7, Sunday at the Boston Garden.

The Hawks did it to the Celtics again, 103-100 in Game

NEW ORLEANS – Byron Scott walked the corridor clutching a crotchety, old enemy in his right hand, the Red Auerbach trophy for the NBA's coach of the year. It was a just reward for a Showtime Laker who hated the old man's stogies in Boston Garden. Still, he lugged that thing until finding the waiting lips of his wife, Anita, for a congratulatory kiss.

Scott had every right to be gloating on Tuesday night, but the coach of the New Orleans Hornets had gone to back-to-back NBA Finals with the New Jersey Nets, been backstabbed out of his job, and no one had to tell him how humbling a moment this had been for him. The Dallas Mavericks' Jason Kidd undermined Scott all the way out the door in Jersey, so it was sweet justice that Kidd had to witness the ceremony at New Orleans Arena on the night a 99-94 loss in Game 5 ended the Mavericks' season.

Yes, Scott is the coach of the NBA's rising power, these go-go Hornets, yet there was no celebrating himself, his trophy, his trip to the Western

Why yes, there were suggestions that Avery Johnson was losing his Dallas Mavericks, including the struggling Josh Howard. No more. The Mavs aren't just listening to the coach, they're reading him, too.

The trouble is, it appears Howard never made it past the title of Johnson's new book, "Aspire Higher."

In perhaps the most stunningly honest, if ill-fated, response to a question in a long, long time in the NBA, Howard said Friday – of all places – on Michael Irvin's radio show, that yes, smoking marijuana was a part of his and his peers' summer vacations.

Surprise, surprise.

" … What I was stating was just [in response to] a random question [the Morning News] asked me about the marijuana use," Howard said. "I just let him know that most of the players in the league use marijuana, and I have and do partake in smoking weed in the offseason sometimes and that's my personal choice and my personal opinion. But I don't think that's stopping me from doing my job."

Well, this was wonderful

NEW ORLEANS – They dismissed the Golden State Warriors playoffs debacle as an aberration a season ago, a perfect storm born out of a bad matchup and a sluggish MVP. The Dallas Mavericks had just gone to the NBA Finals and tantalized themselves with a near-title. Through it all, management suspected the Mavs were one move away. Mark Cuban never did stop longing for Jason Kidd.

The Mavericks were desperate for leadership, a presence and the owner reached his own truth that Dallas could no longer live without Kidd.

For a chance to make a move, to win it all, Cuban made peace with giving away tomorrow for today. Suddenly, there isn’t just no tomorrow without Devin Harris and two first-round draft picks. Most frightening of all, a ghost out of Kidd’s past, Byron Scott, has turned his young point guard, Chris Paul, loose on the Mavericks and suddenly today has been thrust into doubt for Dallas.

The Mavericks are on a spiral so sudden, so jarring, that Game 3 of this Western Conference series