Greg Oden in March of 2012 (Getty Images)The Cleveland Cavaliers rank 27th in defense this season, and with Anderson Varejao out for the season (and possibly traded during the offseason) the Cavaliers are reportedly set to offer a contract to one of the greatest defensive big men of his generation. Even if he didn’t actually play for most of this generation’s term.

Jason Lloyd covers the Cavs expertly for the Akron Beacon-Journal, and on Friday he reported that the Cavaliers will offer Greg Oden a two-year contract following the Feb. 21 trade deadline, utilizing cap space that would presumably put the Cavaliers ahead of Oden’s various other suitors, ones that would be offering him a minimum contract. And this is only if the Cavaliers go past the deadline without acting as a trade facilitator with that extra cap space.

From Lloyd’s report:

Oden is living nearby in Columbus. His agent, Mike Conley Sr., said last week Oden has been to see the Cavs a couple of times already, but was evasive when pressed as to what capacity.

“Greg has been up there (to Cleveland) before and he’ll probably be up there again in an official capacity,” Conley said Friday.

'Tssss. Tssss.' (Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBA/Getty Images)

Washington Wizards shooting guard Jordan Crawford is a lot of things — a game-winner, a dominant scorer who passes all the time, a man with strange ideas about shoe storage and a dude with a remarkably irrational amount of confidence. He's also someone who seems like he'd be fun to talk to, as evidenced by his engaging apperance on ESPN's "Dan LeBatard Is Highly Questionable," available in podcast form here, in which he relates a pretty great story about the first time he ever matched up with Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant:

LeBatard: Can you give me a time that you were on the court, on a professional basketball court, and you looked to your right or your left and said, "I can't believe I'm up here with this guy?"

Crawford: I did it with two people. I did with Vince Carter my rookie year. I couldn't believe I was playing him, I was checking him. And then Kobe, of course. When I first played with Kobe, I was hearing — like, they call him "The Black Mamba" — and then he was doing, like, the little snake sounds when he wanted the ball. (laughs) It was crazy. It was crazy. It was crazy. So, them two moments.

LeBatard: Wait a minute — what was this sound? He was calling for the ball by making a snake sound?

Crawford: Yeah, it's like, tssss, tssss. It's like, "Fish, Fish, Fisher — tsssss, tssss." He'd do that. (laughs) And it's like, they call him, they say — like, everybody tells you he's gonna do it before you play him. Like, "Wait 'till you hear him do this." And then he do it, and it's like, "What?" Like he's really a mamba.

The Denver Nuggets can say goodbye to these uniforms for a while (Getty Images)

It’s easy to dismiss Denver’s 126-98 win over the Chicago Bulls from Thursday because the Bulls are working with a shorthanded, injured roster. A 32-point win is a 32-point win, though, and the triumph marked Denver’s eighth victory in a row. The squad’s record currently stands at 32-18, fourth in the west, and the team has finally evened its home and road contests at 25 apiece. This was the hoped-for but not entirely expected response to a tough start to the regular season, one that saw the team play 22 out of its first 31 contests away from Denver.

[Also: Kobe Bryant, Dwight Howard were skeptical of their union]

That’s an unlikely and unfortunate statistical quirk that the Nuggets have all but remedied with sterling home play. Now that the season’s first 50 have passed, though, and the team can settle in for a final 32 spent equally on the road and at home, can George Karl’s group be counted on to go over the top and join the three world-beaters (San Antonio, Oklahoma City, Los Angeles) ranked above them out West?

Denver columnist Mark Kiszla isn’t convinced yet, all while chiding Andre Iguodala for not playing the sort of all-around ball that typically earns someone making as much as Dre does. From the Denver Post:

Iguodala is a clamp-down defender, a true professional and a compelling interview.

But the NBA is not a spelling bee. You don't get paid $15 million for giving intelligent sound bites or getting eliminated in the first round of the playoffs.

James White can take off from very, very far away. (Joe Murphy/NBA/Getty Images)

When the names of the participants in next Saturday's 2013 Sprite Slam Dunk Contest at All-Star Weekend in Houston were announced on TNT on Thursday night, one name seemed to generate the widest range of reactions from basketball fans — James White.

To casual fans, White's inclusion elicited Barkley-style "Who he play for?"-level inquiries; after all, the Cincinnati product's played a grand total of 377 NBA minutes in 44 games over the course of three seasons spread over seven years, spending most of his professional career bouncing around between the NBA, the D-League and Europe before catching on in an end-of-the-rotation capacity with the New York Knicks this season. To those who've been up on the man they call "Flight" for years, though, the news was met with rapturous joy — finally, the guy who's shut down dozens of competitions over the years with his array of behind-the-foul-line aerial acrobatics is going to get his shot to shine on All-Star Saturday Night.

[Related: Past champions highlight 2013 Dunk Contest field]

And while the 30-year-old swingman's far from a household name, he's planning on changing that by bringing a loaded arsenal to Houston, as he told SLAM's Kicks blog:

K1X: Did you prepare for it? Or do you know which dunks you’re going to do?

JW: To be honest, I never practice dunks. I just do whatever comes to my mind.

K1X: But when do you decide what you want to do? Do you decide in mid-air? Granted, you do have a little bit of time up there.

JW: [Laughs] I have a general idea of what I want to do when I take the ball and get ready to jump. Everybody knows that I have the dunks from the free throw line and all that stuff in my back pocket. I can always pull those out. I watch what my competition does in the dunk contest and then decide which of my dunks I will do. I have about five dunks where I’m absolutely certain that I will get a 50 on those. So it’s just a matter of when to use which of those dunks.

Usain Bolt dunks in New Zealand in 2012, but that country's upside-down so it doesn't count (Getty Images)

On Thursday, the NBA announced the participants in the Sprint NBA All-Star Celebrity Game, which is that contest on Friday night that absolutely nobody watches because it’s one of two days in the regular season that we get to take a break from NBA basketball. It’s typically a borderline unwatchable affair filled with bad jokes and bad basketball, even though this year’s roster is rife with unintentional comedy potential. I mean, look at this lineup:

[…] the celebrity rosters will include actor Kevin Hart, rapper Common, R&B singer Ne-Yo, actor Nick Cannon; actor Josh Hutcherson; and ESPN radio host Ryen Russillo.

The teams will also include former NBA players Dikembe Mutombo, Clyde Drexler, Sean Elliott, and Bruce Bowen; and WNBA stars Tamika Catchings and Maya Moore.

I’ve heard of some of those people, I used to listen to one of those people back when he did podcasts, Nick Cannon is hilarious, and Dikembe Mutombo is Dikembe Mutombo.

[Related: NBA announces participants for All-Star Saturday night events]

Usain Bolt is also on the roster. The Jamaican sprinter and six-time gold medalist would seem to be a fascinating and compelling watch, something we were denied in 1984 when the Chicago Bulls drafted but did not sign the legendary runner Carl Lewis. The world’s fastest human playing a sport predicated on speed and athleticism. Dribbling around Ne-Yo, even.

And then, early on Friday, The Basketball Jones’ Trey Kerby had to go and ruin the whole image for us. Watch Usain Bolt stink up the court shooting around after a German playoff game in 2012. Watch:

Hey, who called in the ringers? (Image via scottagness on Instagram)

It's like my grandfather always said: "After you sweep the NBA's only back-to-back-to-back of the season to run your winning streak to five games and retake the lead in the Central Division, you need to find a way to wind down." Clearly, Paul George, Roy Hibbert and George Hill had similarly wise progenitors, because after returning to Indianapolis following their, um, lightly attended Wednesday night win over the Philadelphia 76ers, the Indiana Pacers starters joined a lucky few fans for some spirited games of dodgeball, long the relaxation method of choice for true gentlemen everywhere.

Behold the summer-camp stylings, complete with frenetic multi-ball action, apparently shifting boundary lines and, of course, questionable overalls:

It turns out he will, sooner than expected (Getty Images)

It’s all great news for the Boston Celtics these days!

To start, the team has won six in a row and has just about established that they’ll make this year’s playoff bracket. The team humiliated the very much humiliating Los Angeles Lakers in front of the giddy home fans on Thursday night. Kevin Garnett recently passed 25,000 career points, while working at home, while revealing yet again that he “bleeds green.” This means he’s turned fully sentient robot, and can play center for years!

[Related video: Watch Celtics blow out Lakers]

In more sobering, yet just as fortunate news, it turns out that point guard Rajon Rondo only has a partial tear of the ACL in his right knee. A. Sherrod Blakely of CSNNE.com was the first to report that Rajon may not have to go through the same deliberate returns that Derrick Rose and Ricky Rubio have had to work through with their tears, and that he could return to full strength in only six months. From CSNNE.com:

"It's still too early to tell for sure," his agent Bill Duffy told CSNNE.com. "But we are very optimistic about his return now that we know his injury is only a partial tear and not a full tear."

Kevin Garnett acknowledges the crowd. (Jared Wickerham/Getty Images)

With the clock winding down to the eight-minute mark of the second quarter and the Boston Celtics already holding an eight-point lead over the Los Angeles Lakers, Kevin Garnett cut across the paint to the right mid-post, received an entry pass from Leandro Barbosa, and went to work on Earl Clark. The result was one we've seen countless times in the past: K.G. turning, fading and splashing.

The points were not only his fifth and sixth of the evening, but also gave him 25,000 in his 18-year NBA career, making him just the 16th player in NBA history — and, we note so as not to draw the ire of Curtis Harris, the 20th player in the combined histories of the NBA and ABA — to reach that plateau. The other 15: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Karl Malone, Michael Jordan, Wilt Chamberlain, Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O'Neal, Moses Malone, Elvin Hayes, Hakeem Olajuwon, Oscar Robertson, Dominique Wilkins, John Havlicek, Alex English, Reggie Miller and Jerry West. If we include the ABA days, the list includes Julius Erving, Dan Issel, George Gervin and Rick Barry. Not bad company.

That alone is clearly an amazing enough feat, but Garnett's achievement is even greater when you consider the breadth of his on-court accomplishments — as Celtics radio play-by-play man Sean Grande noted on Thursday, K.G. is now the only player in NBA history with at least 25,000 points, 10,000 rebounds, 5,000 assists, 1,500 blocks and 1,500 steals. So, y'know, that's pretty good.

[Related: Celtics' Rajon Rondo could return earlier than anticipated]

Garnett finished with 15 points, five rebounds, four assists and three steals in just 23 minutes, as Boston got big contributions from seemingly its the roster (eight players with at least eight points, six in double figures, led by Paul Pierce's 24 points, seven boards and six dimes) en route to a 116-95 beatdown of their longtime rivals. The win was the Celtics' sixth straight without injured point guard Rajon Rondo, whose recent injury might not be quite as devastating as initially feared — a "partial" tear of his right anterior cruciate ligament, rather than a full tear — which has already started to stoke speculation that he could return to the court sooner than expected. In the meantime, the Celtics continue rolling, thanks in large part to the continued excellent play of their Hall of Fame big man.

After the jump, hear more from Garnett and watch several of his other major milestone buckets along the way to 25,000.