ESPN NBA

• Eli Saslow: "Sam Ashaolu had spent more than six years working toward a basketball career at a Division I college. Two high schools. Two prep schools. Two community colleges. He journeyed everywhere it seemed, from Toronto, to Florida, to North Dakota, before finally landing a scholarship at Duquesne... He was fully expecting to have a breakout season... Ashaolu, 23, remains in critical condition at a Pittsburgh hospital with three bullet fragments lodged deep in his head, family members said."
• Julius Hodge on the mend from his shooting.
• Hornets wouldn't mind a little more time in Oklahoma City. Shocker.
• Speedy Claxton broke his hand. The Journal-Constitution website is running this photo of Claxton with hand pain, but as he's in a Hornets uniform, surely that's not from this injury which was sustained while training in Philadelphia.
• Female Team USA also lost in the semi-finals of the world championship against a team that had an unusually hot shooting night (in this case, Russia). Moral of both stories: the rest of the world is good at basketball too, and in single elimination tournaments, even the best team face a tough road to the title. (Think of it another way: before the NCAA tournament starts, who's the favorite? How often does that team win? Maybe a quarter of the time?) UPDATE: Seriously in-depth analysis of what went wrong.
  
  
• Paul Pierce tells Steve Bulpett about Sebastian Telfair: “Sebastian’s not going to take a lot of time to get used to playing with his teammates. He knows the game. He plays the game at a frenzied pace. I think when you saddle him with plays, it’s to his disadvantage. If you let him go, it’s to his advantage."
• Delonte West, meanwhile, should be celebrated for not having a problematic ego.
• Things look terrible for the arena in Sacramento, but I have to say, I find the Maloofs explanation of events, and their rationale for their recent freak out, entirely understandable.
• LeBron James on MTV, as quoted by Nate Jones J.E. Skeets:

Landon: What if you wake up tomorrow and you’ve got a million dollars? What do you do with something like that?

LeBron: What? What you– what you mean?

Landon: You’ve got a million bucks, out of nowhere. You can do anything.

Jody: Make believe. Like and you have a million dollars.

LeBron: No I’ve had million dollars for like … like four years now...

• Nets Daily: Kidd has never lost wearing the red, white, and blue, racking up a 28-0 record. Neither has Carter, who is 18-0. Both have an Olympic gold medal from Sydney and the gold from the 2003 Tournament of the Americas. Kidd also has a gold from the 1999 Americas competition.
• Patrick Ewing reportedly says he should have retired a Knick, and questions Eddy Curry's desire.
• Mike Barrett, on Juan Dixon at the company picnic: "...while people mingled around him, ate barbeque, listened to music, and conversed, Juan continued to work. There's an automatic rebounding machine that fires passes out to the perimeter, so that players can work alone. Juan wore this thing out last night. The machine not only rebounds and passes, it counts your makes and misses, and even gives you your shooting percentage. During the time I was watching Dixon he was 46 for 50 from the top of the key area(see photo). He didn't even seem to notice the people around him." (Sidenote, I'd love to have one of those machines.) There were also Blazer executives in a dunk tank.
• Say something mean about Rodney Carney, and you might wind up on his "hater board."
• Russ Bengston: "...when the headline [Grant] Hill: I Feel Great Now appeared in today’s Florida Today, well, the first reaction was fear. After all he’s been through, isn’t that pushing it? I half-expect to see a follow-up headline tomorrow. Something like, 'Hill: Um, Never Mind, My Leg Just Fell Off.' And hasn’t he felt great before? And hasn’t it just led to more misery? Not to mention the guy’s turning 34, and has had more surgery than Jocelyn Wildenstein. His leg been the subject of more headlines than Barbaro’s. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see the old Grant Hill back. Hell, I even hope he comes out with the Fresh Prince high-top fade. But I don’t want to be getting my hopes so high just yet."
• Kansas City Star columnist Jason Whitlock starts talking about former page 2 colleague Scoop Jackson, ends up saying this: "Black people are tired of letting idiots define who we are. It’s dangerous. I grew up loving hip hop music. But the [bleep] is way out of hand now. Flavor Flav went from fighting the power with Chuck D to a minstrel show on VH1. You have all of these young rap idiots putting out negative images about black men and black women, and it’s on us to stop it and say enough is a enough. It’s not on white people. And it’s not on old black people like Cosby and Oprah. We have to police our own. W.E.B. Dubois talked about the talented 10 percent leading the black masses. We’re letting the Ignorant 5 lead us straight to hell."
• Garry St. Jean-in-Portland rumors. And a Tim Kawakami column saying St. Jean could save the Warriors, by getting hired in Portland.
• Playing in Europe is not all glamour.
• UPDATE: Ain't that embarrassing. Only just now did I realize yesterday's bullets were never published. They're up now.