“That’s Carmelo, right? Why are they showing Carmelo? What is going on? Why am I seeing Carmelo so much? Did he do/say something controversial or something?!”

“NBA in its infinite wisdom has banished hoops to the TV nether regions. Sigh.”

assuming you mean NBC, not sure what you’re expecting. I personally find international ball deadly dull, I’d rather watch summer league. anyway, the gold medal game is on live tonight at 2:30 AM EST on NBC, and we’re doing the bronze game just before that on USA (midnight EST). but with Ginobili and Nocioni both hurt, I’m not expecting anything even close to entertainment.

if Calderon is out again, our man Ricky Rubio should start for Spain, that’ll be interesting to keep an eye on.

I would be equally happy with Paul, Lebron, or Howard. They are three best players in the NBA right now, and probably for some time to come.

NBC just ran a profile of Lebron and Carmelo. Melo has been really mediocre in this Olympics, but the marketing machine rolls on I guess. Meanwhile I have to wonder why the hell he and his 41.5% fg% has played more minutes than Chris Bosh.

And amidst all this talk about how much China idolizes Kobe, can we talk about how Dwyane Wade has played much much better than he has?

Honestly, I think what’s going on with Kobe is that he wants to be here at the Olympics in China, for a lot of reasons, but he doesn’t want to get hurt, which is why he has been the “perimeter stopper” but has only 9 free throws and 19 rebounds in 161 minutes. It’s a pretty canny strategy, not much risk, and he will still get most of the credit not allocated to Lebron, simply because he is Kobe.