Shoot the J

Starting on Saturday, National Basketball Association teams can now take a long hard look at their summer spending and decide whether it was all worth it. December 15th marks the official point when teams can trade draft picks or free agents they signed over the summer, provided they signed them at least three months ago.

It's an occasion that usually kicks off the silly season within the real season in the league; when trade talk becomes the daily grist of the rumour-mill websites like Hoopshype and RealGM. It's not that teams couldn't have traded players before the 15th - Orlando shipped forward Trevor Ariza to the LA Lakers earlier this year, for example - but now, with this extra pool of players to add to convoluted four-team deals, trades become much simpler.

Which means, if the rumours are to be believed, that a whole bunch of point guards are going to be changing jerseys.

On Thursday the Phoenix Suns had a day off, sandwiched as it was between two sets of back-to-back road games.

You might think the Suns would appreciate the day of rest. After all, aren't four games in five nights the scourge of the NBA player, the kind of merciless scheduling that allows players the justification to take a night or two off?

Not for these Suns.

"I like four games in five nights," said Suns point guard and favourite Canadian Steve Nash on Wednesday night. "The night between games is like halftime."

Six and a half years ago, two U.S. junior college players entered their names in the NBA draft. Both were 6-foot-8 forwards who, based on their athleticism, oozed potential. But they were up against considerable odds: no junior college player had ever been drafted in the first round before. For most JuCo players, the leap was to a big Division I school like Oklahoma or Tennessee, not the NBA.

One of them, as it turned out, bucked the odds and was taken in the lottery, earning himself millions of dollars in guaranteed money. The other wasn't so lucky. He wasn't drafted, got an invitation to join the Milwaukee Bucks summer league team, but didn't get a training camp invite.

The first fellow's name is Kedrick Brown, and after five forgettable seasons with Boston, Cleveland and Philadelphia, he's down in the minors, playing for the Anaheim Arsenal in the National Basketball Development League.

The second fellow? His name is Jamario Moon.

Montreal native Joel Anthony joined a select club at the start of the NBA season, becoming the fourth Canadian in the league after he survived the final cuts and made the Miami Heat's 15-man roster. It's an honour only three others share: Victoria's Steve Nash (Phoenix), Toronto's Jamaal Magloire (New Jersey) and Montreal's Samuel Dalembert (Philadelphia).

The six-foot-nine, 260-pound Anthony played in the U.S. collegiate ranks last year for the UNLV Runnin' Rebels and was also a member of the 2006 Canadian men's national team, but sat out this summer's Olympic qualifying tournament to heal a stress fracture in his foot.

It was a good day for Canada's senior men's basketball program, since the experience of practicing daily against big men like Shaquille O'Neal and Alonzo Mourning - even in the autumn of their careers - could only help Anthony's game.

For most Canadian basketball players, however, the road to a paycheque for playing hoops goes through Europe.

http://stats.cbc.ca/nba/playerstats.asp?id=3734When Jason Kapono joined the Toronto Raptors over the summer, much was made of his three-point shooting ability, and in particular, two statistics from last season jumped out. One, he made better than half (51.4 per cent) the shots he took from beyond the three-point arc. Two, and even odder to the casual observer, he actually shot a better percentage from there than he did when shooting closer to the basket.

He is just one player. Could an entire NBA team shoot better from behind the arc than they do from close in? It's never happened over the course of an entire season. Could it?

Nine games into this NBA season, the Toronto Raptors had done just that, shooting 43.6 per cent from two-point land and 45.9 from beyond the arc.

If the first week of the NBA season has anything to teach us, it's the simple lesson: teams that can't put the ball through the hoop with any kind of regularity are doomed, doomed, doomed.

The Chicago Bulls, with their enviable young roster, were the pre-season favourite of many to win the East but have so far lost their opening three games to hardly the most inspiring trio: New Jersey, Philadelphia and Milwaukee. Some would say their 0-3 start has more to do with the full court of press flinging Kobe Bryant rumours than anything their opponents throw at them. But their 37.8 per cent shooting, second worst in the league, is a more likely culprit, and it's a flaw particular to this team: like last year in their playoff series with Detroit, the Bulls can go frosty in a hurry.

Toronto is the home to the National Basketball Association's only franchise, but is Toronto home to the country's most obsessed basketball fans?

Not if you go by Google Trends, a tool which tracks how often computer users enter search terms into the popular web browser.

According to the web tool, computer users from Markham, Ont., just north of Toronto, had the greatest percentage of Google searches that included the term "basketball" than any other city in 2007.
Toronto, as it turns out, wasn't even in the top ten cities in Canada.

Rounding out the top 10 were Hamilton, Halifax, Windsor, Fredericton, Regina, Winnipeg, Mississauga and Kingston. Looking at numbers from the last four years, Halifax leads the country.