NBA

Marv Albert and 50 Cent had a reported "interaction" backstage at Jimmy Kimmel Live that generated a ton of press -- obviously whenever two people like Marv and Fitty interact in a (and this is important) reportedly violent manner, it's gonna be news.

Turns out the the whole thing was entirely overblown -- Marv and 50 never had any sort of violent interaction and, from what FanHouse has learned and which the AP is now reporting, it was all a giant misunderstanding.

Just after the first quarter buzzer sounded at the Meadowlands, Nate Robinson of the Knicks turned and fired a three-pointer at the basket of the New Jersey Nets. The shot went in, and, being as the period had already ended, the basket was waved off by the official.

No harm done, right? Uh, wrong. Mike D'Antoni was furious at Robinson for even trying such a stunt, especially with it coming so closely after the buzzer.

(UPDATE: Apparently, D'Antoni holds a grudge: he kept Robinson on the bench for the rest of the game.)

Knicks! Nets! NBA action at its finest. Video of the shot and the exchange, after the jump.

When the Celtics signed Rasheed Wallace over the summer as their big offseason acquisition, they may have thought they were getting a big man who would stretch the floor with his three-point shooting, and one who would force the centers on the other contenders to come out of the paint to try and stop him.

But 13 games into the Sheed experiment in Boston, Wallace's three-point shooting has hurt his new team far more than it has helped them. And Friday night's 0-for-8 performance from beyond the arc?

That one was so bad, it made history.

Josh Smith would probably be the first to tell you that he didn't have a great game on Friday against the Rockets. But he was there at the end when it mattered most, and hit the game-winner with 0.7 seconds left to power the Hawks to their 11th win, tops in the league at this early point in the NBA season.

Smith finished with a pretty solid line of nine points, eight rebounds, four blocks, and three assists, but was limited by foul trouble to just 24 minutes of action. In fact, he had played just 30 seconds of the fourth quarter, before being inserted with 34 seconds remaining, and his team clinging to a five-point lead.

After the exceptionally gritty Rockets came from 10 points down with under two minutes remaining to tie it at 103 with five seconds left, Smith was there to clean up Mike Bibby's missed jumper for the win. Video after the jump.

The Clippers got what was by far their best win of the season on Friday, but unfortunately, the team's longtime play-by-play man Ralph Lawler wasn't in his usual courtside spot to see it.

Lawler and color commentator Michael Smith were suspended for Friday's game, for what the team deemed to be inappropriate remarks the two made during the Clippers' telecast on Wednesday, when the team faced the Memphis Grizzlies.

The comments in question were regarding Hamed Haddadi, who is a rookie and the first Iranian player to appear in the NBA.

The Sacramento Monarchs, one of the WNBA's original eight franchises folded Friday, leaving the league to scramble to find a new ownership group, possibly in the San Francisco Bay Area, in time for the 2010 season.

The league announced Friday that it is in talks to find a Bay Area ownership group prepared to take the team over.

WNBA president Donna Orender confirmed Friday evening that negotiations with an investor group are underway.

Maybe Cleveland really isn't LeBron James' kind of town after all.

In a decision that will surely send tongues wagging in the NBA -- and particularly in Manhattan -- a Cleveland city commission turned down a request to create a massive mural of the NBA star, on the grounds that the image was really just a giant ad for Nike and in violation of city codes that limit the size of billboards, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

The proposed mural would have replaced an existing image of James, covering a 10-story wall of an office building near Quicken Loans Arena, the home venue of the Cleveland Cavaliers. Although the city of Cleveland has made exceptions in the past for the existing mural, they felt the new image was more of an advertisement than art.

MILWAUKEE -- Four months after Stephen Jackson arrived in Golden State in January 2007, the Warriors won their first playoff series in 16 years. They went 48-34 the following season, their best record in 14 years.

Jackson would like to take plenty of credit for it.

"The Warriors were (garbage) when I got there, so look what happened,'' Jackson said in an interview Friday with FanHouse. "So I love challenges.''

That's why the 10th-year swingman is ecstatic about his trade last Monday from the Warriors to Charlotte. Even though the Bobcats (3-8 entering Friday) never have made the playoffs since entering the NBA as an expansion team in 2004, Jackson believes it's "a great opportunity for me to be part of something great.''

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Warriors coach Don Nelson doesn't give a lot up to the media these days. He's acknowledged losing interest in the daily give-and-take with the team's beat writers and looks to end his postgame press conferences as quickly as he can.

Nelson has said, though, that he likes doing radio because it's a way to speak directly to the fans. To that end, Nelson had one of his most open exchanges on Thursday while speaking on his weekly radio show on KNBR.

A four-time scoring champ leading Mike D'Antoni's up-tempo offense? It looked like a match made in heaven on paper, but the Knicks have apparently decided the intangibles surrounding Allen Iverson -- including ugly exits with two teams in the span of seven months -- outweighed the potential gains.

According to Howard Beck of the New York Times, the Knicks went back and forth on the issue, with a team source suggesting Thursday afternoon there was a 90 percent chance the team would offer a contract. Ultimately, however, the team's brain trust decided that "Iverson posed too great a risk" -- a damning indictment if there ever was one, considering the 2-7 Knicks are currently on pace for a 15-win season.