NBA Eastern

Every Tuesday this offseason, two of our NBA experts will go at it on a topic. We came up with the catchy title, Debate in the Paint. This week: Which team has had the best offseason?

The Los Angeles Lakers started this decade with three consecutive NBA titles. They will finish it by winning the last two.

Anything less would be a surprise.

Although much was made of the summertime roster additions among the top three contenders in the Eastern Conference – Boston, Cleveland, Orlando -- it was the defending champion Lakers who orchestrated the most significant moves in the off-season.

Tip-Off Timer counts down the days until the first game of the 2009-10 season. On Saturday, there are exactly 80 days remaining.

When the NBA completed in merger with the American Basketball Association in 1976, it borrowed a few great things: the slam dunk contest, Dr. J and -- most importantly -- the three-point line. Well, the NBA didn't grab the three-point line right away. It wasn't until the 1979-80 season that the NBA opened the arc for business.

In that premiere '80 season for downtown, the average NBA team took only 227 threes. Last year, Rashard Lewis himself took well more than twice that many (554). The league has come around on the importance of the trey, but it's taken a long time.

Before we get started, it should be noted that NBA bloggers are kind of hard to please when it comes to teams spending money. On the one hand, we sneer in disgust when teams refuse to spend money, patting their fans on the head as we chastise ownership for being "cheap" and turning a profit without ever seriously pushing for a title.

On the other, we tend to flip out when someone spends irresponsibly. There is a salary cap and a luxury tax, after all, and handing off a bazillion dollars to that small guard who has difficulty with creating his own shot and thinks he can tell you what his nickname should be when it should clearly be Iggy can draw our ire as well. Not that I'm naming names.

So it's kind of a sticky situation to begin with. Of course, the Raptors have just poured maple syrup over their particular situation in regards to Andrea Bargnani.

American sports leagues have often been fairly criticized for a lack of diversity at the management level. College football famously has problems fixed its incredible lack of blacks among its head coaching ranks, and pro baseball and football have faced the same talk in terms of its front offices.

But a recent study by the University of Central Florida's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport showed that the NBA is doing it well. Women fill 43 percent of the league's "professional" positions, and the NBA remained the only major American professional sports league with a 'A' grade in both racial and gender diversity. The study also reported that over its history, the NBA has had more than twice as many black head coaches than any other league.

When the Magic-Cavaliers series begins tonight, two of the better passing big men will be on display: Orlando's Hedo Turkoglu and Cleveland's LeBron James.

At 6-foot-10, Turkoglu is a tough matchup for opposing defenses, and his ability to find teammates was a big part of Orlando's Game 7 win over Boston on Sunday. In that game, Turkoglu had 12 assists.

But we really want to focus on James here because, after all, it's his passing that has put him into an elite group of players. It's fair to say that James, all 6-foot-8 of him, is already one of the greatest passing big guys to ever play the game.

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Bloggers knee-jerking on the phone + roundtable style = RoundCast.

Watson, Moore and I got on the phone late Monday night (East Coast FTW, until it comes to late night audio blogging) to talk about recent NBA activity. What we expected was a quick phone call -- yada-yada-yada, Dwight Howard is awesome and goodnight, Irene -- but what we got was Watson attempting to anger every possible fanbase, our collective decision that the Celtics just are not that good and that the Nuggets might beat the Lakers but might not ... simply because they could lose to the Mavericks first.

You could forgive Ray Allen for being a little timid coming into Monday night's game against the Bulls. He did, after all, shoot an embarrassing 1-for-12 in Saturday's playoff opener.

But after an equally miserable first half, Allen made up for the absence of Kevin Garnett and overcame an outstanding performance by Chicago's Ben Gordon. The Celtics guard scored 30 points and hit a series of big shots down the stretch, including the game-winner with two seconds remaining as Boston tied up its series with the Bulls 1-1.

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Blake Griffin has been picking up hardware for the past few weeks (the Naismith, AP and CBS player of the year awards spring immediately to mind) and, considering that he announced his decision Tuesday to enter the NBA Draft, it's safe to say he's going to be getting a pretty substantial pay raise as well.

The Rotation is a weekly study on the NBA by one of our All-Star voices. In rotation this week is Tom Ziller.

NBA owners continue to scream bloody apocalypse. The year 2011 marks the doomsday date, with the L-word -- "lock-out" -- graduating from whisper to constant ink. Non-basketball losses and flagging attendance (see update, end of post) make every cent count, and apparently the stars of the show make too many of the dollars. "Two pounds of flesh or stay home," the owners warn.

But David Stern assures you the NBA is fine. Thriving, even. Ratings boom nightly and the league's (to date) soft slip amid global economic Armageddon should reassure those who fret, Stern argues. A $175 $200 million expansion of the league's credit store for franchises -- not a "bail-out," but further proof of the league's health!

Should we believe a commissioner preaching relaxation, or are the owners seizing with (some combination of) fear and blood-lust? Is the NBA really screwed?

LeBron James made arguably the biggest noise of the entire All Star Weekend during the dunk contest when he told Cheryl Miller that he was "preliminarily" committing to the 2010 Dunk Contest in Dallas. He followed that up the next day by throwing down an absolutely Earth-shattering, off-the-backboard yimyam that got everyone thinking about the future possibilities.

And, lest you think he was bluffing, he confirmed his early entrance to the contest while explaining that the whole process needs to be "cleaned up."