NBA miami Heat

Every night there are some stupendous, silly, stupid, or downright outlandish individual lines from around the lig. Doing Lines lets you know which one tops the list.

The last time we got together, three different players scored 40 points or more on the same night. Well, maybe it's not as rare of an occurrence as we thought, since we were just a single point away from it happening again on Wednesday.

Chris Paul missed by one with 39, but Kobe Bryant and Dwyane Wade each delivered, with 41 and 40 respectively.

WASHINGTON -- Peel off the cobwebs. Get out the dust pan. One of the NBA's best shootouts is back.

There was a time in the middle of this decade when Dwyane Wade and Gilbert Arenas conjured up some Wild West battles even though both play in the East.

In 2005-06, in the four games the two met, Washington's Arenas averaged 32.3 points to 31.3 for Miami's Wade. Arenas had a 47-point game against the Heat and Wade had games of 41 and 40 points against the Wizards.

But then injuries hit both hard. Wade missed 62 games in 2006-07 and 2007-08 due to shoulder and knee problems. For Arenas, it was even worse as he missed 149 combined games in 2007-08 and 2008-09 because of knee trouble.

So when the two squared off Wednesday night at the Verizon Center, it was their first meeting since April 8, 2006.

We're just a week into the season, so don't get mad if your team isn't where you might have expected. It's just that if we go by what we've actually seen, as opposed to what's been predicted, then this is for the most part where teams should fall based on their early performances. But if you're offended by the spot your favorite team holds, fear not: they likely have 79 regular season games remaining to right the ship.

There's some sad news in the NBA universe today as two former NBA players have died in the past three days.

Alan Ogg, who played for the Miami Heat, Milwaukee Bucks and Washington Bullets, died at the age of 42 on Sunday. Ira Winderman of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported that the Heat had a moment of silence before Sunday's home game against the Chicago Bulls. The 7-foot-2 center was 42 years old.

In Seattle, Phil Lumpkin, who played for Portland and Phoenix in the mid-70s, was found dead on Monday morning by O'Dea High School administrators after Lumpkin didn't arrive at the school where he coached and didn't answer the phone.

It's not just the young guys like Michael Beasley and Mario Chalmers who are expected to show considerably improvement this season with the Miami Heat.

The old guy thinks he'll improve more than anyone else on the roster, making him the determining factor in a better-than-expected season in South Florida.

Center Jermaine O'Neal, going into his 14th NBA season, understands the skepticism, but he also believes there is another All-Star season awaiting him.

FanHouse previews a player to watch from each NBA team in advance of the 2009-10 season.

When you're famous, particularly a famous athlete, you're always exactly one step from utter disaster, and one step from rousing success. Michael Beasley has firmly stepped on the former, but the latter is also well within his reach this season.

I don't need to rehash for you the Twitter episode, the questions about whether it was his "stuff" or not, whether that matters, whether the whole issue matters. You've made up your mind.

What you should keep in mind, though, is how quickly a player can go from being considered a "screw-up" or "headcase" to simply a terrific basketball player. And if you don't think Beasley has the talent to make that happen, you better get your head a one way ticket to Straightville on the good train Reason.

FanHouse previews all 30 NBA teams in advance of the 2009-10 season.

Last year about this time, I wrote about a "new" Dwyane Wade in Miami and the potential for the Heat to be a playoff-caliber team. I was pretty dead-on about that, if I may say so myself, and probably would have gotten more credit if Brett Pollakoff hadn't written one of the best columns of the entire season when he made a case that Wade should win the MVP over LeBron James.

Now, my own ego-jerking aside, the greater point here is this: Wade was out of this world amazing last season. He carried a Heat team on his back to the fifth overall seed in the East, despite the exposure of Shawn Marion as a by-product of Mike D'Antoni's system, Michael Beasley's inability to produce as much as first-round counterpart Derrick Rose, and Jermaine O'Neal's continued aging.

Dwyane Wade is coming off the most impressive season of his career, a yeoman effort that produced a scoring title and his first All-NBA First-Team selection.

He doesn't want a repeat. In this case, less could mean more.

Wade was sitting alone on the sideline before a recent exhibition game, watching several of his teammates in a casual shooting drill, contemplating how this season might unfold, and how he wants his role to change.

"If I don't have to score as much, it would be a good thing. It would mean other guys are stepping up, and I won't have to do it all,'' Wade told FanHouse. "It's good if I'm playing fewer minutes, too. I don't care about winning a scoring title. I want to win games.''

Tip-Off Timer counts down the days until the first game of the 2009-10 season. On Saturday, there are 17 days remaining.

We have already discussed the historic indignity of 23 straight losses in an NBA season, a record shared by two awful teams, one of which was an expansion club. The story of the longest winless streak to open an NBA season is similar in that two squads share the misfortune. One had the built-in (but hardly comforting) excuse of being new to the league: the 1988 Miami Heat, who jumped in with 17 straight losses before earning a victory.

But the L.A. Clippers had been around decades when its commencement futility record sprung up. In the lockout season of 1998-99, the Clippers also began 0-17.