nba

Google wants you to feel it. The engineers, having created a new social network which they seemed to debut exclusively to, well, engineers, now want to seduce you--the ordinary, hungover, and unwashed.

Yes, Google wants you to be its new recruits down at the YMCA--the Young Men's Circles Association, the Yo' Momma's Circles Association.

The company now realizes that, in order to be truly happy, it needs real people to be on Google+. So it is tossing aside its once-proud disdain of advertising and throwing its considerable weight toward tickling the fancy of those who are amused by, … Read more

The NBA lockout is about to get really ugly. That's not due to some new twist in the union negotiations or some scheme by the owners--it's because it looks like a bunch of very tall men are going to dance and record it all for the world to see.

Ubisoft today announced a challenge to the out-of-work professional basketball players to benefit any charity of their choice. The stunt calls for locked-out National Basketball Association stars "to create a dance routine via the Just Create Mode on Just Dance 3 on Kinect for Xbox 360 for a chance to win a $25,000 donation to a charity of their choice."

Players will select a song and then do their favorite moves while the Kinect records their routine. They then name and save the dance to their Xbox 360 hard drive before uploading it to JustDancePlanet.com via Xbox Live. Ubisoft will pick the best entrants, and fans will vote to select the winner. … Read more

Today, on El Dia De Los Muertos, the NBA season should have enjoyed its annual rebirth.

Instead, the corpulently wealthy types known as owners are battling with the lengthily wealthy types known as players for an extra slice of, well, cash, leaving fans gameless.

Not all owners support the stance of NBA Commissioner David Stern. Revealing this on Twitter has cost one owner $500,000, believed to be the biggest tweeting fine in history.

This weekend, Micky Arison, he who brought LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, and Chris Bosh into his Miami Heat franchise, turned to Twitter to explain, with consummate … Read more

Whether you're a sports fan or not, basketball games are often some of the best-made games on any platform. The latest news in the ongoing NBA lockout (which began July 1) is that the owners have decided to skip the preseason entirely, and if the players and owners don't come to an agreement by the end of the day on Monday, they may start to cancel regular season games.

Whichever side of the argument you're on, the iTunes App Store has more than enough basketball-type games to keep you occupied. What's particularly interesting is how developers have come up with clever ways to use the touch screen to play basketball-like games.

This week's collection of apps is all about basketball. The first lets you slam-dunk a basketball with a swipe of your finger. The second lets you shoot baskets and challenge others online against a sci-fi backdrop. The third is the iOS version of a megapopular console basketball game.… Read more

We may not see a single NBA game being played this year, but gamers won't be left out with the release of NBA 2K12 on iOS devices for the first time.

The NBA 2K series has been the top-rated basketball simulation 11 years running, and it makes perfect sense to bring the high-flying action to the iPad ($9.99), and to the iPhone and iPod Touch ($4.99). The games will be released October 4.

The game's maker, 2K Sports, takes a unique approach to the touch-screen interface by offering two ways to control the game. Classic Control … Read more

These things feel less like a labor dispute and more like a parking space argument at a country club bar between two Bentley drivers.

Still, it seems that at midnight tonight, the NBA will lock out its players.

You might imagine this will cause great pains to the players. They tend not to be great money managers. Indeed, 60 percent of them are said to go bankrupt within five years of retirement.

However, please spare a thought for those slightly less wealthy people who man the NBA's Web sites. You see, it will be their task to remove all … Read more

There's something about LeBron James that makes many people want to dream of taking their pugilistic talents to his manicured eyebrows.

I wonder, though, what some employees of Intel might be feeling after they read a memo reportedly posted on an internal company site and written by one of the company's executives.

This memo was purloined in clandestine fashion by those sporting opportunists at Deadspin and it will surely have many a literary agent leaping furiously to the executive's side to offer him a non-fiction contract and possibly a speaking tour.

The memo is all about what Intel can learn from the Miami Heat's loss in the NBA finals to the Dallas Mavericks. It doesn't start well. The executive declares himself to be a Los Angeles Lakers fan, which is the equivalent of saying you love that oft-bland meat, chicken.

It doesn't drift into acceptability when he claims a passion for sporting metaphors transported to business.

Here is a sample of his sage advice: "In Miami's case, their great talent just couldn't come together and collaborate with clarity of roles, responsibilities, and the ability to adjust to critical game situations to achieve success under pressure."

Well, yes. Either that or Dallas played better or were coached better, had a more interesting, dynamic owner, or merely had deity on its side.

Such theories do not hold water with this searing analysis that sees John Madden lock lips with Lee Iacocca.

"Sometimes greatness is just flat out who can step up when the pressure is the greatest," he wrote. I am sure I once heard Donald Trump say that on "The Celebrity Apprentice." I am sure he said it while referring to himself.

The Intel exec's analysis can't quite resist any level of sporting intellectualism. There is the searing revelation that sometimes someone with a 3.0 GPA can deliver better under pressure than someone with a 3.8.

Then there's this: "Teams having too much of a specific attribute at the expense of another doesn't provide you with the best of the full spectrum anymore than an orchestra could get with having only great flutists."… Read more

If Shaq had been LeBron, he might have organized an hour-long ESPN special to announce that he was taking his talents out to pasture.

If Shaq had been Jordan, he would, at very least, have called a vast press conference and, on being inducted to the Hall of Fame, he would have scowled at all those by whom he felt slighted.

But Shaq is just whimsical, old absurdist Shaq. So today he posted a little movie, using the real-time social media service Tout, to his Twitter feed. Sitting in what looked like his office at home, he casually announced that … Read more

With the NBA season heading into playoff mode, EA Sports is due to release its over-the-top basketball game, NBA Jam for the iPad, any day. The game has actually been out for the iPhone for a few months for $4.99, but the iPad version has lagged behind it.

What's interesting is that if you do a search for NBA Jam in Google, you'll find several reviews and screenshots already up and even plenty of videos of the game running on iPads. However, it's not for sale in the App Store. What's the deal?

Well, if … Read more