Back-to-back NBA champions! Full coverage here from today’s Miami Herald.

The Thunder dispatched the Rockets in the first round of the NBA postseason earlier this month with not all that much drama, but journalist Hillel Kuttler discovered something significant when Houston point guard Jeremy Lin stepped onto the court for the opening-game tipoff. Writing in the New York Times, Kuttler notes that Lin, the phenom-out-of-nowhere story when his play in February 2012 sparked a late-season Knicks resurgence, was the first Harvard graduate to participate in a playoff game in 65 years.

Meet the late Saul Mariaschin, who wore No. 4 as a member of the Celtics:

A 5-foot-11 point guard, Mariaschin (pronounced mah-ree-ASH-in) ensured that his reputation was made on the court, if not on the loudspeakers. He led Harvard to a 19-1 regular-season record and an appearance in the 1946 N.C.A.A. tournament at Madison Square Garden. The Crimson were eliminated in the first round, a round of eight teams, by Ohio State. . . .

After graduating from Harvard in 1947, Mariaschin joined the Boston Celtics and led them to the Basketball Association of America playoffs as a rookie. (In 1949, the B.A.A. and the National Basketball League merged to form the N.B.A.) Mariaschin was third on the team in points scored during the regular season, averaged 9.7 points in the postseason and appeared on his way to a solid career. But the Celtics were knocked out of the playoffs by losing two of three games to the Chicago Stags, and an 81-74 loss in the finale at Boston Garden turned out to be his last game.

Mariaschin was married that summer, shortened his surname to Marsch and moved to Los Angeles, where he went to work for his father-in-law’s fabric upholstery and design company.

One may reasonably conclude that NBA salaries of that era were often no match for the job offers that in-laws were dangling before the newest additions to the family.

Kuttler notes too that Saul was also a shortstop for the Harvard baseball team and played against a Yale team that included first baseman George H. W. Bush.

Dan Mariaschin, B’nai B’rith International’s executive vice president (and my old boss), never was able to find out if his cousin regretted leaving the game — Saul died in a skiing accident in 1990 — but does think that he was no flash in the pan: “I’m certain that had he continued his playing career, he’d have rolled up impressive stats along the way.”

More here.

Good for Jason Collins. Now I hope he hip-checks Kobe Bryant into the 4th row of the Staples Center for calling a ref a “faggot.”

Local 10 Miami-Ft. Lauerdale reports:

Miami Heat forward Chris Bosh’s house in Miami Beach was robbed Wednesday night while he and his wife celebrated his 29th birthday.

According to police, $340,000 worth of jewelry, purses, watches, and rings was missing when the couple returned to their home in the 6300 block of North Bay Road.

The couple was out celebrating Bosh’s birthday at Briza on the Bay, a waterfront venue in downtown Miami.

Two housekeepers and the couple’s children were both home during the robbery.

Only jewelry without significant markings that would make them easily identifiable were taken.

I’m actually surprised that more robberies like this don’t happen to celebrities. A 2011 survey of burglars in the U.K. (who knows how accurate that is) revealed that close to 80 percent of these criminals used social-network platforms to help find their victims. And since celebrities live their lives in the public eye, it seems criminals could target them pretty easily.

As this is an early report, I’ll post any updates or corrections as need be.

For trying to run over his girlfriend with a car.

No word on whether or not Bloomberg’s treats were low-sodium, trans-fat-free and 16 oz. or less:

Spurs forward Stephen Jackson left San Antonio’s 100-83 loss to the Knicks after spraining his right ankle when he crashed into a waitress working the sideline in front of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

“Guess who just contributed to the crime rate in NYC,” tweeted New York Daily News reporter Frank Isola.

Jackson was hurt in the first quarter Thursday night when he shot a 3-pointer from the corner. The shot missed and he stepped backward out of bounds and onto the waitress, who was kneeling in front of courtside seats.

I didn’t know you could wear dominatrix-stripper boots on the hardwood and not damage the court:

Virginia is for lovers . . . and Kings too?

Via Sacramento’s News10.com:

The owners of the Sacramento Kings plan to move the team to Virginia Beach, according to a newspaper based in nearby Norfolk.

The Kings would be tenants in a new arena to be built near the Virginia Beach Convention Center and operated by Global Spectrum, according to Inside Business.

The paper says lease payments would be guaranteed for 25 years by Comcast, which owns Global Spectrum.

Comcast would reportedly get broadcast rights and its name on the new arena.

Inside Business quotes sources as saying the Maloof family will join Comcast officials in announcing the planned move next Wednesday, one day after meeting in a closed session with the Virginia Beach city council.

More here and here.

via FoxSports.com:

Former NBA star Dennis Rodman has finally met his estranged father after 42 years of separation, following an exhibition game in the Philippines.

Philander Rodman Jr., who has acknowledged fathering 29 children by 16 mothers, says he was happy and surprised that his son agreed to meet him late Wednesday. He tried to meet the basketball Hall of Famer during another game in Manila in 2006.

’’It was great,’’ he said Thursday of the first time he held his son’s hands since they last met in December 1969.

’’I've been trying to meet him for years. And then last night, boom, I met him. I was really, really happy and very surprised,’’ he told The Associated Press. . . . 

The 71-year-old Vietnam War veteran now operates the Rodman’s Rainbow Obamaburger restaurant in northern Angeles City.

He said his restaurant menu includes burgers with red, yellow and green colored buns and fries, colors associated with his flamboyant son.

No word as to the meat content of said burgers.

The New York Knicks failed to match the Houston Rockets’ offer sheet to flash-in-the-pan point guard Jeremy Lin last night, scared off by the odd contract structure that the Rockets were able to put on the table.

Rockets GM Daryl Morey has been portrayed as an evil genius this offseason in exploiting collective-bargaining loopholes to offer deals to free agents that makes it very difficult for home teams to re-sign. Lin’s three-year deal pays him around $5 million for each of the first two seasons and then almost $15 million in the third season. With the salary cap in mind, that last season makes the deal prohibitively expensive to match for a team like New York that has multiple large long-term contracts on its books. Morey has also offered a similar deal to Chicago Bulls backup center Omar Asik that the Bulls will have a huge problem matching.

Fortune writer Chip Lebovitz is outraged, writing that these deals will “force rich teams to choose between large payrolls and young players.” Well, yes, one of the explicit goals of NBA collective bargaining agreements is to even the playing field between the big-money big-market teams and small-market teams that have difficulties luring free agents and retaining superstars.

The reason that Morey’s offers are structured as they are is that the CBA necessitates it. Jeremy Lin is an undrafted second-year player who is a restricted free agent. That means that a competing team can’t offer him any more than the average player salary for the first year of the deal with an increase of 4.5 percent in the second year. The third year of an offer to a restricted free agent like Lin, however, is limited only by a team’s salary cap. These CBA rules mean that the Rockets aren’t allowed to offer Lin any more than about $5 million in the first two years of their offer sheet. In order to try to entice Lin away from New York, they upped that considerably in the third year. New York’s difficulty to absorb that third year into their books was a nice side benefit to Houston’s strangely structured offer sheet.

The CBA tries to balance three often-competing goals: letting home teams keep homegrown players, preventing big market teams from hoarding big contracts to dominate the playing field, and letting free agents get market value for their services. It’s these three values that caused the structure of the Jeremy Lin contract. Daryl Morey may be an evil genius, but he’s merely working with the rules as written to sign players at what he considers fair market value.

Another proud moment in New York Knicks basketball.

Over the weekend, the Houston Rockets formally signed last year’s New York sensation Jeremy Lin, a restricted free agent, to a very rewarding offer sheet: three years, $25 million dollars. While the contract isn’t necessarily exorbitant in its per-year averages, Rockets GM Daryl Morey structured it so as to be damaging to the Knicks. In the final year of the deal, Lin will make $14.25 million. If the Knicks match Houston’s offer sheet, they’ll have almost their entire salary cap tied up due to the large contracts of their other superstars — and the luxury tax hit of the final year of Lin’s deal would put the total cost to New York that year in the $30 million range.

For these reasons, it’s widely reported that New York is going to let Jeremy Lin go to Houston. The Knicks have until midnight tomorrow to match. In the wake of Houston’s offer, New York went out and acquired former Knick point guard Raymond Felton in a sign-and-trade with the Portland Trailblazers. It would be an odd roster combination if they now retained Lin.

The hubbub around Lin’s free agency has also laid bare personal schisms among the Knicks players. Lin got a lot of publicity and praise for revitalizing a floundering Knicks team last year, and that might have rubbed the big-money New York superstars the wrong way. Before a U.S. Olympic Team practice, Carmelo Anthony called the Rockets’ offer a “ridiculous contract” and refused to comment on whether he thought Lin was worth it. Veteran J. R. Smith, who re-signed with New York for a comparative pittance, told Sports Illustrated that “I think some guys take it personal, because they’ve been doing it for longer and haven’t received any reward for it yet.”

If Jeremy Lin is anywhere close to as good as his talent teased for the 25 games he started last year before getting injured, he’s surely the Knicks’ best option at point guard over Raymond Felton and Jason Kidd. But the unique structure of the contract that Houston has offered him combined with some superstar sour grapes may force the Knicks to let him walk.

Could be, and I applaud the move, if it happens. Los Angeles Times:

It was a peculiar time for David Stern to open such a dialogue, but the time and place signified his seriousness.

This might be it for the Dream Team concept in the Olympics.

The NBA Finals were 45 minutes from tip-off last month when the league commissioner said it himself — cognizant that NBA owners fretted every four years about players being injured with the extra month of activity . . . that the players themselves began to question whether they should be paid to play for Team USA . . . and, finally, that the NBA wasn’t making an abundance of money by lending its assets to the national cause of thumping (take your pick) Angola, Tunisia, etc.

 In other words, enjoy the London Olympics. Who knows if such a collection of basketball players will ever suit up for the Games again?

 “I think we got a lot out of the Olympics,” Stern said ominously last month. “We helped grow the game. The result has been extraordinary. But I think it’s appropriate to step back and take stock of where we’re going.”

Then he did something completely wild. He sided with longtime sparring partner Mark Cuban, a sign that a basketball apocalypse was beginning . . . and NBA participation in the Olympics could be ending. Cuban, after all, had said the league’s quadrennial gift to the Olympics was “the biggest mistake the NBA makes.”

The rest here.

But is he worth $30 million?

A person with knowledge of the deal said Thursday that New York Knicks restricted free-agent guard Jeremy Lin and the Houston Rockets have agreed to terms on a four-year contract offer.

The person told The Associated Press on Thursday on condition of anonymity because the team hadn’t officially announced the deal.

Lin can sign the offer sheet with Houston on July 11, and the Knicks will then have three days to match the offer.

The Knicks have repeatedly said that they plan to keep Lin.

The contract is worth $10.2 million over the first two seasons and $9.3 million in each of the last two years. The fourth season is a team option.

The person also told the AP that the Rockets traded Kyle Lowry to Toronto on Thursday for a future first-round draft pick with lottery protection and forward Gary Forbes. Lowry averaged 14.3 points and 6.6 assists in 47 games for Houston last season.

The Rockets had Lin in training camp, but waived him because they had already had Lowry and Goran Dragic on their roster. Now that they’ve traded Lowry, and with Dragic headed to Phoenix, Houston is trying to get Lin back.

The rest here.

The Oklahoma City Thunder made it to the NBA Finals this year, prompting analysts to praise their front office’s decisionmaking process and trump “the Oklahoma City Model” for a rebuilding franchise. But for teams hoping to go from the bottom of the barrel to the top of the ladder, this isn’t necessarily a wise move.

The Oklahoma City Model, in a nutshell, is to be patient, stockpile and use draft picks, bottom out for a few years, then let a franchise’s young talent mature together to become a well-oiled unit capable of going far into the playoffs.

The problem? As Beckley Mason pointed out on ESPN, the reason that Oklahoma City could be a perennial contender now is that they have Kevin Durant, one of the league’s top talents. In a counterfactual history where OKC (then in Seattle) gets the first pick rather than the second pick, they might have drafted injury-prone Greg Oden and struggle to scrape by in 2012 while Kevin Durant leads a Portland Trailblazers team to the playoffs.

We can see how much luck played into the Oklahoma City Model by looking at other struggling teams — the Minnesota Timberwolves, say. Minnesota had five top-six draft picks from 2008-2011, including the #2 overall pick in 2011. They also were able to trade for 2008′s second overall pick.

Using those picks, Minnesota acquired Kevin Love, Ricky Rubio, Jonny Flynn, Wesley Johnson, and Derrick Williams. The Timberwolves have an exciting young team, but they don’t look like a dynasty in the making. They might make the playoffs a few times, but even with some seasoning, that doesn’t look like a championship-caliber core.

Or consider the Washington Wizards. In successive drafts, they were able to secure John Wall (#1 overall), Jan Veseley (#6) and Bradley Beal (#3). They could yet turn into a very, very good team, but they look to be a far cry from Durant-Westbrook-Harden.

Simply put, the Thunder are a Finals team because they lucked into drafting one of the five best players in the NBA. No other player in the last half-decade of NBA drafts projects as good as Kevin Durant is, and the next cellar-dwelling team that successfully follows “the Oklahoma City Model” will do so mostly because of luck, not because it’s a consistently replicable model for success in the NBA.

Here we go again.

Only a few months after Dwight Howard announced his intention to waive his early opt-out clause and remain in Orlando for the final season of his contract, Howard has officially requested a trade — again — to the Brooklyn Nets — again.

The superstar center is unquestionably one of basketball’s best players, but his off-the-court drama wore thin with fans, players, coaches, and the media this past season. Did anyone really believe Howard would be content to play out his contract?

Over the last week, the Houston Rockets made moves to try to acquire a young stockpile of players and draft picks to trade for Howard. While they failed to move up in the draft to a position it was thought the Magic would be happy with, they still have ended up with an arsenal of talent that might be possible to use to make a move for Howard. (Something that — as a Rockets fan — I am completely on board with.)

While Howard has requested a trade to Brooklyn, looking at the Nets’ roster it’s difficult to imagine a package they could put together to land the superstar, unless they also ship out a haul of future first-round picks. It’s also unlikely that Magic management is too keen on placating Howard. He sulked, manipulated the media, forced out his coach, and generally acted like a petulant child throughout the previous season. The Magic don’t owe him anything.

The Magic are reportedly listening to offers from any team that wants to pitch one as they try to get something in return for the superstar who will likely leave next summer no matter what.

Hopefully, the Howard saga will come to a merciful end soon. There are few things more disheartening in sports than watching a superstar use his clout to yank a team around and pout in public about his dissatisfaction with the millions of dollars he’s currently making. Howard is still a prodigious talent, and he’s someone that can drag a team full of scrubs to the playoffs single-handedly, but he’s managed to turn himself into one of the NBA’s more depressing sideshows.

Enjoy:

LeBron James and the Miami Heat made it rain on the Oklahoma City Thunder in Game 5 of the NBA finals to clinch the 2012 championship. Our long national nightmare is over: King James has a ring.

Okay, that’s mostly a joke. But as a LeBron apologist, I’ll offer that it’s good to see him get a ring and semi-cement his legacy — as one of the best basketball players of all time. It’s also nice to see some of the other Heat players get a ring — Shane Battier is one of basketball’s hardest workers and smartest players, and Dwyane Wade’s brilliance can’t be overstated.

This title, however, is going to be spun as a victory for LeBron James. No one has ever denied his talent, but his off-court decisions and on-court demeanor have grated on some NBA fans for a long time. Exacerbated by “The Decision” wherein announced his move to Miami, James has long had his haters.

It seemed inevitable that he’d get a ring eventually. This one was nine years coming and well-deserved. James carried his team through the playoffs when Dwyane Wade, long considered the “clutch performer” on the Heat, just couldn’t get it going.

James won the Finals MVP award, boasting per-game averages of 28.6 points, 10.2 rebounds, and 7.4 assists in the championship round. It was vintage LeBron: He didn’t have a game that stood out as singularly dominant but did almost everything on the court from beginning to end for his team.

Condolences to the Thunder, who are an exciting young team who made an incredible run this year. Their stars are likable and the team has a bright future in the league — and another shot at a long playoff run next year. (Though as I wrote before, let’s cool it on the dynasty talk.) This was Miami’s year, but both teams have earned a well-deserved vacation.

The Heat survived a furious comeback by the Oklahoma City Thunder last night to even the NBA Finals at one game apiece. Kevin Durant was typically brilliant, LeBron James put up his usual numbers, and Dwyane Wade seemed to snap out of a funk.

In what may have been the most pivotal play, Oklahoma City, down two points with twelve seconds left, inbounded the ball to Durant. LeBron James, Durant’s defender, was out of position. As Durant went up for a shot, James made contact on Durant’s arm and body. Durant missed, LeBron rebounded, and the game was all but over. Watch for yourself:

Durant, Westbrook, the OKC fans, and Twitter all erupted at the refs’ inability to call the foul on LeBron. In real time it doesn’t look too bad, but the view that the baseline ref had should have been unmistakable: Durant got hacked. Now, unsurprisingly, some in the sports media have said that this is an example of the NBA treating its marquee player with special treatment.

It’s not. This is actually a common occurrence in sports, and it’s not limited to star players. When the game’s on the line, no matter who has the ball, refs tend to swallow the whistle. As University of Chicago economist Tobias Moskowitz, author of Scorecasting — writes at Freakonomics.com, referees are more worried about making an incorrect call than an incorrect no-call:

In basketball, hockey, soccer, and the NFL, we also find that the rate of officials’ calls, especially judgment calls, goes way down near the end of tight games and the bigger the stage. How do we know this is referee bias and not just the flow of the game? Because non-subjective calls that require little judgment — such as delay of game and shot clock violations, where everyone in the stadium can see a giant clock indicate that time has expired or, in the case of the NBA, the entire goal lighting up red — do not decline as the game gets tight or nears its end. Officials seem to systematically swallow the whistle on judgment calls and let the players determine the outcome. As fans, we may want that, too, but keep in mind it means the rules of the game aren’t being applied uniformly.

This last part is crucial — the rules of the game aren’t being applied uniformly — but it’s not because of superstar treatment. The Miami Heat escaped with a victory last night, but it’s more because referees are systematically biased to ignore ticky-tack fouls in a game’s closing seconds than because they favor LeBron James over Kevin Durant.

Yesterday, the 69 year-old NBA Commissioner decimated the radio host on his own show after being asked, “Was the fix in for the lottery?” Details here.