Live

I’m currently in the lobby of the downtown Phoenix Sheraton, watching somebody excitedly get their picture taken with Gheorge Muresan while My Giant was trying to check into his room. Rookie/Sophomore practice ended a little bit ago, and we’re now a couple minutes away from the All-Star Saturday Night and All-Star Game media sessions … Imagine lazily shooting around with your boys at the gym — and I mean “lazily” to the extent that no one is jumping when they take jump shots — with a coach trying to teach the principles of pick-and-roll defense on deaf ears, and you get the idea of how these “practices” go. Luis Scola looked like he’d just gotten out of bed 15 minutes beforehand … A number of guys on the Sophomore team had some pretty ill purple/orange/white Huaraches, including Thad Young, Aaron Brooks (206!) and Al Thornton. Although when I asked Al about his kicks, he referred to them as Hyperdunks. Kevin Durant had some special makeups of his Nike KD’s, which were almost a blend of OKC and Phoenix colors, and Scola had what I think were Li Nings that looked alright … I cut in on an Al Horford interview and was all prepared to ask him questions, until I realized he was talking to a throng of Spanish-speaking reporters. And while I took like three years of Spanish between high school and college, I wouldn’t have been able to formulate anything beyond “What’s your name? How are you?” So I left …
Michael Beasley on the Rookie Team’s roster: “We nice, man. We niiiice. We nice.” Asked if it was fair that the Rooks had Greg Oden on their side, The Bease snapped, “Hell yeah! He’s in his first season, right?” Beasley told me he’s gotten 18 tattoos since the Draft … Earlier this morning I was at a Subway restaurant, where Tony Parker was making an appearance as part of a contest where a fan can win a day of hanging out with TP. At one point, some guy who was dressed like a valet was telling everyone how excited he was to get his mini-basketball autographed, then — I kid you not — turns to a teenage girl and asks, “What’s his name again?”