materialkillers:

NBA Back! - After a 15-hour meeting that started on noon on Friday, the NBA and the players have finally agreed on a tentative deal that will soon end the lockout.  Once everything is ironed out and it becomes totally official, games will start on Christmas Day and each team will play a 66-game regular season while the start of the playoffs/Finals will be pushed back slightly.  The free agency period will be fun to watch, so stay tuned.

nbaoffseason:

NEW YORK — NBA commissioner David Stern canceled the first two weeks of the season Monday after owners and players were unable to reach a new labor deal and end the lockout.

Gasol Brothers Practicing W/Barca During Lockout

Seems like Kobe Bryant isn’t the only Laker looking to go overseas to play. Pau Gasol and his brother Marc of the Memphis Grizzlies are both heading to Barcelona to practice with the team. Pau has already stated that if the lockout continued he would be likely to play with Barcelona and that they would be his first option.

Thoughts?

Kobe Bryant has offer to play in Italy

Kobe Bryant has been offered a $6.7 million, one-season contract to play for the Italian team Virtus Bologna, appealing to his childhood memories of growing up in the country.

Virtus has given Bryant four contract options, stretching from the one-year deal to two-month and one-month options, and a per-game deal that would come out to $739,640 per home game.

All of the offers are pretax and would allow Bryant to return to the Lakers immediately if the lockout ends.

Virtus also reached out to Manu Ginobili, who played with Bologna before joining the San Antonio Spurs in 2002.

The NBA season usually begins in late October, but owners and players have failed to agree on a new labor deal. The two sides are at odds over how to divide the league’s revenue, a salary-cap structure and the length of guaranteed contracts.

Thoughts?

Kobe to China is not a done deal according to sources.

Fresh off of torching James Harden for a game-winner, Kobe is still unsure about playing ball in China during the lockout. On Thursday the owner of Chinese team Shanxi Zhongyu remarked that Kobe had agreed to terms and would be with the team as early as October 1st.

According to ESPN’s Chris Broussard, “Kobe has not agreed with any team on anything. He is conducting due diligence and weighing various options.”

Kobe was also rumored to play in Turkey (remember he has affiliation with Turkish airlines), though Nike has encouraged any of their athletes that decided to play during the lockout to do so in China because of the marketing potential. Oh, and Nike sponsors the Chinese league as well.

Meanwhile, Ron Artest says that he is, “definitely going to play,” for the  British Basketball League’s Cheshire Jets.

gotemcoach:

NBA LOCKOUT UPDATE:  Day 1

Kobe Bryant takes job as junior developer at Myspace, where he will focus on securing the platform network, specifically network ingress filtering, by defeating any denial of service attacks which employ IP source address spoofing.

Salary: 60K/year

@gotem_coach

Any thoughts on who is in Kobe’s Top 8??