THE 68th renewal of the U.S. National Basketball Association will unwrap on October 29 (Oct. 30, Manila time).
Three games are slated for opening day of the 2013-14 regular campaign – Orlando at Indiana, Chicago at Miami and the Los Angeles Clippers vs the Los Angeles Lakers at the Staples Center.
Bannered by All-Star Paul George and 7-foot-2 man-mountain Roy Hibbert, the reigning Central Division titlist Indiana Pacers will officially start hostilities in tangling with the Orlando Magic, who are looking to rebuild around rookie shooting guard Victor Oladipo, the NBA’s No. 2 draft choice last June and an Indiana University product who is the preseason favorite to romp away with Rookie of the Year award.
Prior to the game, a 15-foot-tall bronze Larry Bird statue will be unveiled at the Bankers Life Fieldhouse, the Pacers’ home arena. The ceremony has nothing to do with Bird’s NBA success with the Boston Celtics as a player or with the Pacers as their former head coach and current president of basketball operations.
Before he joined the NBA in 1979-80, he spent three seasons at Indiana State University. Bird is the only personage in NBA annals to be named Most Valuable Player, Coach of the Year and Executive Player of the Year, the latter two of which were accomplished with the Pacers.
Before a friendly crowd at the AmericanAirlines Arena, the two-time defending NBA champion Miami Heat, who for the fourth year in a row will be led by the Big Three of LeBron James (the league’s Most Valuable Player in four of the last five seasons), Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh and additionally bolstered by the return to NBA action of injury-prone center Greg Oden from nearly four years of forced vacation due to various knee ailments, will clash with the Chicago Bulls, who welcome back 2011 NBA MVP Derrick Rose after the playmaker de luxe sat out the entire 2012-13 wars due to knee surgery.
The Miami players along with their Filipino-American mentor Erik Spoelstra and his coaching staff will receive their 2013 NBA title rings prior to the nationally-televised contest.
The Heat, whose top nine scorers from last season are back, seek to become only the third franchise in league history to make at least four consecutive trips to the Finals.
The first two are the Boston Celtics, during the Bill Russell era from 1957-66 and again during the Larry Bird-Kevin McHale-Robert Parish era from 1984-87; and the Los Angeles Lakers, during the Earvin “Magic” Johnson-Kareem Abdul-Jabbar era from 1982-85.
To cap opening day, the defending Pacific Division champion Los Angeles Clippers, under first-year head coach Glenn “Doc” Rivers, will take on their in-house rivals, the Los Angeles Lakers, at the Staples Center.
In this encounter, the Lakers are the “home” team with the light uniforms. The Lakers and Clippers have been co-tenants at the Staples Center since 1999-2000 and are the only NBA clubs to share an arena.
The Lakers are likely to show up without their injured meal ticket Kobe Bryant. The fourth all-time leading scorer in NBA regular-season history behind Abdul-Jabbar, Karl Malone and Michael Jordan, the 6-foot-7, 35-year-old Bryant has not fully recovered from the first major injury of his illustrious 17-year NBA tenure, having undergone surgery last April for a torn left Achilles tendon that forced him to miss the 2013 playoffs.
Steve Nash, the Lakers’ two-time league MVP (2005 and 2006 with the Phoenix Suns), is the oldest active player in the NBA. He will turn 40 next February.
There are familiar faces in new places as scores of veteran players have switched addresses this season. Foremost among the transferees are Dwight Howard, Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Andre Iguodala.
The enigmatic All-Star center Dwight Howard left $30 million and one extra year on the table in bolting the Lakers for the Western Conference rival Houston Rockets on an $88-million, four-year pact as a free agent.
Legendary 36-year-old forward Paul Pierce, who had spent his first 15 NBA seasons in Boston, was jettisoned by the rebuilding Celtics along with another future Hall of Famer Kevin Garnett and guard Jason Terry to the retooling Brooklyn Nets principally in exchange for Gerald Wallace, MarShon Brooks and Kris Humphries, reality television show starlet Kim Kardashian’s former quickie hubby whom she later ditched for hip-hop artist Kanye West.
Together with the 37-year-old Garnett (who waived the no-trade clause in his contract), 36-year-old Terry and throw-in D.J. White, the high-scoring Pierce, whom Hall of Famer John “Hondo” Havlicek (the career scoring leader in Boston history) recently declared as the best one-on-one Celtics player of all time, was shipped to Brooklyn after the Celtics’ erstwhile head coach, Rivers, left Hub City last June and joined superstars Blake Griffin and Chris Paul (the new NBA players union president who re-signed a free-agent deal worth nearly $108 million over five years) with the LA Clippers.
The NBA approved a trade for Rivers in which Boston received an unprotected 2015 first-round draft selection from the Clippers. The agreement includes an anti-trade clause that disallowed the Clippers and Celtics from engaging in future transactions among each other, including the exchange of players, for the duration of the 2013-14 campaign.
Iguodala, an All-Star swingman and a member of the NBA-dominated unit that captured the gold medal during the 2012 London Olympics, left the Denver Nuggets in a sign-and-trade, three-team deal that netted him a four-year, $48-million agreement with the up-and-coming Golden State Warriors.
Meanwhile, Jason Kidd, also a future Hall of Famer, called it quits as an NBA player last summer to become the head coach of the Brooklyn Nets this season. Aside from Kidd, other notable NBA players who hung up their jersey were Grant Hill (Kidd’s co-1995 NBA Rookie of the Year awardee) and Tracy McGrady.
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