FanHouse Nba Media Watch

The Clippers got what was by far their best win of the season on Friday, but unfortunately, the team's longtime play-by-play man Ralph Lawler wasn't in his usual courtside spot to see it.

Lawler and color commentator Michael Smith were suspended for Friday's game, for what the team deemed to be inappropriate remarks the two made during the Clippers' telecast on Wednesday, when the team faced the Memphis Grizzlies.

The comments in question were regarding Hamed Haddadi, who is a rookie and the first Iranian player to appear in the NBA.

ESPN has assigned its Spanish-speaking correspondent Alfred R. Berrios to keep up a weekly ranking of the NBA's Latinos for its ESPN Deportes property. Celebrating the game's Central and Southern American tentacles is a positive thing, and the NBA has long sought to integrate the multitudes of Spanish-speaking sports fans in the United States and abroad into its fold.

But ESPN's list is just weird in terms of inclusion and exclusion.

Sports Illustrated's Chris Ballard probably couldn't have happened into a worse time to release a book about the NBA. The economy is bad. ESPN's Bill Simmons released a tome on the league last month which reached the New York Times' non-fiction best-seller list. The fawning NBA fan has already possibly purchased the LeBron James quasi-autobiog, and the statheads have likely buried themselves in the Pro Basketball Prospectus 2009-10 or Wayne Winston's Mathletics. There are a lot of options, and typically little interest in basketball books.

But fans who whistled by Ballard's effort -- The Art of a Beautiful Game: The Thinking Fan's Tour of the NBA, published by Simon & Schuster -- are missing a great view into the league we love. With a certain mix of comfort and curiosity, Ballard has put together a wonderful collection of NBA insights straight from the horses' mouths.

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During an interview with the Associated Press on Monday, NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar revealed that he is being treated for a rare form of leukemia.

Kareem apparently learned of the diagnosis nearly a year ago, but held off on making the news public until now.

"The word 'leukemia' is a very frightening word," he said in a phone interview from New York. "In many instances, it's a killer and it's something that you have to deal with in a very serious and determined way if you're going to beat it."

In his NBA.com video recap of last Friday's Magic-Nets game, NBA TV analyst Rick Kamla made the unfortunate mistake of referring to New Jersey forward Yi Jianlian as a "Chinaman." After FanHouse contacted Turner Sports about the remark, the video was pulled from NBA.com. It ran on NBA TV Friday and has been available on NBA.com since Friday night.

Turner Sports spokesman Jeff Pomeroy relayed to FanHouse an apology to anyone offended by the remark from Kamla and the network, which manages NBA TV and NBA.com. Pomeroy said Kamla was not aware of the connotations of the word, and meant nothing malicious or offensive by it.

Some people won't think it's so horrible. As a matter of fact, some will cheer the announcement that because of back injury that was so bad he couldn't sit for long stretches, Bill Walton has announced he will give up announcing.

Walton, in a statement today: "As I return after a grueling multi-year, life-threatening, life-changing ordeal with back problems, it is time to dedicate the rest of my life to service. ... Thanks everybody -- for everything."

For many, Walton was a polarizing play-by-play man. Never one to withhold an opinion, you thought Walton either delivered verbal bon mots filled with liquid genius or that he was "theeeeeeeee worst announcer in the history of the NBA. No, not the NBA, the worrrrrrrrrrrld."

Don Nelson insisted again on Thursday, like he's been insisting since the start of training camp, that he's excited by his young Warriors team and that he is having fun coaching it.

But that's not the way it looks. Nelson has grown increasingly short with the media in the past year or so and his pregame press conferences are littered with one-word answers and uncomfortable silences.

One day after the Warriors lost to the Rockets 108-107, a radio host on the team's flagship station opened his program by saying it sure seemed like Nelson's heart wasn't in it anymore.

TNT's Inside the NBA may be the best studio show in sports, and Charles Barkley is a huge (both literally and figuratively) reason why.

Unfortunately for viewers at home, though, Barkley hopes to leave the show sometime soon, saying that he'd walk away from his career as a television pundit should the right opportunity in an NBA front office present itself.

Tuesday night's NBA TV show, hosted by Ahmad Rashad and featuring Chris Webber and Gary Payton, wasn't as good as the TNT version with Ernie Johnson, Kenny Smith, and Charles Barkley in terms of pure basketball analysis. But in terms of pure comedy, that Tuesday show was solid gold.

And now, it's over.

Kevin McHale has been hired to replace Gary Payton in the studio, and while I think McHale will do just fine as an analyst, there's no way he'll have the same chemistry with Webber that Payton did. With the show obviously looking to get a little more serious, here's a reminder of some of the antics that made it so much fun to watch.

Ron Artest has never been afraid to tell it like he sees it, especially while being one of the athletes who chooses to interact with his fans through the use of social media. He's taken it places it didn't even need to go, really: like giving out his cell phone number, or ripping his former team over a contract issue that didn't even make any sense.

For a lot of fans, the unfiltered access is awesome; a way to truly see into the lives of one of their favorite players. But the direct contact might not be all it's cracked up to be -- especially in the case of one blogger, who unintentionally found himself on the wrong side of Artest's outgoing personality.