FanHouse O.j.Mayo

It's June, a.k.a., a terrible time to find a quality basketball coach. But that will be USC's task after Tim Floyd's sudden resignation Tuesday amid a slew of allegations regarding the recruiting of star guard O.J. Mayo. Athletic director Mike Garrett (right) is used to hiring coaches on the fly. He fired Henry Bibby just four games into the 2004-2005 season, tabbed Jim Saia as interim coach for the season and then nabbed Floyd.

Garrett has time before having to go the interim route and there are some qualified coaches who either are unemployed or at mid-majors and would likely leave their schools and incoming recruiting classes for a job at a major school in a major conference. The USC athletic director has a history for going after tough gets and succeeding, but the question is whether the Trojans basketball program will be severely punished for the Mayo situation? Floyd was accused by former Mayo associate Louis Johnson of giving $1,000 to Rodney Guillory, an alleged street agent representing Mayo.

It's been a forgone conclusion for awhile, but on Wednesday it became official: Derrick Rose is the NBA's 2009 Rookie of the Year. He received the Eddie Gottlieb Trophy during a press conference earlier this afternoon.

There were several impressive rookies this year but Rose was the run-away winner of the award, receiving 111 of a possible 120 first-place votes; O.J. Mayo (five first place votes), Brook Lopez (two) and Russell Westbrook (two) accounted for the rest.

It's trophy time in the NBA, and the FanHouse crew has submitted its ballots. Find out which players deserve to take home the hardware and which ones don't, in our NBA Awards series. Next up: Rookie of the Year.

Coming into the season, most projected the rookie of the Year race to be fairly hotly contested between Derrick Rose and Michael Beasley, the top two picks in the NBA draft. But it wasn't: while Beasley spent time learning to contribute coming off the bench, Rose became one of the leaders on a team that made its way back to the playoffs. As such, the young Bull was our unanimous choice for Rookie of the Year honors.

The end of the regular season is winding down, so it's time to start thinking about who's going to be taking home the awards. With the Grizzlies in town on Monday to face the Phoenix Suns -- and with neither team having anything to play for but pride at this point -- I got the chance to speak with Memphis' coach Lionel Hollins about who he thinks should win Rookie of the Year.

And to the surprise of absolutely no one, Hollins enthusiastically said O.J. Mayo (who just happens to be on his team) should be the clear cut choice.

Memphis Grizzlies head coach Lionel Hollins is 8-22 since taking over for Marc Iavaroni in late January. Iavaroni was fired after the Grizzlies started the season 11-30.

In case you're scoring at home, that gives Iavaroni a .268 winning percentage compared with Hollins' .266. But Hollins should get credit for at least one thing: He's not selling false hope like a lot of other coaches. In fact, he's not selling hope at all, really.

Hollins peddles reality.

As teams get eliminated from the 2009 NBA playoff picture, Fork 'Em figures out what went wrong.

"The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress." -Philippe de Comines

It's also paved with the 2008-2009 Memphis Grizzlies and their fans.

The Grizzlies entered the season with a bizarre self-awareness. They were a young team with a coach that preached speed and aggression, but who had been told by his boss to instill defense, or else. They had lost their longtime franchise player in a rebuilding trade that resulted in much of the league mocking them, then pulled off a brilliant draft day trade to acquire O.J. Mayo. They had a deep set of guards, a great combination of young frontcourt players, returning superstar Rudy Gay, and a possible superstar in O.J. Mayo. And they were still expected to only win only 20-25 games.

NBA fans have been waiting for an All-Star Weekend HORSE competition for years, but the first few minutes of this year's contest had me wondering if it would fall short of the hype.

Fortunately, after getting warmed up with a handful of boring corner threes and mid-range jumpers, Joe Johnson, Kevin Durant and O.J. Mayo reached into their bag of tricks and broke out an array of shots that included everything from between-the-legs left-handed layups to loooong three-pointers from the first row of the grandstand behind the court.

We're not even at the NBA's All-Star break yet, but Bulls' head coach Vinnie Del Negro is already trying to say that the race for the Rookie of the Year is over. In Tuesday's Chicago Sun Times, Del Negro pretended to be an election night pundit, calling the race in favor of his own rookie point guard Derrick Rose, while making it seem like we shouldn't even bother discussing the other contenders.

Forgive us coach, if we take your recommendation with a larger than average grain of salt. Especially when there's a rookie named O.J. Mayo who's currently playing for the Memphis Grizzlies.

Technically speaking, the Grizzlies aren't the youngest team in the league -- Golden State and Portland just barely edged them out.

But in terms of players who actually play the most minutes, there's no doubt that the Grizzlies lead the way: they start three rookies (O.J. Mayo, Marc Gasol and Darrel Arthur), a second-year point guard (Mike Conley) and a third-year small forward (Rudy Gay) who's the old man of the group at 23 years old.

With that much inexperience, it's not a surprise the team is just 4-13 ... but at least one player thinks they probably could be better. When asked if he thought the Grizzlies were a well-coached team, Gay gave one of the worst endorsements of a coach I've ever seen.

Every night there are some stupendous, silly, stupid, or downright outlandish individual lines from around the lig. Doing Lines lets you know which one tops the list.

O.J. Mayo didn't exactly make a big splash in his first three preseason games -- the rook shot just 34.1%, including an atrocious 14.3% from long distance, while scoring all of 14, seven and 11 points, respectively. Maybe the tweener's game doesn't translate to the NBA after all ...

... or maybe making snap judgments on a guy three meaningless games into his career is incredibly stupid. Mayo finally had the scoring explosion we knew was in him, lighting up the Pacers for 26 points in just 30 minutes last night.

Will the NBA three-point line be a problem for him? It doesn't look like it: he shot 6-8 from behind the arc and 10-17 from the field. Of course, there's more to basketball than simply filling up the bucket, but he came through on the other end of the court with five steals.