Around basketball: Triple completes LeBron cycle ... Mad Ant races to Pacers
When LeBron James of the Lakers posted a 25-point, 11-rebound, 10-assist tripledouble in a 112-107 overtime win over Oklahoma City on Tuesday night, it completed a set for him. The sublime future Hall of Famer has now recorded a tripledouble against all 30 NBA teams in his 17-year career, the first player to ever accomplish that feat. James, who leads the NBA in assists, also has five triple-doubles in Los Angeles’s last 10 games.
Melo starts over: There was some understandable rust on
Carmelo Anthony when the 35-year-old made his debut with the Portland Trail Blazers on Tuesday. He was 4-for-10 from the field in 24 minutes, committed five fouls and had five turnovers as the Blazers lost 115-104 to New Orleans. But most important, he did have a spot in the starting lineup, a key consideration that led him to sign a minimum-value one-year deal that’s not fully guaranteed.
Long day: Mississauga’s Naz Mitrou-Long was minding his own business with the Fort Wayne Mad Ants of the G League at a game in Portland, Maine, this week when word came down that the Indiana Pacers needed the guard as an emergency fill-in, with both Malcolm Brogdon and T.J. McConnell out for a game with injuries. There aren’t a lot of Portland-to-Indianapolis flights, so Mitrou-Long and Mad Ants teammate Brian Bowen took a 160-kilometre Uber ride to Boston that began at 1 a.m. and caught a flight. They made it. Mitrou-Long, who entered the game with 21 career points, scored seven in his first six minutes off the bench and finished with a career-high 12.
Deep bench for Tokyo: Men’s basketball at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics could have a very NBA flair to it, quite aside from whichever players decide they’ll play for their countries. Former Phoenix Suns head coach and current Sacramento assistant Igor Kokoskov has agreed to coach Serbia when it tries to qualify for the Games in a lastchance tournament in June, while Philadelphia’s Brett Brown is reportedly going to be the head coach of Australia, which has already qualified. Toss in Toronto’s Nick Nurse with Canada and the benches could be dominated by NBA coaches. Information from other publications, wire services and websites was used in the compilation of this report.