There is a draft blowing in the NBA and it is blowing East. After years of Western supremacy, the tide seems to be shifting, finally, to the Eastern Conference. The Celtics championship romp over the Lakers not only established Boston as the league's top team, but suggested that Detroit, which in the Eastern Conference Finals also fell to the Celts in six games, may have been the runner-up. The Celtics provided further evidence of that--evidence most experts ignored in their playoff predictions--by going a remarkable 25-5 against the West during the regular season. And the Piston's mark of 22-8 against the rival conference represented a higher winning percentage than any Western team managed against its own. (The Lakers' 37-15 was the West's top interconference mark.)

And at last night's draft the only two players regarded as true difference-makers, Memphis' Derrick Rose and K State's Michael Beasley, both landed in the Eastern Conference--and both with teams that are considered far better than their record. Rose went to the Bulls, which got lottery lucky to snare the first pick despite having only the 9th worst record in the league. The Bulls have an impressive array of young talent, even if is mismatched and overlaps too much at the guard position, and was actually expected to contend in the East this past season. The addition of Rose should move Chicago quickly into the East's upper echelon.

Miami, which got Beasley with the second pick, will be three seasons removed (and minus Shaq) since its NBA championship. But the fastest way for any decent team to make a big leap forward is to sink all the way to the bottom because its best player is injured, enabling it to snare a second superstar in the draft. San Antonio did that in 1997 when, after losing center David Robinson for the season, it managed to draft Tim Duncan to twin with Robinson. Two seasons later the Spurs won their first title. With Dwyane Wade returning from injury and Shawn Marion, the key addition from trading Shaq, the Heat has an impressive triumvirate to rebuild around.

Other top teams in the East, like Orlando and Cleveland, are built around young superstars Dwight Howard and LeBron James and should continue to improve. And Toronto appears to have pulled off the coup of draft day by landing a perennial all-star in Jermaine O'Neal to play alongside Chris Bosh at a price of only their second best point guard, the talented, but oft-injured T.J. Ford, and a middling first-round draft pick. Label the Raptors instant contenders. While plenty of talent and talented teams--L.A., New Orleans, Utah--remain in the West (including the two difference-makers out of last year's draft, Greg Oden and Kevin Durant, neither of whom made any difference this past season), contenders like the Spurs with Duncan, the Suns with Steve Nash and Shaq and the Mavericks with Jason Kidd all appear to be be showing signs of age and inevitable decline.

Tides do shift. The East won the NBA Title. The NFC won the Super Bowl. And maybe the National League can finally win an All-Star Game. (Reader warning: Don't bet on the latter.)

Yesterday afternoon I told all my Boston buddies that Game 4 was the Celtics' best hope to win a game in L.A. because the "fix" was in.

Not the kind of fix alleged by disgraced ex-ref Tim Donaghy, himself a convicted fixer for gambling interests, who said that some refs affected the outcome of games at the behest of the NBA--prolonging series, favoring marquee teams and protecting star players. But rather the kind of fix that is repair or damage control.

Earlier in the week NBA commissioner David Stern had hoped to make the embarrassment that was the Donaghy mess go away with his trademark, withering glower and a few dismissive "consider the source" remarks. But a few days later Stern was still playing defense, if only because every NBA fan believes, at the very least, that league's officiating is often inept and biased and too many believe there is some core truth in Donaghy's charges.

The result of all that was advantage Boston. The NBA clearly preferred the Lakers to win Game 4, tying the Finals at two games apiece and setting up a ratings blockbuster Sunday night. But with Donaghy's allegations hovering, you just knew that the the officials would do everything in their power to call a fair game, unlike the previous two games where--first in Boston, then in L.A.--the refs appeared to be wearing home uniforms and produced huge free-throw discrepancies in favor of the home side. In fact, before the game I bet a pal that the two teams would wind up shooting an identical number of free throws and I consider L.A. 29 attempts, Boston 28 well within the margin of error.

With as much attention on the refs as on Kobe and KG, the Lakers lost the biggest part of the home-court advantage--it isn't having Jack Nicholson and Dyan Cannon courtside--at the Staples Center, where the team hadn't lost since March. Of course, my homecourt disadvantage theory looked pretty foolish in the first half when the Lakers went up by as many as 24 and walked off the court with an 18-point lead. The Lakers got most of the calls in that half too, but deservedly so as the far more aggressive team. But when the Celtics went on a second-half tear and a few ill-timed whistles or marginally bad calls might have derailed them, the calls went their way--again to the more aggressive team. And a fair shake from the refs turned out to be just enough for Boston to produce the greatest comeback in NBA Finals and take a 3-1 lead in the Series.

Nobody, least of all the Boston Celtics, could explain why it took the team with the NBA's best regular season record a full seven games to dispatch Atlanta in the first round of the NBA playoffs--how the Celtics kicked the Hawks, the only sub. 500 team to reach the postseason, by an average margin of 25 in its four wins at the Boston Garden, but lost all three games in Atlanta. The Celtics, who had the best road record (31-10) in the NBA this past season, are at it again: they smothered LeBron James and his Cleveland Cavaliers two straight at home, but last night suffered a second double-digit defeat in a row in Cleveland to square the series.

The home court is supposed to be an advantage--worth three points in most bookmaking operations, just like in football--but the Celtics are hardly alone in making it seemed even more conspicuous this 2008 playoff season. New Orleans ran defending champ San Antonio off the court in the opening pair at home, then were routed two straight by the Spurs when they crossed west into Texas. The Los Angeles Lakers are even up with the the Utah Jazz after losing both games in Salt Lake City, where the Jazz were a league-leading 37-4 this season. Home teams in this second round are 15-1, with only Detroit winning on the road, a one-point squeaker in Orlando.

Granted, home teams won more than 60 percent of the home games during the regular season and only 8 of 30 NBA teams had losing records at home. Still, the discrepancy in the numbers--home and away--in this playoff round has been mind-boggling. Look what happened when the the two teams that met in the 2007 Finals, the Spurs and the Cavaliers, arrived home trailing 0-2: San Antonio, having shot 41.6% from the field on the road, shot 49.7% at home. The Cavs jumped from 33.1 percent shooting in Boston to 49.3 percent. Even the superstars weren't immune to road woes: LeBron James shot 8 for 42 in Boston; Tim Duncan went 1 for 9 and scored just five points in the opener in New Orleans: and Kobe Bryant was 13 for 33 in the Laker loss Sunday.

So what exactly is the homecourt advantage? The comforts of home--familiar food, your own bed-- as well as knowing the court and the rim (and in the old Boston Garden, Red Auerbach used to play nasty tricks with the temperatures and conditions in the cramped visitors locker room) must play some part. And as the game has become increasingly emotive--more fist-pumping and chest-thumping--the crowd frenzy may have more effect, up and down, on today's players. Of course, there is also the critical question of whether the home crowd has an impact on the officiating. A likely case in point would be the key three-pointer scored by Detroit at the end of the third period of Game 2 against Orlando, where a clock snafu forced officials to guess whether the Pistons got the shot off within 5.1 seconds. Watching the game and guessing along with the officials it seemed unlikely to me and one inevitably wonders if the path of least resistance was dealing with an angry coach rather than Detroit's famously angry crowd.

Still, I confess I look hard for what I perceive to be official bias and--besides the consideration given superstars like James and Bryant, a time-honored NBA tradition--didn't see much clear evidence of it. The Cavs, for example, were awarded 53 free throws to Boston's 56 in the two games at the Garden, 51 to Boston's 50 at home. New Orleans shot 39 free throws to the Spurs 40 in New Orleans, 33 to the the Spurs 41 in San Antonio. Or to put it in human terms, I've seen LeBron lower his shoulder into a defender and actually get called for charging at both home and way in this series.

Whatever accounts for the discrepancy is a pretty good advertisement for David Stern's rejuvenated NBA. The oft-repeated complaint is that the season is too long, the players can't get up for 82 games and, thus, too many games are meaningless. Obviously, there is some truth in that. But this year's playoffs are demonstrating that playoff positioning counts a great deal and some good teams that had to open on the road may have been doomed from the start. The Celtics, by virtue of the best record in the league this year, are in position to pull of an unprecedented, if very unlikely, trick--winning the NBA championship without a single victory on the road.

While the NFL draft is this weekend and the NBA draft not for another two months, it's the basketball version, with recent news indicating that most of the top college freshman players will enter the draft, that has attracted more of my attention.

For the second straight year since a minimum age of 19 was instituted in the NBA, freshman will almost certainly be the top picks in the draft. Last year it was Ohio State's Greg Oden and Kevin Durant who went one-two--to Portland and Seattle respectively--in the draft. This year the cream of the freshman crop are again choosing the one-and-out route at college, with Kansas State forward Michael Beasley and a pair of guards, Memphis's Derrick Rose and USC's O.J. Mayo likely to be the three top picks in some order. Insiders are predicting that more than half the lottery picks, which should include high-profile players like UCLA's Kevin Love and Indiana's Eric Gordon, will be frosh.

Obviously, this NBA rule change has been a win-win for college basketball and the NBA. The nation's elite high-school players are now doing a campus drive-by, giving the NCAA tournament more star power. And as a result, the NBA gets to draft players who are presumably more mature on and off the court with the added benefit of some March Madness exposure that helps promote them. NBA Commissioner David Stern has obviously been delighted with how his brainstorm has worked for his league and he would like to push it even further, raising the entry-age to the NBA to 20, though it's not clear that the union will accede to this proposal.

But just because the higher entry age bolsters basketball at two levels doesn't mean it's a good idea for society. Sure there were high-school players who opted to go straight to the NBA and whose games weren't ready and who weren't mature enough to handle the rigors of the pro league. But just a superficial glance at this past season, certainly the NBA's most entertaining and untroubled in many a year, reveals that of the consensus top candidates for MVP--Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, LeBron James, Dwight Howard and Chris Paul--four entered the league directly from high school, with only Paul playing two years of college ball at Wake Forest.

But if the premise of the immature player and his difficult adjustment is overstated, the result of the new rule is far more egregious. It's a complete academic sham. Players who would have gone straight to the NBA now spend one reluctant year taking a scholarship spot from a kid who might really want to be there. And, of course, one year may be a slight exaggeration since these gilded kids can pretty much stop going to class as soon as they've served their school by demonstrating their wares in the NCAA tournament. The graduation rates for so many of the elite basketball schools are already so embarrassing that it's hard to see how adding a layer of one-and-outs does anything but exacerbate the problem.

It may be a bit too facile to touch on how we treat youth in our broader society. But it seems ludicrous that we deem 18--year-olds mature enough to enlist in the military, with potentially dire consequences, yet are hellbent on protecting them against the consequences of not being ready for prime-time NBA basketball. If the pros want to backstop the kids, why not make a provision of every contract with a high-schooler guaranteed money that would be reserved for a college education if the NBA thing didn't work out. I understand why the NBA, with its public relations problems in recent years, prefers more mature players. And I understand why the NCAA wants to exploit the talent to boost its TV ratings before turning the kids loose. But what that adds up to in those places where basketball is not life's paramount concern is nothing short of a fraud.

Newsweek is blogging on the NCAA tournament, here. Here's my first entry:

Before March Madness consumes you, check out a film that pays homage to basketball's black pioneers.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE:

Nobody would ever have thought that Bobby Knight was the kind of man who would go gentle into that good night. But two weeks ago, while the sports world was still dissecting the extraordinary Super Bowl upset and awaiting the Clemens congressional circus, Knight just slipped away. On Monday he announced that he was resigning as Texas Tech's basketball coach, departing with 902 wins in his career, ranking him first all-time among Division I coaches.

All Knight offered by way of explanation was that he was tired of bad refereeing. That was most assuredly part of it. He has been tired of refereeing for most of his career, and Knight has always been far less tolerant of the flaws of other folks than he has been of his own. One might also suspect that, at 67 and after 42 years as a head coach, he was just plain tired, even more so because he had been relegated to the basketball hinterlands with a second-rank team in the essentially football town of Lubbock. And perhaps Knight reasoned that by turning the reins over to his son, Pat, in midseason, he gave his kid the best shot at retaining the job. Knight is certainly not one to trust institutional assurances.

If we can set aside questions of behavior and temperament for a minute, then Knight was, to my mind, the best college basketball coach ever. His teams didn't rival those of other coaching immortals like John Wooden and Dean Smith when it came to pure talent, but he got more than anybody out of what he had. His Indiana University squads in the mid-'70s were coaching clinics. The '75 version fell just short of the Final Four when its leading scorer, Scottie May, was injured during the tourney, but the '76 team went all the way to glory, the last Division I men's college basketball team to finish its season undefeated.

Make no mistake: these teams didn't lack talent. Indiana sent six guys to the pros off those teams—May, a sweet-shooting forward, center Kent Benson, a pair of ball-hawking guards in Quinn Buckner and Bobby Wilkerson, and two more forwards, Tom Abernathy and John Laskowski. But unlike the UCLA or North Carolina players whose talents in college had been kept under wraps and who blossomed in the pros, the stars on Knight's best teams pretty much peaked in Bloomington. While several went on to have long, productive NBA careers, none became a dominant pro until Isiah Thomas became the leader of the Detroit Pistons' championship teams. It wasn't until Thomas transferred from Chicago to Bloomington in the early 1980s that Knight had a genuine superstar to build around (though Larry Bird had made an abbreviated stop a few years before). Few of the basketball elite were willing to subject themselves to the exacting standards that Knight demanded of his players on and off the court.

To the extent that Knight's tale rises to the level of tragedy—and I'm not really sure it does—it is because he was incapable of meeting the high standards he demanded of others. And he refused to take responsibility for his failures of temperament, casting blame scattershot and pointing fingers at pretty much everyone but himself. It was sad, even pathetic, to see a man of such talent and breadth cast himself as the eternal victim—of idiot bureaucrats, of incompetent refs and of unscrupulous reporters. Indiana finally cut him adrift as a hopeless recidivist before the 2000 season, but in truth that decision wasn't made until Knight's program had slipped to the point where it was first-round fodder in the tournament and no longer a threat to add to his three national titles.

The 2006 hiring of Kelvin Sampson as basketball coach made it clear that high standards were never the paramount issue at Indiana U. Winning was and is. Sampson left the University of Oklahoma under a cloud after recruiting violations, and he started at Indiana with a personal one-year ban on contacting recruits. Now, two years later, Sampson has—surprise, surprise—reportedly committed a series of major recruiting violations, virtually reprising his Oklahoma transgressions and compounding those, according to the NCAA's report, by giving "false or misleading information" to investigators. Indiana's athletic director risked a Pinocchio moment if he pronounced himself shocked by the accusations, so he settled for "profoundly disappointed" and said there would be no "rush to judgment," ignoring the fact that there was precious little judgment used in the first place when Indiana hired Sampson.

Read the rest of the column here

The NBA will never regain its former prominence in the vast panorama of American sports. But after a long period when it seemed there was nothing but bad news emanating from the league--off-court misbehavior, on-court fracases, a gambling scandal and, with the memory of Michael Jordan hovering above, a shrinkage of star power and a tedium in the play--the NBA has staged something of a mini-revival. And coming out of the All-Star break (and an entertaining All-Star game), the NBA can look forward to what appears to be the most compelling season since MJ hung 'em up (at least that second time he hung em up with the Bulls).

It has been a long time since there has been the movement of so many stars--Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen to the Celtics, Shaquille O'Neal to the Suns, Pau Gasol to the Lakers and, in all probability, Jason Kidd to the Dallas. And it has created a wide open playoff scenario with at least a half dozen legitimate contenders for the title and another handful of teams considered to have an outside shot. The Western Conference playoffs loom lethal with no team, regardless of finish, able to contemplate a breather, even in the opening round.

The trades have also revived the two most storied franchises in the league, Boston and L.A.. And while Garnett has long been recognized among the game's elite, the Celtics' reemergence (with the best record in the league at All-Star break) has given him a showcase that he never had in a dozen standout seasons in Minnesota and, if he can stay healthy, one that will establish him in the NBA's all-time pantheon. Two of the recent trades, the aging and gimpy O'Neal, and the aging Kidd to Dallas, represent daring moves by franchises that have been perennial contenders in recent years, but clearly felt they were still destined to fall short. O'Neal potentially gives the running Suns a monster in the middle when the games turn halfcourt in the playoffs and Kidd, if motivated and healthy, should resolve the Mavericks' problem of talented, but erratic play at its point.

In the more good news for the NBA, LeBron James simply defies belief as he grows his game, doing what seemed impossible when he entered the league as a teenager--not only living up to the boundless hype, but actually exceeding it. He is even better this season--amazingly, he is still just 23 years old--than he was last when he single-handedly carried the Cavs all the way to the NBA Finals. And it's hard to blame him for thinking that if one of these major talents that has popped up on the open market would find his way to Cleveland, James might nab one of those championship rings.

Sure it's not perfect, the league could use a franchise in New York rather than the laughingstock that is now the New York Knicks. And the Bulls, a team that seemed to be rebuilding with a talented array of youngsters, has regressed so much this season that once untouchables like Ben Gordon suddenly find themselves on the trading block. Moreover, it's hard to explain the seemingly eternal imbalance between conferences, but there is no doubt that the West remains dominant. The West is a plus 48 in the wins column against the Least and right now Houston would be odd team out of the playoffs despite a 32-20 record. That would be the fourth best record in the East, where, at least now, a 23-30 mark would still claim a playoff berth.

The Western dominance is even more remarkable when you consider--also remarkable--that the Celtics are now 16-0 against the Westerns. That unblemished record will be put to a test, starting tonight in Denver, when the Celtics play five games against the West in seven nights, including four teams with winning records. Boston might have the advantage of Garnett returning to the lineup after missing nine games with an abdominal strain.

Assuming his full recovery at some point, it could be one of those injuries that proves a blessing in disguise. It not only gives the 31-year-old Garnett, one of the most intense, all-out competitors in the league a rest, but necessity helped the Celtics discover that they may be more than the sum of their superstar threesome, Garnett, Allen and Paul Pierce.

The Celtics have gone 7-2 with Garnett sidelined and got major contributions from Rajon Rondo at the point and James Posey, Leon Powe and Glenn "Big Baby" Davis off the bench, the latter two who weren't even expected to be in the team's rotation. The added depth should help the Celtics revival story down the stretch. For those ready to catch up with the NBA now, the must-see game on this Celtics trip comes Friday night--a national broadcast on ESPN--against Phoenix with Shaq possibly in the Suns lineup.

Like every red-blooded American sportswriter, I am now compelled to follow the best basetball prodigies coming out of nursery school. So I have, of course, been hearing about O.J. Mayo for many years now. It was mostly tales of his prodigious talents along with a few hints of misconduct or, at least, questionable judgment. (As befitting a star of his stature, basketball suspensions were lifted, drug charges were dropped.) But earlier this year I finally got my first real introduction to the next great O.J. in a New York Times article by Lee Jenkins.

It detailed how an emissary from Mayo showed up in the offices of University of Southern California basektball coach Tim Floyd in the summer of '06. Floyd had heard of Mayo but, because he had no hopes of recruiting such a stud to his second-tier program, hadn't sent him so much as a brochure. Nevertheless, the gentleman informed Floyd that Mayo, a superstar guard from West Virginia, had already chosen USC, viewing the school and L.A. as central ingredients of his marketing vision. Moreover, the coach didn't have to worry about any other scholarships he might have lying around--"don't worry about recruiting, I'll take care of it"--because Mayo would bring along some basketball pals.

Mayo is reputed to be bright and academically capable, thus presenting no admissions problem. Still, one might think Floyd would be a little embarassed about this recruiting episode, given recent revelations about problems in the school's high-powered football program. That he might have balked, if only for a moment, after he asked for Mayo's cellphone number and was refused-- told essentially, "Don't call him, he'll call you." But Floyd simply viewed it as a welcome breakthrough for USC. basketball, one that, even if Mayo only stayed a year on his way to the NBA, might finally give the Trojans the prominence to challenge crosstown rival UCLA, longtime home of basketball gods.

So Mayo got USC and both got prominent billing (along with UCLA frosh Kevin Love) in SI's college hoops preview. And the story, by Grant Wahl, was even more frightening. Mayo's idol naturally is Los Angeles Lakers supestar Kobe Bryant, who has actually mentored the kid, or at least offered him some hoops advice. And anyone who has watched Kobe's one-man-team game in recent years knows that any advice he has offered is going to be lousy.

Now Mayo is not exactly underconfident or shy about shooting in the first place. But it seems like O.J.'s team was playing pickup ball against Kobe's team last summer when Mayo, who had drilled three straight, passed the ball to an open teammate who then missed what would have been the game-winner. According to SI, Kobe took him aside and chided Mayo for the selfless decision-making: "When you've got it going like that, take the shot…throwing it to him just because he's open doesn't give the team the best chance of winning."

Kobe does know shots; he led the NBA in shots last year, on the way to leading the league in scoring and the Lakers to a 42-40 record. And Mayo is a quick learner. He has put up 59 shots in USC's first three games, 24 more than any of his teammates. Of course, if the team wins, everybody will be thrilled with his gunslinging. But while USC is off to a 2-1 start, the team's home opener suggested it could be a rather bumpy year. Mayor scored 32 points and USC, ranked #18 in pre-season polls, lost 96-81 to Mercer University. Mercer, a Georgia school, is out of the Atlantic Sun conference, which includes another giant-killer, Gardner-Webb, which had upset Kentucky a few days earlier. Mercer, however, has now lost all three games since beating USC, including by 18 points to Ivy non-power Harvard.