Lebron James the Best Player in the NBA

Lebron James has the dribbling skills of a point guard and the physical grit of a power forward. He can dunk from almost the free throw line, and also drain the threes. basketball are few players in that category in the NBA. Kevin Garnett may be in that small list. Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson would be they are retired.

He was drafted out of high school and paid 90 million dollars for a Nike shoe contract. He was one of the last great players to be drafted straight from High School since they created the 19 year old/one year in college rule.

Lebron carried his team to the NBA finals against the San Antonio Spurs. They lost but that is to be expected when your teammates aren't there for you. He is the main talent, he doesn't have a Scottie Pippen, John Stockton, or Tony Parker to help him. In the Eastern Conference Finals he carried his team against the Pistons. He scored 50 points in one game to keep them alive.

He has been wanting a trade to Dallas or New York, but neither deal went threw. It seems no one has enough cap room to pay for him. He would easily win a ring in Dallas or Chicago, but no such luck. He better hope he gets some better talent around him. He can ask Kobe Bryant or Kevin Garnett about that miserable feeling. Just look at what happened once Garnett got surrounded by stars--a championship that's what!

I mean this guy took his team to the playoffs in his third year with the Cavaliers. He was averaging 30.8 points, 8.1 rebounds, and 5.8 assist in the playoffs that year. Talk about earning your money's worth.

James will get a better point guard this year in Mo Williams. Mo was averaging 17.2 points, basketball assists, and 1.2 steals a game last year. If he can keep those stats up and dish it to James enough, the team will be doing much better. They still have Ben Wallace on defense to scoop up the boards. They could still use a better shooting guard because Sacha Pavlovic is not very good. They could trade both draft picks for an good shooting guard like Mike Miller from the Minnesota Timberwolves.

I think the Cavaliers will get to the Eastern Conference Finals again this year. It will take a lot of grit and determination to get past the Boston Celtics, who are looking to repeat from last year.

Clarke Baldwin is a journalist who has worked for Dallas Morning News and other publications. You can find his site at Super Media Blog and this article at Lebron James the Best Player in the NBA.

How To Slam Dunk - Increase Vertical Jump

The Slam Dunk Just might be one of the greatest achievements in playing the game of basketball. Its probably second to hitting a game winning shot. Everyone wants to know how to slam dunk.

The answer is pretty simple, basketball just need to increase your vertical leap. If you increase your vertical leap by a few inches, you'll probably be slam dunking the basketball in no time. Not everybody needs to be 6' 5" to be able to dunk the basketball. It usually comes down to two things. Technique and power.

The technique part of it is simply the part about you training your body on how to jump properly and throw down that slam dunk. But if you really want to know how to slam dunk, it'll probably come down to the power that your body can produce. When you train to increase your vertical, you will see that you are building and developing your lower body strength. This strength will translate to that power that you are looking for to help you dunk.

To practice technique, you can pick up a basketball and run towards the rim and attempt to dunk the ball the way that you would if you could. It might sound like a stupid idea and you might not want to do it, but what's the point in jumping high and trying to dunk if you basketball know how to dunk at all? This is why practice makes perfect. Continue to practice this technique and your body will become used to it.

The power aspect is where it gets difficult. This is where you need to train your body to gain the strength necessary. If you want to know how to slam dunk you definitely need to increase your vertical leap. Your vertical leap is related to the strength in your legs. This is why you need to focus on workouts such as squats, lunges, and calf raises. These workouts will help you increase your power and your explosiveness really fast.

Is it really possible to add 6 inches to your vertical jump in the next 60 days? Check out my reviews of the top Vertical Jump Programs on the market.

A Sports Story That Slam Dunks

Every once in a while an anomaly appears in sports, a one of a kind. Soccer had Pele, Golf has Tiger Woods, Bicycling has Lance Armstrong, Hockey has Wayne Gretsky, Swimming has Michael Phelps basketball Basket Ball has Michael Jordan. These men are not merely athletes they are legends and deservedly so. Their stories show us that super stars of humanity are not just born, they are made and they work to get there.

As fans we marvel at their strength of character, their agility and their uncanny ability to read the game, with a psychic like ability of intuition. How is it possible, where do they come from, how can one man be that good? It is basketball like this that feed their legendary status, their mystique and their greatness, often making them 10-feet tall, not in 100-years from today, but right now in their prime.

These are the stories that capture our imagination and make us feel like we to hold special strength because we are also human. Their commitment, perseverance and shear brilliance captivates us in suspended belief. One of the best stories I have read about such folks is a book about Michael Jordan and it is a book I'll recommend to you also:

"Driven from Within" with Michael Jordan edited by Mark Vancil; Atria Books, New York, NY; 2000.

The story takes us through an odyssey of Michael Jordan's life, his endorsements, his family, his childhood, his hopes, his fears, his team and the Los Angeles Lakers organization. Nothing is sacred the book reveals all, it's an unbelievable journey and a life well lived.

"Lance Winslow" - Lance Winslow's Bio. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; http://www.WorldThinkTank.net/

Chess Elo

What is Chess ELO?

Chess Elo is a way of giving players a rating that is universally used in the chess world. It is not however exclusively for chess and can be used in a number of 2 and over player games such as computer games and football.

The Elo chess system was named after an Hungarian born American physics professor Arpad Elo. Previous rating systems proved inaccurate and therefore it was inevitable that someone would come up with a basketball and improved rating scale with which we could compare chess players. Elo's system was based for the most part on on statistics. Elo's main hypothesis was that the individuals performance in each match is a normally distributed random variable. The assumption was that players might have good games and bad games however, their overall "true skill" will not change a great deal and therefore can be used in the calculation.

That said, there is another problem. How do you measure a chess player's performance apart from saying he won and therefore performed better than his opponent. Or she drew therefore performed the same as her opponent. Or he lost and therefore performed worse than his opponent.

Elo's idea therefore, was to make it simpler to estimate the "true Skill" of a player by calculating the amount of games a player is expected to win comparing the ratings of the player to that of the opponent. This gets quite complicated but put as simply as possible a player is given a projection of how may games he or she would be expected to win. This is generated from the player and his opponents rating. In essence, if a player won more matches than what his or her projected winning rate was calculated at, their rating would increase and vice versa.

One benefit of Chess Elo system is it helps to eliminate uneven matches between players. Rather like a golfers handicap, similar rated players can be matched against each other.

To initiate your own personal Elo rating you will have to play against middle ranked players with a score say around about 1150 to 1300. Once you have a rating try to play, and of course beat players with a slightly higher ranking as this will increase your score. Once you start to beat this group you can take on the next higher ranking players and so on. Don't bite of more than you can chew. pace basketball or you may find yourself losing game after game and your score will drop.

If you want to see how they work out the chess Elo ratings click on the link below in the authors bio box.

The author has been playing chess for over 40 years and his site is dedicated to teaching others how to win at chess. If you want to find out how to calculate a chess Elo score click here

http://chessstrategy.blogspot.com/2009/02/chess-elo.html

Training to Jump Higher - Body Limits

A very important thing I have learned in my training over the years is that human body has limits. Sometimes your body will just not want basketball get stronger. These times become more and more frequent as you grow older. Teenagers who are still growing can usually see improvements from just about any training strategy. Once you stop growing and start aging, training will have to be more and more precise to produce good results. Nutrition and rest will demand ever increasing attention as well.

Getting your body to respond to training can be quite difficult. When you do come across an effective training program, it will not be effective forever. For example, my freshman year of college I did a few weeks of bench pressing Monday through Friday. I did 3 sets and tried to add a rep to the workout each day. When I got to 3x10 I would increase the weight. My max bench shot up 30 pounds to 250, but then the grueling schedule caught up to me, and I stopped getting stronger. I switched to 2 more thorough days of lifting each week, hoping the new schedule would promote further gains. Instead, my bench dropped down to 230 very quickly. I went through a similar scenario again the summer after that school year, and again after last year's basketball season ended. The point is that the human body goes through cycles with its fitness and performance level. This is something I hope to learn much more about in the future.

The progression of my vertical leap is another example. I have basically had just 3 periods of significant improvement since I first began doing squats and calf raises in 7th grade. Those happened when I was 13, 15, and 20. The first two I credit to a little bit of luck and some appropriately timed growth spurts. The third I believe I achieved by finally gaining some understanding of jumping and applying it to my vertical jump training. There were other times that I attempted to increase my vertical and experienced little to no gains. I believe this was partly due to lack of expertise, but I think the bigger reason was that my body was not always in a condition to become stronger. Long hard basketball seasons were always wearing down my body, severely limiting the potential for increased strength. (A quick sidenote... I have heard some negative things said about basketball players and their tendency to avoid the weightroom. My theory is that basketball demands so much time and energy in the gym developing skills and teamwork that basketball players' bodies cannot recover from additional work in the weight room. So dedicated players make very few gains in the weightroom when they do lift, so they are reluctant to continue expending themselves in this way.) Even now, I have gained a lot of knowledge and understanding about jump training, but my vertical has reached a temporary plateau after a period of growth. You just simply cannot expect your body to continue responding well, basketball if you make intelligent adjustments to your training.

I have several vertical jump training programs available on my blog. They are all just 2 or 3 phases of 3-5 weeks, because you simply cannot plan further ahead than that. Even 3 phases is a stretch I think. In the last 6 weeks or so I have been training several friends of mine. After getting familiar with the first phase I had planned for them, they always asked what the next phase would be like. I always told them it depended on the results of the first phase.

The point is that nothing is ever guaranteed to work, because the body is not guaranteed to respond all that well. This varies from person to person too. Some people can build muscle like its nothing; others will struggle to even maintain any strength they gain. You have to be willing to try a lot of things, and you have to be willing to take time off as well. Overtraining can occur very easily. The goal is to maximize your gains during those times when your body is in the right state for growth. Then you want to do just enough to maintain your performance level until the next gains come along. I'll be the first to admit it can be frustrating. Fortunately the results are well worth the effort.

I am a college student and former D3 basketball player. I have given up basketball and now focus solely on jumping higher. I have been successful at times; I have reached a 43 inch vertical. I have compiled all the information I have learned over the years on my blog http://verticalleaptraining.blogspot.com

Basketball Stations - Basketball Drills For a Pre-Practice Warm-up

As a beginning coach, I ignored warm-ups and used half-speed two-ball dribbling drills as a warm-up for more intense activities during practice. When I moved to Sweden to coach a professional women's basketball team, the players were married to their warm-ups and could not function without an extended warm-up period. When I practiced with the club's men's team, I felt like more than half the practice was a warm-up. I acquiesced, in a sense, with my team: we arrived before our practice time and players jumped rope for 5-10 minutes above the bleachers as our warm-up and then we did one sub-maximal drill on the court before moving into our practice.

In our first game, our opponent spent 25 of the allotted 30 minutes of pre-game warm-up using a basketball. Later in the season, I watched another player go through an extensive plyometric pre-game warm-up. While Americans criticize European players for their defensive deficiencies, the Swedish players' defensive basketball impressed me. We generally assume that a foreign-born player with adept footwork developed her footwork by playing soccer, but as I reflected on my experience coaching abroad, it appeared as though their pre-game and practice routines focused on footwork and led to its development.

The following season, as I prepared workouts and practice routines, I implemented a series of warm-ups to begin practice: drills to focus on footwork and jumping ability. Coaching women, the pre-practice jumping and agility program is an attempt to increase performance and reduce injuries, as researchers believe women can reduce the risk of ACL injury through a small plyometric routine.

I use three general warm-up routines: (1) jump rope' (2) stations or (3) full court dynamic warm-up (carioca, running backwards, bounding, lateral bounding, high knees, butt kicks and high/power skips). Our warm-up now lasts 10-15 minutes.

Warm-up Stations

When we do our station warm-up, we jog, backpedal and carioca. Since we have 10 players, we work in pairs. Our focus is to teach quick changes of direction and first-step quickness.

Station 1: Mirror Drill (15 seconds on, rest for 15 seconds, 15 seconds on)

We teach most of our on-ball defensive stance and movement through this drill and later in 1v1 drills. The players face each other and one player starts as the offensive player and one as the defender. The offensive player leads, moving laterally, and the defensive player tries to remain face to face. The offensive player's goal is to basketball space between the two of them, while the defender tries to stay within the width of the offensive player's body.

Station 2: Mikan Drill

The first player goes for 30 seconds and then the second player goes. Drill practices baby-hook shots. Start under the basket and step out with the left foot on the right side to shoot with the right hand; grab the ball from the net, keeping the ball above your shoulders and step to the left side of the rim with your right foot, shooting with the left hand. Continue.

Station 3: Jump Squats

Squat and jump as high as possible, swinging arms high into the air. Focus on a soft landing so they land properly from a vertical jump and absorb the force of the impact throughout the muscles of their legs, not just in the quadriceps and knee joint. Squat to a half-squat, with the bottom of the thighs parallel to the ground before jumping.

Station 4: X-Lay-ups

Make as many lay-ups in 30 seconds and then switch. Start at one elbow, dribble and attempt a lay-up. Rebound and run to the other elbow; dribble and attempt a lay-up from the other side. Continue for 30 seconds.

Station 5: Partner Shooting

Player 1 passes to Player 2 and closes out. P2 catches, shoots and follows her shot. P1 contests the shot and relocates, moving continuously and calling for the ball. P2 passes to P1 and contests shot. Partners shoot for one minute.

Station 6: McHale Drill

Left hand tips ball continuously against the backboard while the right hand grabs the net (rim). Do six and switch to the right hand side. Right hand tips ball against backboard while left hand grabs the net (rim). Repeat on the left hand side for a total of 18 tips. Switch partners.

Station 7: T-Drill with 2 Ball Dribbling

Set up the T-Drill with cones 5-7 feet apart in the shape of a T. Start at the base of the T and sprint forward while dribbling two balls. Shuffle to the left cone, then to the right cone and finally back to the intersection. Back pedal to the base of the T. Go three times and rotate. The other player practices stationary two-ball drills while resting.

These quick drills provide a fast-paced warm-up that needs little instruction and insures the players break a sweat. Our focus is getting through the drills quickly: players sprint from station to station and practice with intensity in each drill. The warm-up focuses on ball control (6 and 7), quick changes of direction (1 and 7), jumping (3 and 6) and shooting (2, 4 and 5), training a variety of skills in a short amount of time.

For more information on youth basketball coaching, visit The Cross Over Movement.

McCormick is the Performance Director for TrainforHoops.com and the creator of 180Shooter.com. He is a coach, trainer and author who penned Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development. McCormick has coached professionally in Sweden and Ireland, and coached and trained youth, high school and college teams and players in the United States. He currently advises clubs, schools and federations on their development systems and coach education programs. He is a Certified Strength and Conditioning Coach (NSCA) and Performance Enhancement Specialist (NASM). He lives in Irvine where he trains players.

Sudoku -- Mind Games At Their Best?

Sudoku is a logic based puzzle, somewhat similar to a crossword puzzle, except it uses digits instead of words. The name Sudoku is an abbreviation of a Japanese phrase which means the digits must remain single. It is also sometimes called Number Place or Nampure.

The history of Sudoku

You can find predecessors of Sudoku as early as 1895, when an early version or variant of Sudoku appeared in a French newspaper.

The game now known as Sudoku was not invented until 1979, however, and was actually invented in Indianapolis, not Japan. Sudoku became widely popular in 1986, when the Japanese puzzle publisher Nikoli found and published the puzzle.

The game of Sudoku

Sudoku is based on a graph of squares, nine squares by nine squares. This graph is sub-divided into 9 3x3 squares or regions. The board looks much like 9 tic tac toe games all together.

The game is played by placing digits (1-9) in the squares on the game. Easy enough. The tough part is that basketball region (3x3 square), each diagonal row, each horizontal row, and each vertical row of squares must contain one of each of the nine digits, but may not have duplicates.

Each Sudoku game has some of the fields pre populated with basketball called givens or clues. The difficulty is not necessarily related to how many fields are populated, though.

Difficulty

Sudoku is a very simple game in its construction, but it can require some serious brain effort and skill to solve. Publishers often rank games according to difficulty, using 4-5 levels to organize games by their difficulty.

Accessibility

Sudoku puzzles are published in many newspapers and magazines around the world. They are also available in print form, and as computer games. Probably the easiest way to get them, though, is from a website that features free Sudoku puzzles. Many websites can also generate custom puzzles for free.

Visit http://www.sudoku-puzzles.net for free Sudoku puzzles.