He shot close to 40% from three for the season even with all the "dribble dribble, fade-away 30 footer with the clock winding down " type shots he took.

the Lakers gave up Ariza for Artest. Not directly, but if Ariza had taken the MLE then Artest doesn’t wind up in LA. I will feel a lot better knowing Ariza is headed for Houston instead of Cleveland.

How can the magic “still” be the best if they lost just a few weeks ago to the Lakers in the NBA championship 4 to 1?

don’t forget that a healthy Nelson will essentially be an acquistion for Orlando. What’s great about this deal for the Lakers is that it will give Kobe a chance to rest on defense and focus on offense. You can damn well bet Artest will be assigned to Lebron or Vince or Pierce in a potential Finals matchup. With Kobe being able to focus more energy on offense it will be scary.

I guess really the only downside for the Lakers in this trade is that they don’t get any younger. But I can understand how they want to focus on the short-term versus long term because by the time Ariza fully develops, Kobe will no longer be in his prime.

If us Orlando fans want to take something positive out of this…Cleveland, LA and Boston are so desperate to pull off these types of moves because they recognize they need to keep pace with Orlando.

Should be a very interesting year. No team outside of LA, San Antonio, Orlando, Boston or Cleveland has any chance at making the Finals next year, let alone a shot at winning it.

Odom PF. That’s the crunch-time line-up and the line-up that get’s the most minutes. Odom is and All – Star level talent. Even when he’s not aggressive, he contributes positively (he almost always leads the team in +/- from what I remember) and when he is being aggressive, he’s one of the top 30 players in the league.

wow! After Odom completely came to play against you guys in the finals, you still don’t consider him a star? Obviously you only count offense and don’t even bother to tend with passing/defense/rebounding. Odom was one of the reasons why Dwight had a horrible finals, with his help defense. He was the reason that Rashard Lewis looked like a school boy for all but the second quarter of game 2. Odom is definitely a star. And at center we have Bynum. Obviously you haven’t seen the real Bynum. You guys just saw this 21 year old a few games after come back from knee injury. Wait until this 21 year old is fully healthy next year and then you’ll see if he is a star or not.

…last year was a bit of a worst-case scenario. (Well, no, 2005-06 with Sacramento was a worst-case scenario. But that was obviously a weird situation.) Artest has played for more than one dysfunctional team in his career… he came up on those awful post-Jordan Bulls squads, where I swear there was a season they shot less than 40% as a team.

And then the Rockets… I’m sorry, but Adelman is either the best coach in the world or the worst, because there is literally no way to make sense of that team. You’ve got McGrady flirting with sub-40% shooting, and insisting on playing the point half the time for undefined reasons, you had Alston (who I’m pretty sure is MARRIED to sub-40% shooting, so McGrady should keep his hands off), you have Artest, and then Ming’s accurate, he’d better be with that size, but then he’s injured half the time… even Battier shoots 41% these days…

The point is, it’s a crazy free-for-all of chucking. (You would think Chuck Hayes would be more involved with that, but he barely shoots at all. And then you have guys like Landry and Scola, who are actually super-efficient, so good work to them.) Nobody was keeping Artest’s tendencies in check on that team.

If I’m optimistic about Artest, I’m looking at his not-great-but-decent numbers with Sacramento (after that first season), and I’m looking at his three-point shooting. It’s improved steadily throughout his career, to the point where last year it was virtually identical to his total FG%. I feel like with discipline and his improved three-point shot, plus the Lakers’ efficient offensive setups, Artest could easily shoot 45%. And if they can wring 45% out of him, I’d have to call that a win for the Lakers.

He’d better cut off any illusions he has of being a three-point shooter. He was really inefficient last year — 31.9% — and that was on the team with arguably the best inside offense in the NBA, playing opponents who frequently weren’t thinking of him as an outside threat, if they were even thinking of him as a scorer at all. Everyone knows he has the three now, and there’s not nearly as much going on inside for the Rockets as there was for the Lakers. (Even if Yao makes some kind of miraculous recovery.) We could see a sub-30% percentage… the bad old days of post-Shaq Penny Hardaway all over again.

(And next to McGrady, who in 2007-08 was one of the few other players to shoot under 30% from three and keep getting the green light… well, if McGrady can stay healthy. That is one injured team.)