Fin-dog with new tricks...

Los Angeles beat Toronto 102-91 even though Chris Bosh had 22 points and 10 rebounds for the Raptors, who fell to 3-17. Bosh sounded off after the game: "I don't know man. We talk about the same thing after every game all the time," Bosh said. "You guys see it, the fans see it and I see it."
"It's the same old thing," Bosh said. "Once it starts getting old for us we'll start playing better. Once we get tired of the fans booing, once we get tired of being down by 20 at home, once we get we get tired of those things, that's when things will really kick in for us." Lamar Odom had 19 points for the Lakers and Kobe Bryan, who sat out the fourth quarter, finished with 11 points for the Lakers, who iced the game with a 31-18 run in the 3rd quarter. Laker comments after the game were mocking at best: "It was really good for us to be able to rest," – Kobe Bryant…"We get to have a light practice, lift a little weights, have a steak and relax a little bit," - Lamar Odom…By the way, the Lakers outrebounded Toronto 48-33 and shot 54% from the field vs. only 41% for the Raps…

Jermaine O’Neal is tilting at windmills after being fined $10,000 for the length of his shorts…"It doesn't make any sense," O'Neal said. "Our shorts don't determine who we are." O'Neal took no chances in Tuesday's game against Dallas at Conseco Fieldhouse. He asked equipment manager Joe Qatato for the shortest pair of shorts available, and wore them. The problem for teams is that uniforms are ordered in December or January of the previous season -- in this case long before the new policy went into effect. O'Neal said he has filed a complaint with the NBA Players Association. Meanwhile, he blasted the policy as meaningless and offensive. "It's a cultural thing," he said. "There's other people outside of suits and ties who watch the NBA. You don't turn away an entire group that watches the games. That's what (commissioner David Stern) is doing. That's how people are taking it. I know players are taking it that way. "To me, it's more of a control issue. If you want to talk about making the NBA better, sit down with the entire company of the NBA and the players and talk about what we can do to improve it." Hmmm…shouldn’t Reebok, the NBA’s official uniform supplier be held accountable here?

MVP baby…Steve Nash had 28 points and 14 assists, and Marion added 27 points and 14 rebounds as the Suns ended their eighth straight victory on a 15-6 run, beating the Warriors 118-110 Wednesday night.

No Shaq, no chance…Tim Duncan had 28 points and 16 rebounds, Manu Ginobili added 27 points, and the Spurs dominated in the paint in a 98-84 victory over the Heat on Wednesday night. Dwyane Wade scored 31 points but got little help from the rest of the Heat, who shot 36 percent from the field.

Wow, that was fast…Dwight Howard, who turns 20 on Thursday, has made 100 consecutive starts to begin his NBA career.

The Sixers hired Moses Malone to tutor their big men on rebounding…they should have just signed him to a 10-day contract to see if he could still go out and get 10 a night in his 50’s…

Cue the yelling in practice…Retired Purdue basketball coach Gene Keady has accepted a position with the NBA's Toronto Raptors. "What my exact duties will be has yet to be determined," said Keady, who returned Tuesday from a Caribbean cruise with his wife, Pat. Keady will either join head coach Sam Mitchell's staff as a full-time bench coach or he will be a consultant/scout. "I talked with them Monday, and they had some of their people at the Jimmy V Classic, so we agreed to finalize things in a day or so," Keady said. In mid-November, Keady received a call from Toronto executive Wayne Embry, who requested that he join the Raptors in Boston to observe a game and then return to Canada for a practice and a home game.

Keady enjoyed the three-day stint but told Raptors officials that he would think about their offer while vacationing with his wife. "I'm excited about it," he said. "I've kind of left it up to (the Raptors) as to what they would like me to do. "They have a lot of young talent, and I like their guys and their coaching staff. I'm looking forward to it." No one in the Raptors organization could be reached for comment Tuesday night. However, Mitchell said two weeks ago that he is eager to work with Keady. "Everyone in this organization, including me, can learn," Mitchell said. "Who better to learn from than someone with (Keady's) background of success?"

1) Chuck Klosterman, writing for ESPN.com but usually with SPIN magazine with an interesting article on the return of Phil Jackson:

I enjoy watching the Los Angeles Lakers. In fact, I'm watching them right now, as I type this very sentence. They are like an eighth-grade intramural team which happens to have one kid with a mustache; in eighth grade, mustachioed dudes get to take all the shots. In theory, the Lakers are running Tex Winter's triangle offense, but the scheme has been altered to fit the Lakers' current personnel: Instead of spreading its five interchangeable components throughout the frontcourt and employing an intricate system of baseline cuts and horizontal passes to maximize scoring opportunities for all potential contributors, Luke Walton is just throwing the ball to Kobe Bryant on the left wing so that he can dribble twice and shoot a 19-foot fadeaway, pretty much every time down the floor (this offensive pattern strikes me as less of a "triangle" and more of a "straight line," but I suppose Euclidean geometry only matters to kids who play for Duke). This one-legged triangle succeeds about 32 percent of the time, which means Kobe and his metaphorical mustache will get 22 second-half points while the Lakers lose by 12. There is not much to be optimistic about here, unless your name is Marvin Barnes and you are planning an ill-advised comeback; this franchise is clearly shackled by the fact that the second-best player on the team is Lamar Odom, a man who is either (a) the worst good player in the NBA; or (b) the best terrible player in the NBA. However, this is excellent news for people like me: I love one-man teams. If I had coached the Houston Oilers in 1979, I would have given Earl Campbell 45 carries a game; I would have also made him return kickoffs, cover punts and play nickel back. The premise of watching Kobe eternally trying to score 60 out of necessity is the best thing about the NBA (at least until April). If I wanted to care about who won or lost, I'd watch a college game. However, Kobe's vocation as an offensive black hole is not the only reason the Lakers intrigue me. I am equally interested in seeing how Phil Jackson responds to the possibility of unadulterated public failure, as this response will characterize the totality of his existence. Because I feel a moral obligation to support all humans from North Dakota who are not Rick Helling, I am a fan of Phil Jackson. I enjoy his unorthodox coaching philosophies, most of which work brilliantly despite making no sense whatsoever. Whenever I hear Jackson reminisce about the success of the Chicago Bulls, he inevitably makes unconnected references that (I assume) are supposed to seem self-evident, such as, "It was difficult to convince Horace Grant to hit the offensive glass as aggressively as he attacked the defensive glass, so I made him read Frank Herbert's 'Dune.' Horace brought a lot to the table." Throughout his career as a player and a coach, Jackson has been a wonderful role model for myriad subcultures, most notably (a) ambitious stoners; (b) men who aspire to have sex with their boss's daughter; and (c) pedantic intellectuals with massive skeletal structures who still want to look comfortable in Italian suits. Jackson's success is vast, unassailable and informed by modernity. He is on the cusp of being A Great Man, an intangible designation I suspect he desperately desires. But Phil Jackson has never really failed. And if you want to be A Great Man, you need to fail (at least once). Americans don't read very much, mostly because they don't have to. But we still live in a staunchly literary world. We understand almost everything (and everyone) within the context of a narrative that's written by circumstance and reality; each person's history is a little story where they are the main character. As such, historical figures are remembered for the things they accomplish and the victories they win -- if life were a movie, the collection of those achievements would comprise the plot. But people are always defined by their greatest failure. You learn very little about a man's character from his success; truth exists only within adversity. And adversity is what Jackson needs to define himself as A Great Man; without it, he's just a tall dude from Williston High School who won a lot of games with a lot of talent. A few weeks ago I was sitting in the terminal of Charles De Gaulle Airport outside of Paris; I was reading "Wilt," the autobiography of Wilt Chamberlain (this is not the 1992 book in which Chamberlain talks about having sex with 20,000 women; this is the 1973 book in which he talks about architecture and Richard Nixon and NCAA high jumping and having sex with maybe 1,300 women). Wilt died in 1999 and quit playing basketball before Mick Taylor quit the Stones, but a middle-aged French guy still recognized him from the cover of the book (this surprised me, since almost nobody over there even seemed particularly interested in Tony Parker). "Wilt" is an engaging, depressing book; it's really just a monologue about Chamberlain's single-minded obsession with his own greatness, his profound bitterness over his own iconography, and why Bill Russell is a jerk. More than any other figure in sports, Chamberlain illustrates the limitations of achievement: No one has ever dominated anything the way Wilt dominated his chosen field (the only exceptions I can think of are Isaac Newton, John Philip Sousa and Mark Burnett). In 1962, Chamberlain averaged 50.4 points and 25.7 rebounds a game; in 1962, your fantasy basketball league would have been insane. Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak is considered to be an unbreakable record, but it will be broken twice before another person scores 100 points in a single game. I'm not even sure such a performance is still theoretically possible: When Michael Jordan scored 63 points (in double overtime) against Boston in the 1986 playoffs, it seemed like he took every shot on every possession while channeling Frank Lloyd Wright's imagination through the bones in his right wrist -- but at that pace, he still would not have broken Chamberlain's record unless the game had gone into seven additional overtimes. Yet Chamberlain was not the league's MVP in 1962. That season, Chamberlain scored over 50 points in 44 different games, but people barely noticed. They were too busy watching Wilt define himself through his most profound failure: He simply did not get it. Wilt was a smart guy and a good businessman, but things that were obvious to everyone else completely escaped his understanding. He could not comprehend why fans and writers would dislike an egocentric superstar (he oddly assumed the world must have been intimidated by his honesty and skill). When he led the league in assists in 1967-68, he thought that accomplishment proved he was unselfish (of course, everyone else immediately recognized that passing for the sole purpose of racking up assists is not that different than trying to score 100 points by yourself). Wilt's defining failure was not that he couldn't win the league championship, because he did that twice; Wilt's defining failure was that he could not see the difference between (a) things that are impressive; and (b) things that are important. That failure is central to the portrait of Chamberlain -- it makes him a misguided, tragic hero. And within the context of contemporary history, it makes him A Great Man. You can see this relationship between accomplishment and failure everywhere. Michael Jordan scored 32,000 points, won six championships and sold about 70 billion sweatshop Nikes, but those things tell us almost nothing about "Michael Jordan." It was MJ's failures -- his attempt at baseball, his comeback with the Wizards, his compulsion for gambling -- that define his true legacy: Jordan was the most hypercompetitive person alive, and that made him both unstoppable and unsatisfied. Charles Barkley has developed an entire on-air TV persona around the fact that he supposedly doesn't care about having never won an NBA championship, even though it's patently obvious that he does; it seems to color his perceptions of everything. I cannot think of any major boxer (from any era) whose legacy isn't dominated by the melodrama of his specific Achilles' heel. John Elway was far more interesting before the Broncos won a title, because all those soul-crushing Super Bowl blowouts made him seem doomed and rarified; now he just seems like a normative Hall of Fame QB with a few less yards than Dan Marino and a few fewer rings than Joe Montana. By erasing his greatest failure, Elway has actually lost his definition. The same thing happened to the entire Boston Red Sox organization: Ten minutes after the 2004 World Series, that franchise was no longer captivating, and all their long-suffering fans immediately became lost, boring and strangely self-absorbed. Today, being a Red Sox fan is almost meaningless. Losing isn't everything. Losing is the only thing. This is why the Lakers are worth watching, even when San Antonio is whacking them by 20 and some cat named Smush is trying to stop Manu Ginobili from dunking with his left hand. How Phil Jackson responds to the circumstances of this debacle will illustrate more about his authentic nature than any of his nine championships, and it will dictate whether he is remembered as A Great Man. I suspect this is part of the reason Jackson returned to coach a Lakers team he knew would be terrible; he understood that a dramatic failure would shape his personal narrative more than another shallow success. Jackson supported the political career of Bill Bradley, but his worldview is much closer to Bill Clinton's: Jackson wants a legacy, and this is how you get it. In a related story, L.A. is still behind by 11 in the fourth quarter. Somebody needs to throw the rock to Kobe. I realize he's not open, but somebody needs to throw it to him anyway.

2) Marty Burns of Si.com thinks these 5 guys need a change:

Looking for greener pastures - Thomas, Watson among those looking for new homes

Thomas and Patterson are two of five disgruntled players seeking a trade. Here's a look at the five, and which teams might be interested:

Tim Thomas, SF, Bulls: The 6-foot-10 veteran has been sent home by the Bulls, who have decided he doesn't fit into their plans. In the final year of a deal that pays him $14 million, he comes at no long-term risk. The Pacers, Knicks, Heat, T'wolves and Nuggets have been mentioned as possible destinations, but Chicago would probably rather keep him and clear the cap room.

Ruben Patterson, G/F, Trail Blazers: The 6-5 veteran defensive specialist is unhappy with his role as a backup to Darius Miles and has asked to be traded. The Blazers would love to accommodate him, especially if they can get back an expiring contract in return. The Knicks, Rockets and Nuggets are all said to be interested.

Voshon Lenard, G, Nuggets: The former 3-Point Shootout champ lost his starting spot and, like Patterson, has asked to be traded. In the last year of a deal that pays him $3.27 million, Lenard could be an attractive target for a team seeking a veteran marksman. The Heat are interested and might be willing to offer backup center Michael Doleac.

Earl Watson, G, Nuggets: Despite having signed a five-year $29 million free agent contract in the offseason, the 6-1 former Grizzly has found himself on the bench next to Lenard. He's not eligible to be traded until Dec. 15 by league rules. The Knicks, T'wolves, Jazz and Lakers are among teams that might be interested.

Mark Blount, C, Celtics: The 7-foot veteran has fallen out of favor with coach Doc Rivers, and has grumbled about his role. But he has not played well this season, and his contract ($5.5 million this season and $28 million over the next four years) scares off most teams. The T'wolves and Nuggets are two teams that have been mentioned as possibilities.

On the surface it seems to make perfect sense. The Knicks need a small forward. The Bulls need a veteran big man. The Knicks have a spare big man in Antonio Davis. The Bulls have a spare small forward in Tim Thomas. Davis makes $13 million. Thomas makes $14 million. Close enough to make it legal under salary cap rules. And each guy is in the last year of his contract. So why doesn't Bulls GM John Paxson get on the phone with Knicks GM Isiah Thomas? "Hello, Isiah ... John Paxson here. Umm, remember that big Eddy Curry blockbuster we made a few months ago. ... What do you say we pretend like Davis and Thomas were never included?" "Pax, my man, I was just thinking the same thing. We'll call it an early Christmas present to each other.... By the way, how come you didn't tell me that Curry was allergic to rebounding?" Jokes aside, we know that such a deal is illegal. According to an NBA spokesman, teams are prohibited from reacquiring any traded player for the remainder of that season. But there is a loophole ... What if the Bulls were to release Thomas, and by sheer coincidence (ahem), the Knicks were to release Davis at the same time? Then the two teams could re-sign their former players for the minimum, an additional $1 million roughly. It would be perfectly legal, according to the NBA. The problem for the Bulls and Knicks is that by waiving those players they would give up those big expiring contracts. For example the Bulls would no longer have Thomas' $14 million deal to use as a trade conduit later this season. They would only have Davis' new $1.1 million deal. In other words the Bulls would probably rather have Thomas collect dust now and be able to use the larger value of the contract than to have Davis help them win a few more games this season. But if the two clubs were to decide the deal makes too much sense to ignore, they could get a deal done via this scenario. Obviously, Davis and Thomas would have to clear waivers first. But it is highly doubtful any team would be willing to pick up the remainder of the $13 million Davis is owed or the $14 million Thomas has coming his way. "That would be no problem," said one league source, "For one thing, nobody's got the cap room to do it." Otherwise, the only hurdle for the Bulls and Knicks would be a 30-day waiting period. Last year there was some grumbling when the Celtics re-signed Gary Payton two weeks after trading him to the Hawks in the Antoine Walker deal. As a result the new CBA contains a provision (aka the Gary Payton Rule) that requires a 30-day waiting period before teams can claim their old player off waivers or sign him to a new deal. So Paxson and Isiah could probably make this happen, and all it would cost them would be an additional $1 million and enough patience to wait 30 days. Of course, this assumes that the Bulls and Knicks really would want their old players back. From the Bulls' side, it would be a no-brainer. Chicago didn't want to give up Davis in the first place. The 6-foot-10 veteran was a locker room leader and glue-guy for the Bulls. He was only included in the deal to make the salaries match up. Thomas, meanwhile, doesn't fit in Chicago's plans at all. The Bulls already have Luol Deng and Andres Nocioni at small forward, both of whom are better fits in coach Scott Skiles' defensive scheme. That's why Paxson recently told Thomas to stay at home and not bother showing up for work. For the Knicks, it's a much tougher call. New York coach Larry Brown sure sounds like he wouldn't mind having Thomas back. "He'd be playing a lot of minutes here," Brown said two weeks ago. "We made the deal knowing we were giving up two starters. Everybody though he'd start here. I thought he and [Michael] Sweetney [would be starters]." But Brown is also the guy who, as Sixers coach and de facto GM back in 1999, traded Thomas to Milwaukee for Tyrone Hill. Does he really like Thomas that much more now that he would give up Davis? Even with the emergence of rookie Channing Frye, Davis is a big body with a lot of experience in the trenches. It's hard to see the Knicks giving that up even if they could use more scoring from the small forward spot. That's why the Knicks and Bulls are likely to stand pat and use those big contracts to sniff around for better offers. For example, the Blazers might be willing to give up Ruben Patterson and some other pieces for Davis' expiring contract. Patterson is more Brown's type of player, and it would have the added benefit of keeping Davis away from a conference rival in Chicago. The Bulls, meanwhile, could hang on to Thomas and use the contract to make a trade later for a high-priced player. Or they could use the cap space after the season to make a run at a free agent like Al Harrington, Ben Wallace or Joel Przybilla. That's why we're not likely to see a Davis-for-Thomas switcharoo this season. Even though it would arguably help both teams on the court.

3) Chris Ballard also of SI.com thinks LeBron is a star maker:

Get on board - Cavs poised for stardom with LeBron in spotlight

Life is interesting again: Cavaliers guard Damon Jones has ended his media boycott. That's right, after spending the first three weeks of the season declining to talk to the press, apparently because Cavs coach Mike Brown named Eric Snow the starter, one of the league's most loquacious players recently decided to grace NBA fans with his wisdom once again. "I want to apologize to the media for taking a hard stance and not talking," Jones said. "I know from a business standpoint I did you writers a disservice for not talking because you were not able to get in my clever quotes and humorous statements in the paper." (How clever? Judge for yourself. Here's Jones, describing then-teammate Michael Redd to me two years ago: "I call him 'Bombs over Baghdad.' Sometimes he kills the enemy and sometimes he kills the civilians. And we --" he gestured around the Bucks locker room -- "are the civilians.") This was a prudent, if belated, move on Jones' part. Maybe he is spoiled after last year, when he was able to cruise through the season like a 3-jacking remora attached to Shaquille O'Neal's underbelly, catching a ride to warmer NBA waters through little effort of his own. Though, really, that only means he should appreciate his current situation even more, versed as he is in the art of drafting off superstars, because he and the rest of the Cavs (The James Gang? the LeBronsketeers?) are in an enviable position at the moment. LeBron James is already making their lives much better, just as they have made his. This is a team talented enough to go deep into the playoffs, and with a ludicrous amount of fanfare, primarily because LeBron leads them. So it would behoove the Damon Jones' and Drew Goodens of the world to make nice to the media, make even nicer to GM Danny Ferry and put their agents on alert. Good times, they are a comin'. To understand why, think back to Stacey King. Remember him? Nice fellow, bad haircut, great collegiate career. Michael Jordan made Mr. King an NBA champion, undoubtedly prolonged his NBA career and earned him a couple extra mil', all because of the post-Bulls glow he carried with him. He was 'a winner,' just like Luc Longley and John Paxson. That's what a title will do for a guy, because making it deep into the playoffs is the difference between being Steve Kerr and Fred Hoiberg, between Horace and Harvey Grant. Eight points a game is disappointing on a lottery team; on an NBA Finals squad, it means you are a Valuable Role Player. And Valuable Role Players -- past chapter heads include Austin Croshere and Jerome James -- tend to be rewarded at a level that is not commensurate with -- how should we put it? -- their ability to play basketball. And though Zydrunas Ilgauskas, Larry Hughes and Donyell Marshall have proven capable of playing basketball at a high level, they have yet to prove they can do it in the postseason. Watching the Cavs against the Kings Tuesday night, one could see it happening already -- in the way the Sacramento broadcasters fawned over James, the way Gooden got wide open dunk after wide open dunk, the way Ilgauskas was lauded repeatedly and referred to as an "All-Star center" (which he is, in part because he was on a winning team last year), the way there appeared to be a buzz at Arco befitting, well, a rock band. Kevin Garnett sees where it's headed. "If you're paying for a ticket to see LeBron, it's like a present," Garnett told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune recently. "I hope the city of Cleveland totally understands what they get to see night in and night out. He's like the Beatles right now." Funny, it's almost like we've heard that analogy before. Oh that's right, we have. "The Bulls are Beatles of the NBA," (May 24, 1996, USA Today), "The Bulls are the Beatles of today" (Danny Ainge, in January of 1996), and 85 other references in the mid-'90s, according to our friend Lexis-Nexis. (The first was made in '91, when Bob Greene wrote in the Chicago Tribune: "What is going on with the Bulls right now has much more in common with the heyday of the early Rolling Stones, the early Beatles, than it does with professional sports.") Last season, Jones earned the nickname "Donkey," because he was always following around Shaq (aka Shrek), cackling at his jokes. This year, he might be wise to fashion himself a Ringo-esque existence. After all, Ringo might not have been the most talented Beatle, but think if he'd joined some other Liverpool band back in the day? That would be like voluntarily leaving the Cavs during the LeBron area, sort of like -- what's that guy's name again? -- oh yeah, Carlos Boozer. How'd that work out for him, anyway?

4) Greg Boeck of USAToday.com reflects on the changing fortunes of the Clippers:

Clippers changing chemistry and culture

LOS ANGELES — Sam Cassell and Cuttino Mobley live close to each other in Houston, where they have bonded as friends. They work out together in the summer. "Sam's always over at my house," says Mobley. They have gotten closer this fall: The NBA veterans locker next to each other at Staples Center, where they have not only cemented their basketball relationship but also transformed the one-time laughingstocks of the league into legitimate Western Conference threats. These aren't your old Los Angeles Clippers, the ones who provided Jay Leno joke material for years with their unrivaled history of failure. This is the franchise that has never won a playoff series since arriving here in 1984, last made the playoffs in 1997 and posted its only winning record in Los Angeles in 1992. "Players can't wear anything embarrassing to the league," the Tonight show host said of the new dress code before the season opened. "Like a Clippers uniform." Look who's laughing now. The loosening of owner Donald Sterling's purse strings, the take-charge regime of coach M ike Dunleavy and general manager Elgin Baylor's offseason acquisitions of Cassell and Mobley have culminated in a head-turning 12-5 start and perch atop the Pacific Division entering tonight's home game against the New York Knicks. Laughter now is associated with winning, as is this catchphrase as the team breaks its pregame huddle: "One, two, three, Clip Show!" For the second season in a row, the Los Angeles Lakers are the No. 2 tenant in the building. The Clippers have beaten them the last three times. Even injured Shaquille O'Neal took notice Monday before his Miami Heat lost to the Clippers 99-89. "I'm sure Donald Sterling is tired of being second fiddle," the former Lakers star said. No longer must the Clippers audition for free agent contracts. Two years ago, four fled Clipperland for more money and an opportunity to win. Even restricted free agents Elton Brand and Corey Maggette tried to leave. Instead, Cassell and Mobley sensed a chance to win in pro basketball's wasteland of losing. Mobley, a 6-4 guard with six seasons and 14 playoff games of experience, was first aboard. He signed a five-year, $42 million deal Aug. 3. He saw a young team on the verge of breaking out after an encouraging 37-win season that included 27 losses by seven points or fewer. "You come here and teach them a little bit," says Mobley, 30. Cassell, a gritty, take-charge point guard with 12 seasons, 103 playoff games and two rings on his résumé, came nine days later in a sign-and-trade deal with the Minnesota Timberwolves. First, however, he had what he says was an "air-it-out" sitdown with Dunleavy. "I don't have four, five years to BS," says Cassell, 36. "I told him, 'If this organization is serious about winning, let's go win it.' It's easy to say you want to win. Put forth the effort. That's what we've been doing." Defying sceptics…The backcourt buddies have combined to average 33 points, 11 assists and 9.5 rebounds. Skeptics doubted whether there were enough basketballs to accommodate them, with Brand and Maggette. But Cassell had no doubts. "I told Cat, 'Hey, man, let's surprise a lot of people,' " Cassell says, referring to Mobley. " 'People are going to laugh and joke about us, predict us to finish this and that and say they aren't enough basketballs.' But I'm a winner. I'm here now, and I'm going to make this place a winner." He has done that with his typical bravado, or, as Mobley kids, "His big mouth. ... We told the guys from the beginning, 'You have to walk with a swagger.' They never had that." They do now, none more so than Brand, the center who heard chants of "MVP! MVP" two weeks into a season in which he has dominated inside, and Maggette, bucking for his first All-Star nod. "In the past, when we lost two in a row, we folded," says Maggette, averaging 21.7 points and 5.5 rebounds at forward. "I have to credit Sam. Our focus is better." Only six of the Clippers' wins have come against winning teams, but they have strung together victories against the Cleveland Cavaliers and Heat, confidence-builders with a hearty schedule ahead. Brand sees the losing changing before his eyes, and it's not a one-season fluke. Except for Cassell, who signed a one-year, $6 million contract, the core of the team is locked up long term. "We have players you can hold accountable," says Brand, coming off a 37-point, 12-rebound, six-block game against the Heat and averaging 19.7 points and 10.5 rebounds. "In other years, it was young guys auditioning for other teams because they thought they wouldn't get a contract here. Now, the guys want to be here." For one of the few times in Sterling's ownership, the Clippers are over the salary cap. "He's been responsive to everything we've wanted to do," says Baylor. The culture has changed so dramatically Baylor has given up his baseline seat and moved into the media section to accommodate fan interest, which is starting to rival the Lakers. They still outdraw the Clippers by nearly 2,000 a game, but Hollywood celebrity Penny Marshall, a Lakers and Clippers fan, says, "It's a different atmosphere." The first sellout crowd, against the Heat, gave the Clippers three standing ovations during their rousing come-from-behind win. Even Sterling has caught Clipper fever: For the first time in his ownership, he attended a Lakers home game against his team this season. "The diehards are excited," says longtime season ticketholder Jim Goldstein. "But the city hasn't realized what's going on as a whole." "They finally got chemistry," says Atlanta Hawks coach Mike Woodson, who lost twice to the Clippers. "Bringing in Sam and Cuttino ... they play together." Dunleavy says their work ethic and attitude have rubbed off. "They're willing to try to do the right thing. When they don't, they own up to it. It's great for a team to see veterans take a hit from the coach." Mostly, opponents are taking the hits. "We walk into arenas expecting to win," says Cassell, who'll wait until after the season to decide his future. "No doubt the whole thing is changing here. No one is playing for contracts. Now we want to win. You win, everybody gets paid." After tonight, the Clippers face the Phoenix Suns on Saturday, the Detroit Pistons on Sunday and the San Antonio Spurs on Dec. 13. "All our games are tough tests," says Cassell, "because we haven't won a lot. The challenge is here. We're ready."