Ricky Rubio Has Arrived; The Greatest NBA Tour Ever

Ricky Rubio has arrived. He’s arrived as much as you can during a lockout, when no one can really talk about him or see him play too often. But it’s being reported that the Spanish prodigy is in Los Angeles right now taking in the sights and testing himself against other NBA players. He’s already balled with Danny Granger, Joakim Noah, Enes Kanter and Omri Casspi. We haven’t heard a reaction, but it must’ve been good enough that Michael Beasley asked him to play in his All-Star Classic game on Friday at Osseo High. We wonder what Rubio’s thinking. After all these years, he’s finally here but at the mercy of a lockout. How will that affect his game? Do you think he’s going to struggle to pick things up if we have a condensed or shorten season? If we do have a condensed schedule, it could help him. Less time to prepare for him. It helped a few PGs during the last lockout season. It could happen again … A 10-day barnstorming tour across four continents? We’ll let it slide that we first broke this news a little while back. Anyways, a tour starring Kobe Bryant, Amar’e Stoudemire, Kevin Durant, LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul and Blake Griffin could net the big names over $1 million, touring all over the world from Puerto Rico to Australia. It would start at the end of the month. Excited, or not? We are as excited as can be considering the lockout has it’s jaws clenched pretty tightly … David Stern must’ve had one of his cronies slapping the smirk off his face Tuesday night. Stern is a major proponent of deadlines. He loves the word, and loves to use them to wield his power. If we don’t finish this by a certain time, I’ll cancel this and I’ll cancel that. It’s how he shows strength. Well, Tuesday night he did the same thing, except there was one problem: George Cohen the mediator was in town. Oh you want deadlines? Okay, we’re gonna stay around until we get it right. The meeting ending up going on for 16 or so hours, ending at about 2 a.m. The poor journalists stuck outside and in the hotel lobby all day joked they needed to shave and were close to resorting to cannibalistic activites. In a show of good faith, the parties send down ice cream, cookies and pizza to feed the malnourished reporters. Hopefully they split the cost or else they might need another two weeks to figure out the tip … The good news? They met for another nine hours yesterday, and Yahoo! Sports reports they moved closer to a 50/50 split in BRI … Check out our man Wesley Matthews‘ sneakers. There are 58 of them in that picture … Dirk can’t ball right now. Now he also can’t throw out the first pitch for Texas in the World Series. Yep, the Rangers nominated the Big German to get his Big Unit on, but he wasn’t chosen. Why? Reports claim that Major League Baseball executives wanted to stand behind their fellow owners in the NBA lockout in a show of support by not letting him throw. Yeah, because throwing out a first pitch and moral support of a lockout have so much to do with each other … Andray Blatche has a clothing deal with a company called Eight and Nine Designs. We haven’t seen too many photos, outside of these ones, but it’s pretty funny to see Blatche rocking a “Dream Killer” t-shirt inspired by Boyz N The Hood during the lockout … Unbelievably, Kim K. and Kris Humphries may already be close to a break-up. Damn, we really thought they were gonna work out … And if you live anywhere near Zanesville, Ohio you better have watched your back yesterday. You could’ve been in a market, buying a carton of milk before a freaking tiger jumped out from behind the register. The real life Jumanji is here. We need to find some scowling old guy with a rifle and awful facial hair. Sadly, but warranted, the escapees are pretty much all dead, including 18 Bengal Tigers (nearly extinct in the wild) … We’re out like Dirk’s shot at the majors.