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SAN FRANCISCO -- If you play adult league basketball, you've seen it a million times. Some new squad comes in, a ragtag group of ringers who, to the naked eye, look like a juggernaut. They're taller, stronger, younger, more athletic. Yet somehow they look up at the scoreboard and they've lost to a bunch of 40-year-old lawyers and accountants whose feet didn't leave the floor the entire game. Why? Because that team has been playing together and winning rec league titles for 20 years. Continuity matters in sports, and especially basketball, where teamwork and chemistry are so vital. That's partly why this season's 10-3 start by the Utah Jazz was so baffling. When they traded away four of their five starters from last season -- Donovan Mitchell, Rudy Gobert, Bojan Bogdanovic and Royce O'Neale -- most expected head front office exec Danny Ainge to sell off any remaining parts and get direc...

The Los Angeles Lakers probably should have traded Russell Westbrook before the season. It's hard to argue otherwise when they're 8-12 through 20 games. As well as Westbrook has adapted to a bench role, there is simply no path to contention that involves a $47 million sixth man. The Lakers surely knew this before the season began. They didn't act on it. Part of the reported logic was a desire to see how this team would actually look on the floor. Well, the proposed 20-game timeline has come and gone. It's December. A quarter of the season is behind the Lakers, and while there are still questions to be answered, we have a pretty good idea of what this team is. So through more than a month of basketball, what have we learned ? What do the Lakers now know that they can act upon in trade negotiations? Here are the five biggest lessons this team has learned through the first month and a half of basket...

LeBron James is currently on one of the great random streaks in the History of Sports . The NBA introduced an All-Star Draft as an alternative to its old East vs. West format six years ago. James has been elected a captain in each of those six seasons. In the first five, the team he drafted ultimately won the Game . This season, he'll look to move to 6-0. Standing in his way is Milwaukee Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo, who drafted against James and lost in both 2019 and 2020. Now he's hoping the third time will be the charm, so in order to attempt to predict how the two captains who act when All-Star Sunday arrives, CBS Sports is holding a mock All-Star Draft. Representing James will be resident Lakers expert Sam Quinn, and representing Antetokounmpo will be Milwaukee maven Jack Maloney. James, as the leading overall vote-getter, will pick first on the starters. Antetokounmpo will pick first with re...

Blow. It. Up. They are NBA Twitter's three favorite words, but they tend to be far less realistic than critics want to accept. Fans think in terms of the championship binary. They want teams to either be directly com Pet ing for one or rebuilding toward that end. Owners treat winning as a spectrum. Championships are nice. Turning a profit is a necessity. Get most owners a couple of home playoff Game s while avoiding the luxury tax and they're going to be pretty happy. Unsurprisingly, this kind of inertia tends to keep teams together well beyond their expiration date. There might be a dozen teams that need to be blown up in a given season. We're lucky to see one or two teams actually pull the trigger. So let's look through the standings now and attempt to figure out who should and shouldn't push that big red button and start over again. We'll rank all 30 teams, starting with the NBA's ...