“He pulled a cowardly move,” Granger said. “He cheap-shotted a couple of my teammates, and one gets thrown out …

“The refs never catch what he did … it’s cowardly. And I’m going to say something about it. I wanted to say something about it all the way to the game was over. I just don’t think the game should be played that way. You can play hard and fight and battle, but when you start cheap-shotting people it gets out of hand.”

For his part, Noah didn’t escalate the situation any further:

“I played dirty? OK. I’m just trying to win basketball games, man,” Noah said. “It’s the name of the game.

“I’m just out there trying to do what I gotta do. Like I said, I give a lot of credit to their team. They play hard as hell. They were competitive. I don’t have anything bad to say about them. Everybody saw what happened out there. Now you want to call me a dirty player? I don’t think I’ve ever been a dirty player. It is what it is. It’s OK.”

Josh McRoberts didn’t seem to take issue with Noah’s play.

“I’m not mad about it,” McRoberts said. “He got a good hit on me. They caught me trying to hit him back.

“It’s part of the game. I’m not going to say it’s dirty. That’s Game 5 of a playoff series. You can’t say it’s dirty, it’s part of basketball.”

Here’s the play in question. You’ll see at the 0:25 mark that Noah was standing still underneath the basket with his elbow raised and McRoberts initiated the contact. Noah does nothing wrong.

Noah is not a popular player outside of Chicago, but I like his game. He plays with great energy and has a terrific feel for the game, especially for a big man. He is the heart and soul of this Bulls team.

Joakim Noah wasn’t happy with the Bulls’ $55 million offer, but Chicago upped the ante and it seems the two parties have agreed to an extension.

The deal is worth $60 million plus additional bonuses, Dan Fegan, one of Noah’s agents, told ESPN The Magazine’s Ric Bucher.

I compared Noah to Andrew Bogut in a previous post, and this contract sound a lot like the one Bogut signed two years ago. Bogut’s deal raised a few eyebrows then, but he has since developed one of the best two-way centers in the league, earning All-NBA 3rd Team honors last season in his best year as a pro.

Between this contract and their refusal to include him in a deal for Carmelo Anthony, the Bulls obviously value what Noah brings to the table. According to 82 Games, his net points (per 100 possessions) was +0.9 last season, while Bogut’s was +8.0. In three head-to-head matchups last year, Bogut averaged 22/14 on 52% shooting, while Noah posted 10/16 on 42% shooting.

I think $12 M+ per season for a defensive/rebounding specialist is steep, but maybe Noah will develop offensively in the same way Bogut did. The difference is that Bogut started with a pretty good post game and developed from there, while Noah’s current post moves are rudimentary at best.

Alex Kennedy of HOOPSWORLD says that the Bulls offered Noah more than $11 million per year, and he isn’t happy with the offer.

The contract extension the Chicago Bulls offered Joakim Noah several weeks ago was actually a five-year, $57 million deal. Noah isn’t happy.

Wow, I think that’s more than fair for a offensively-challenged center who averaged 10.7 points and 11.0 rebounds per game last season. Sure, he’s great defensively and brings a lot of energy, but that’s why the Bulls’ offer is fair. When you start getting into the $12-$14 M per season range, you have to be a complete player. And as good as Noah is, he isn’t a guy that the Bulls can feed in the post and expect him to score.

Two summers ago, Andrew Bogut signed a five-year deal worth $60 million coming off of a season where he averaged 14/10. This season, he was named to the All-NBA 3rd Team after turning into one of the league’s best defensive centers and one of its few go-to post players. Would you rather have Bogut at $12 million per season or Noah at $11.4 million? Bulls fans might say Noah, but after the season Bogut just turned in, I think most people around the NBA would rather have Bogut (16/10, 2.5 blocks in 2009-10.)

With a new collective bargaining agreement looming, Noah should lock in his extension now. There’s just too much risk involved with all the uncertainty of next summer.

Earlier today, I discussed the report that the Chicago Bulls were one of two teams that Carmelo Anthony would like to be traded to before the season starts. Now it appears that the Bulls are thinking about using Joakim Noah as a centerpiece in an offer for the Denver swingman, per ESPN Chicago.

The Chicago Bulls are interested in trading for the Denver Nuggets’ Carmelo Anthony and are discussing internally including Joakim Noah as part of the deal, according to a league source.

According to the source, the Nuggets are hesitant to take back Luol Deng as part of a deal with the Bulls because Denver is leery of taking on long-term contracts with the collective bargaining agreement set to expire on June 30, 2011. Deng is two years into a six-year, $71 million contract.

Now we’re talking.

Noah isn’t a superstar or even a star, but he’s a quality center who brings defense, rebounding and energy to the Bulls lineup night in and night out. I would think that the Nuggets would require that he be included in any deal for Melo. If they can come away with Noah, Taj Gibson and a first round draft pick or two, that would be a solid start to their rebuilding effort that will no doubt begin once Anthony departs.

There’s just one sticking point — without Deng’s bloated salary, the numbers don’t match, so the Bulls would have to get a third team involved to take on Deng’s contract. That, or the Nuggets would have to take Deng as part of the deal.

When handicapping the NBA MIP award, I always like to look at the player’s original draft position. Here’s a table with the last 20 winners of the MIP award. Take a look:

Notice anything? Only one MIP winner in the last 16 years (Tracy McGrady) was drafted in the first 12 picks.

It appears that the voters don’t just look at overall improvement, they also take into account unexpected improvement.

Looking at TrueHoop’s list of MIP candidates that received more than one vote from a panel of voters, here are draft positions for each player: Kevin Durant (2), Andrew Bogut (1), Corey Brewer (7), Joakim Noah (9), Josh Smith (17), Russell Westbrook (4), Aaron Brooks (26), Anderson Varejao (30), Channing Frye (8), Al Horford (3), Andray Blatche (49) and Zach Randolph (19).

Can we safely cross Durant, Bogut, Noah, Westbrook, Frye and Horford off the list?

Actually, I’m not sure. I don’t remember a year when there were so many top candidates drafted in the first ten picks. The top non-lottery pick is Josh Smith, and he averaged more points and almost as many rebounds two seasons ago. I don’t think the writers are going to look at his career stats and think improvement even though he played much headier ball this season (as evidenced by his improved shot selection and increased assists).

Of all the non-lottery candidates, Aaron Brooks best fits the MIP profile. Here are his numbers year over year:

2008-09: 11.2 ppg, 3.0 apg, 2.0 rpg, 40% FG%, 37% 3PT
2009-10: 19.6 ppg, 5.3 apg, 2.7 rpg, 43% FG%, 40% 3PT

I think he’s going to win the award, but a case could be made for the first four players on the list:

1. Kevin Durant was supposed to get better, but I don’t think that there were too many pundits predicting a 30-8-3 season and 50 wins for the Thunder. He averaged 25-7-3 the year before, so his stats don’t really reflect his improvement. I think this will hurt him in the MIP race. (It also doesn’t help that he’s also on the short list for MVP.)

2. Andrew Bogut might be the darkhorse. Yes, he’s a former #1 overall pick, but he’s been around just long enough for people to give up on him. A little more than a year ago, a buddy of mine said he was a bust. I know he was trying to tweak me — I’m a sometimes-proud Bucks fan — but still, since he was the top overall pick, we’re expecting more than the 12-10 that Bogut posted in 2008-09. We were expecting a star, and that’s exactly what Bogut became this season. He averaged 16-10, and was second in the league in blocks (2.5) and fourth in charges drawn per game. In fact, he was second in the league in HoopData’s stat “DEF” which tallies the total number of blocks, steals and charges. (It should be noted that Josh Smith was the player ahead of him, though I don’t know that too many MIP voters dig this deep into statistics.) In the end, the Bucks’ emergence as a playoff team, Bogut’s improvement on both ends of the court, and his season-ending arm injury might produce a groundswell of support in terms of winning the MIP.

3. Corey Brewer averaged 6-3-2 last season and 13-3-2 this season. That’s a nice jump in scoring, but Brooks’ improvement was more impressive.

4. Joakim Noah averaged 7-8 last season and posted 11-11 this year. That’s also an impressive improvement, but we saw it coming, didn’t we? If Noah gets starters minutes, there’s a great chance that he’s going to post a d
ouble-double. It doesn’t fit the profile of unexpected improvement.

What about George Hill? He only got one vote from the TrueHoop panel, but the former 26th overall pick improved his numbers from 6-2-2 last season to 12-3-3 this season, and was a big reason why the Spurs stayed in the playoff picture even though they lost Tony Parker for part of the season.

So, in terms of the MIP profile — a big statistical jump from a non-lottery draft pick — I think Brooks is the frontrunner, but Bogut has an outside shot and Hill is the guy (almost) no one seems to be talking about.

But should anyone even want to win this award? In its history, no MIP winner has ever won a NBA championship. Strange, but true.

Photos from fOTOGLIF

- NESW SPORTS has video of Bill Simmons’s appearance on Jimmy Kimmel.

- Over on BLEACHER REPORT, “Jersey Al Bracco” rips into Mike McCarthy for giving the beat reports the same old platitudes after the Packers’ embarrassing loss to the then 0-7 Bucs last week.

- THE BIG LEAD discusses statistical guru Nate Silver’s plan to try to predict the winner of the World Cup.

- SPORTSbyBROOKS has video of a WGN reporter dunking and talking trash to a little kid. The kid starts crying. Nice.

- FANHOUSE explains how those refs at the LSU/Alabama game could not see that Patrick Peterson’s feet were indeed inbounds. The televisions that they use to review plays are not in HD. Seriously.

The Cleveland faithful might think that LeBron was fouled on his last drive, but after taking a couple of looks at it, I think it was a clean play. The defender is entitled to his space, and he’s allowed to jump in the air as long as he doesn’t jump forward. This is called the “principle of verticality,” which means that a defensive player is entitled to his vertical cylinder. Joakim Noah’s defense on the play wasn’t a perfect example of this (as his body was drifting toward the basket a bit), but it was a good defensive play. LeBron was in a tough spot and obviously jumped into Noah looking for the call and the refs didn’t bail him out.

There are a couple of other things to take from this game:

1. Mo Williams’ ineffectiveness
He was 4-13 from the field (including 1-7 from long range). He did have six assists, but Mo is a scorer and he needs to be more efficient than this.

2. The Bulls’ balance
Chicago had seven players score at least seven points, and Luol Deng led the Bulls with 15. Derrick Rose didn’t shoot the ball well, but still scored 14 points and dropped 11 dimes.

The Cavs drop to 3-3 with the loss, while the Bulls are 3-2.