Belize

Restricted free agent shooting guard Nick Young.... is expected to sign his one-year, $3.7 million qualifying offer with the Wizards on Monday, according to people with knowledge of the situation. Young is coming off a career year with the Wizards, finishing as the team’s leading scorer at 17.4 point per game. But he found a rushed free agent market that was unfavorable to players at his position — and restricted free agents in general. Most teams around the league anticipated that the Wizards would match any offer for Young and few had the resources or willingness to give him a lucrative offer sheet.

Before Hopkins-Dawson began, we noticed a few basketball-related coincidences: Tim Thomas escorting fellow Paterson, N.J., native Kendall Holt to the ring for an undercard bout, and Carlos Boozer sauntering to ringside in an olive suit. Ha! The NBA avatars of mailing it in and the inactive list were in the house! Oh, wait —that means the harbingers of sports doom were also in the house.

That's why, like several of his teammates, [Korver] is trying to coordinate workouts for the team on the West Coast which would take place over the next month or two. "A lot of guys are playing on national teams or playing overseas. I think Derrick's [Rose] been playing a couple exhibitions, so until those kind of wind down, we obviously can't really do it," Korver said. "But there has been talk about meeting up somewhere in California. L.A. or Santa Barbara or somewhere and having some kind of team meetings, team workouts. You want to be ready. And we have a team that relies on chemistry, and we want that chemistry to be there. That's definitely something we'll be getting into in the next month or so." That drive to succeed is one of the messages Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau wanted to continue to instill in Korver, and others, before the lockout hit. "He basically said that we've got to bring more than we brought last year," Korver said. "We got a taste of what it can be ... We got a lot of young guys who can keep getting better. And that's basically what he was preaching. He wants us to do a lot of the same of what we did last year, just do it better. Coming into camp in great shape is going to be a really good thing. There's a lockout, there's going to be a lot of downtime. Don't let yourself slide. And whenever the time comes, be ready to go."

Barkley: "Well, I think it would be a mistake for Derrick Rose to go overseas"

Boozer: "If the lockout continues, I definitely plan on playing overseas."