Earvin “Magic” Johnson is excited to be on the cover of 2K Sports’ NBA 2K12 and for the start of the NBA season on Christmas Day. Johnson will be part of ABC and ESPN pregame shows for this abbreviated NBA season. The cover athlete took some time to break down some of the NBA’s blockbuster trades in this interview below.
Can you break down the Christmas Day NBA games?
You have a team in the Knicks now who are a lot better, especially with Tyson Chandler coming over. I think that once Baron Davis gets healthy they're going to cause some real problems in the East. Then, when you think about the World Champion Dallas Mavericks playing Miami again, I think it's going to be exciting, because Miami has got a lot to prove. I watched Miami and Orlando in their preseason game on Sunday, and I did see LeBron James going to the post a couple of times. So you can see he's been working on his game.
They've got a lot to prove to themselves as well as to the league, and they're an exciting team. So it's going to be fun to see what Miami does in terms of coming back after a devastating loss in the championship to the Dallas Mavs. Then the Mavs, man, when you think about the world champions making so many big changes, I mean, Tyson Chandler was the anchor of their defense, and now he's gone to the Knicks.
And J.J. Barea, he was the spark plug coming in off the bench, and now he's moved on to Minnesota. So how will Lamar Odom fit in and Vince Carter fit in to the Dallas Mavs, and can they get that, no pun intended, that Magic back? Because in the playoffs they were magical. They had everything going. They had the defense going. They had Dirk, who was outstanding…they had the outside shooters…just bombs away. They were just hitting from everywhere. Jason, J.J. Barea, they did an outstanding job. So there are questions there.
John Gaudiosi has been covering videogames for the past 20 years for outlets like The Washington Post, CNET, Wired Magazine and CBS.com. He has focused on the convergence of entertainment and videogames for outlets like Video Business, Home Media Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Gamerlive.TV and is also a freelance game columnist for Reuters and writes for outlets like Forbes.com, NVISION, Official PlayStation Magazine, EGM Now, Geek Monthly, PrimaGames.com, and Yahoo! Games. John also serves as the video game expert for NBC in Washington D.C. and has produced videogame documentaries for The History Channel and Starz Entertainment. John was named one of the Top 50 Game Journalists in the world by Next-Gen.biz in 2007. He is the co-author of Scholastic Books' How to Get into Videogames, Prima Publishing's Madden: Twenty Years of Videogame Football and Electronic Arts: The Official History.
