NBA News

This week has been hectic for the National Basketball Association, who is now faced with the possibility of a star player ending his career to early and a former player being documented and known to the world.

Saturday, September 13th, 2008, marked the day that Phoenix Suns center Shaquille O'Neal foreshadowed his retirement. He has already put a deadline on his retirement, at the end of his contract, which is the 09-10 NBA season. Shaq's career, which has taken a turn for the worse since he left the Lakers, has been somewhat diminished to that of a lower status NBA player (if there is a such thing.)

Also in NBA news, a documentary on another NBA player has got the nation hyped. Fairly unknown NBA star Wat Misaka played for the New York Knicks for a short time, breaking one of the racial barriers of the NBA. In a time when the NBA was dominated by whites and Americans, and at the peak of an anti-japanese era, Misaka was able to play in the NBA and show the world that you don't have to be american to be good at basketball. The new documentary, titled “Transcending: The Wat Misaka Story,” is about how this son of two japanese immigrants lived, and the hardships he faced because of his ethnicity. Misaka played for the Knicks for the first two weeks of the season, before he was cut early. He set this milestone 61 years ago, 3 years earlier then when the NBA started accepting blacks. The documentary took two years to film, and will be showing next week in San Francisco, Sacremento, and Los Angeles.