NEW ORLEANS - In what has become a highlight of the NBA calendar, All-Star Saturday festivities will commence from Smoothie King Center. The night starts off with the Shooting Stars competition, followed by the Skills Challenge, the 3-Point Shootout and the main event, a showcase of athleticism known as the Slam-Dunk Contest. You can catch all of the action live starting at 8pm et/5pm pt on TSN2. Or, one could call All-Star Saturday, "Damian Lillard Day." The Portland All-Star, who competed in the Rising Stars game on Friday, is scheduled to participate in the Skills Challenge, 3-Point Shootout and Slam- Dunk Contest on Saturday. "Im happy that Im really a part of the weekend. I get to compete in all these events, and just to be in these guys company with all these stars," said Lillard. "It lets you know that the hard work is paying off." This year, much like last, Saturdays competitions are broken down into East vs. West. Paul George of the Indiana Pacers is the East captain, while Steph Curry guides the West. Both are starters in Sundays All-Star game. Saturdays happenings start at 8 p.m. ET. Up first will be the Shooting Stars, a simple enough competition where current NBAers join a legend and a WNBA star in a shooting contest from all over the floor. The first round will feature teams from the same conference against each other. The winning teams advance to the final round for the title. Each competitor will be stationed at one of the first three places, and the shot must be made before the next can be attempted. All three will chuck it up from near half-court and the team with the best time wins. Its a family affair for two of the teams as Curry will join his father Dell Curry and Becky Harmon of the San Antonio Silver Stars. On the East team, Tim Hardaway, Jr. of the New York Knicks will partner with his dad Tim and Elena Delle Donne of the Chicago Sky. Kevin Durant of the Oklahoma City Thunder will pair with Karl Malone and Skylar Diggins of the Tulsa Shock. The other East team is the defending champion trio of Miamis Chris Bosh, Dominique Wilkins and Swin Cash of the Sky. The Skills Challenge underwent some changes this year. Now, there will be two two-man teams from each conference competing against each other to reach the East vs. West final. It will now be a relay format. The Eastern teams will be rookie Giannis Antetokounmpo of the Milwaukee Bucks and All-Star DeMar DeRozan of the Toronto Raptors as well as rookies Michael Carter-Williams of the 76ers and Orlandos Victor Oladipo. The West will be represented by Lillard and Utah Jazz first-year player Trey Burke and the tandem of Goran Dragic of the Phoenix Suns and Reggie Jackson of the Oklahoma City Thunder. The 3-Point Shootout remained largely untouched, although the East v. West format remains intact. The player from the Eastern Conference with the most points will meet the player from the Western Conference with the most points. However, there is one new wrinkle this year. Each player can make one of the five locations to a full rack of five money balls, each worth two points. Defending champion Kyrie Irving of the Cleveland Cavaliers anchors the East team of Orlandos Arron Afflalo, Washingtons Bradley Beal and Joe Johnson of the Brooklyn Nets. Curry and Lillard are on the West team alongside All-Star starter Kevin Love, who won the title in 2012, and San Antonio Spur Marco Belinelli. And now, its time for the main event. This years edition of the Slam-Dunk contest will see many changes, first of which is a Freestyle Round. Lets let the NBA explain: "In a significant first in the events history, the competition will tip off with a Freestyle Round where the dunkers for each conference will have 90 seconds to showcase as many dunks as they want. At the conclusion of the Freestyle Round, the panel of judges will then choose a winner by voting East or West. The winning conference will earn the advantage of deciding whether its dunkers will dunk first or second in the head-to-head battles that take place in the Battle Round." The Battle Round? "The Battle Round will feature head-to-head matchups pitting East dunkers vs. West dunkers, with the judges choosing a winner for each battle. Upon losing a head-to-head battle, that dunker is then eliminated from the competition. The first team to win three battles will win the competition and be crowned 2014 Sprite Slam Dunk champions." No individual champion? "At the conclusion of the team competition, fans will then have the opportunity to vote for the player of their choice as the Sprite Slam Dunker of the Night through SMS, Twitter, NBA.com and the NBA GameTime app." For the first time since 1988, there will be three All-Stars in the Slam-Dunk Contest. George and John Wall of the Washington Wizards team with defending champion Terrence Ross of the Toronto Raptors, and out West, Lillard, Golden States Harrison Barnes and Sacramentos Ben McLemore round out the team. . Rinehart joins safety Darrell Stuckey and linebacker Donald Butler as potential unrestricted free agents who are remaining with the team. . Martin Reway and David Griger both recorded four points with a goal and three assists each. Mario Lunter, Daniel Gachulinec and Stanislav Horansky also scored for Slovakia (1-0). Dominik Kahun had both goals for Germany (0-2), who lost its opening match to Canada 7-2 on Thursday. . - The fiancee of former New England Patriots player Aaron Hernandez is set to ask a judge to throw out allegations that she lied to a grand jury. . "First, I would like to offer my deepest and sincerest apologies for any harm I have inflicted on University of Missouri defensive lineman, Michael Sam," the statement read. . The 57-year-old Tietjens has coached New Zealand to nine IRB World Sevens titles and to four Commonwealth Games gold medals as its only coach in the professional era. New Zealand Rugby Union chief executive Steve Tew said the re-signing was made with a focus on 2016 when sevens will be in the Olympics.PRETORIA, South Africa - The chief defence lawyer in Oscar Pistorius murder trial sought on Wednesday to undermine the prosecution testimony of a couple who say they heard a womans screams and gunfire the night the athlete fatally shot his girlfriend. Lawyer Barry Roux said telephone records will show that the banging sounds the neighbours heard were instead a distressed Pistorius hitting a toilet door with a cricket bat to get to fatally wounded girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. Charl Johnson and his wife Michelle Burger have testified to hearing a sequence of events in the pre-dawn hours of Valentines Day last year that involved a woman screaming, a man shouting for help and then the sound of gunshots. Cross-examining Johnson on the third day of the blockbuster trial, Roux says call records will show Pistorius called an estate manager at around 3:19 a.m. and soon after he bashed in the door with the bat. In Johnson and Burgers testimony, they say they heard what they described as shots straight after making a call to security at 3.16 a.m. The similar times show the sounds were the bat on the door, Roux argued. "There is only one thing you could have heard, because it coincides precisely," Roux said to Johnson. "That was the time that he (Pistorius) broke down the door (with the bat)." Johnson replied, addressing the judge: "My lady, I am convinced the sound I heard was gunshots." "I understand," Roux said in the exchange, suggesting Johnson had convinced himself they were shots. Throwing doubt on the witnesses recollection of the sequence is crucial for Pistorius defence after the state maintained there was a loud argument on the night he shot Steenkamp through a door in his bathroom and screams and shouts before a gun was fired. Pistorius team wants to show the screams were Pistorius calling for help after the accidental shots. After a break, prosecutor Gerrie Nel asked for permission to stand down Johnson until Thursday to get more records. The judge agreed and the case moved on to its fourth witness. Pistorius, 27, has said he shot 29-year-old Steenkamp by accident, fearing she was a dangerous intruder in his home. The case has transfixed people around the world, and the proceedings are being broadcast on television, adding to the scrutiny of South Africas criminal justice system as well as the character of a globally admired athlete whose career peaked when he ran in the 2012 Olympics. Pistorius was born without fibula bones because of a conngenital defect and his legs were amputated when he was 11 months old.dddddddddddd He has run on carbon-fiber blades and was initially banned from competing against able-bodied peers because many argued that his blades gave him an unfair advantage. He was later cleared to compete. He is a multiple Paralympic medallist but he failed to win a medal at the London Olympics. Lawyer Roux earlier attacked the testimonies of Johnson and Burger by also saying similarities in their accounts indicated that they had aligned their versions at the expense of truth. In his testimony Johnson told the court in Pretoria, the South African capital, that he heard the cries of a terrified woman and shooting around the time that Pistorius killed Steenkamp. Johnsons wife, Burger, had given similar testimony and at one point broke down in tears because of what she said was the memory of the terrified screams of a woman. Roux said there were differences between the statements that Johnson and Burger had given to police after the shooting, and testimony that they gave in court. Both the statements and the testimony shared similarities, Roux said, implying that the couple had contaminated their evidence by talking through what they were going to say. "You could just as well have stood together in the witness box," Roux said. "What do you say to that?" The tart assertion drew a caution from Judge Thokozile Masipa, who told Roux he had gone too far. Roux contended that crucial elements in the testimony of the couple were missing in their earlier comments to police, including the statements that they heard a womans screams rising in anxiety and intensity and that they heard the womans voice "fading" after the last in a volley of gunshots. Johnson suggested that he and his wife were more expressive while testifying in court than when providing information for a police document. "I would venture a guess that its the way you verbally tell the story," he said. "Theres a lot more emotion involved ... whereas the statement is more factual." At the beginning of proceedings on Wednesday, prosecutor Nel said Johnsons telephone number had been read out in court a day earlier. Johnson then said he had since received a "large amount" of missed calls. He described one voicemail message as saying: "Why are you lying in court? You know Oscar didnt kill Reeva. Its not cool." ___ Gerald Imray is on Twitter at
www.twitter.com/GeraldImrayAP ' ' '
