Earlier this week the Lakers received their championship rings and this year's rings are some of the flashiest yet. Several members of the Buss family and team captains Derek Fisher and Kobe Bryant weighed in on the design for the rings. The rings are made of a special limited 15K gold to celebrate the 15th championship. Dr. Jerry Buss requested the 14 round diamonds circling the top of the ring to represent 14 championships with the small gold trophy on the top representing the 15th. The team captains requested that each player have their own face and jersey number on the side of the ring. On non-player rings the Los Angeles skyline takes the place of the face. Each ring is authenticated by a serial number and there are hidden etchings of the Lakers logo on the ring. The diamond-studded top echoes the shape of the Staples center. Each ring comes with a box that has two LED spotlights inside. The 2009 Lakers championship rings were created by Jason of Beverly Hills and are worth about $30,000.

The latest sports star to hit hard times is NBA player Antoine Walker. The former Celtics star forward has had a rough year. Now various sources says that Walker has lost most of the over $110 million that he earned while playing in the NBA is being chased by creditors. Over the summer Walker was arrested in a Lake Tahoe casino for writing bad checks to satisfy over $1 million in casino markers in Las Vegas. Walker is a known gambler who reportedly once played $15,000 hands with another known gambler, basketball great Michael Jordan.

The Boston Globe found that Walker has been pursued by multiple financial institutions for unpaid debts totaling more than $4 million and has been named as a defendant in three recent debt-related civil cases in Florida and Illinois. Walker is from Illinois and also played for the Miami Heat. Earlier this year J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, Wachovia Bank, and American Express Centurion Bank all won decisions against Walker for failing to pay off promissory notes. He had $53,321.71 in overdue credit card charges with American Express and much of the debt appears to have been created by other people that he authorized to use his card.

Currently Walker, who is 33, is without a team or a contract as the NBA season begins and may be considering playing in an international league for money. It's a far cry from a decade ago when Boston signed him to a six-year, $71 million deal. At just 22 years old he was instantly insanely wealthy. During the Boston Celtics season Walker stayed at the Bishops Forest condominium complex in Waltham and was known to have a variety of luxury cars including customized Bentleys, Mercedes and more. He also had a taste for expensive watches by Rolex and Cartier and enjoyed wearing custom-tailored suits.

And then there's the real estate. Walker created both a Walker Ventures LLC and a real estate company, AW Realty LLC. The company is listed as the owner of several Chicago-area properties, including his mother's home which was once valued at $6 million. In 2007 Walker was robbed at gunpoint in his Chicago home. He bought the home for $4.1 million but put it on the market for $3.9 million after the robbery. It appears to have been sold but is now on the market again by the new owner for just $2.995 million. In 2007 he also sold a townhouse in the same neighborhood for $1.39 million. He had bought the home for $1.3 million in 2004. In the Globe article Walker's mother Diane said that she still has her home and Antoine Walker has his and so there is no problem.

Back in June I started hearing rumors that Russia's richest man Mikhail Prokhorov was interested in buying a portion of the New Jersey Nets. The six-foot-nine-inch-tall billionaire is a basketball fan and owns a share of a Russian basketball team. The latest news from Moscow is that he may help to build the team's new arena. He would provide a loan for the Nets and receive a large non-controlling stake in the team in return. Nets owner Bruce Ratner has wanted to build an arena for the team in Brooklyn and move his team there in 2011. The stadium's construction may cost around $800 million. Ratner has been to Moscow for talks but nothing has been officially confirmed yet.

Former NBA basketball player Antonio Davis and his wife Kendra have put their Roswell, Georgia home up for sale. The pair bought the over 16,000 square foot home a couple of years ago. According to an Atlanta Journal Constitution article, Kendra, an interior decorator did the decorating herself. The six-bedroom home is a mix of formal and informal spaces. The "grand salon" has French doors which open to the outside. The kitchen is integrated into the family area and features a leopard print chaise, the sort sometimes seen at the foot of a bed, posed in front of the granite-topped kitchen counter. As you might expect the home is full of sports memorabilia and has a basketball court. Like some other basketball players' homes I have seen this one has a mural or two including basketball-themed murals in two of the children's rooms and in the arcade worthy game room. This home is listed at $4.2 million with Elite Real Estate. Check out the virtual tour here.

Experience more lush living in luxury homes and mansions or see the stars living large with celebrity homes galleries at AOL Real Estate.

Want to make points with your basketball loving sweetheart this Valentine's Day? Select movie theaters around the country are offering a LIVE 3D HD presentation of NBA All-Star Saturday Night on February 14, starting at 8 pm ET/5 pm PT. Turner Sports, which has televised the NBA All-Star Game for six consecutive years on TNT, is collaborating with the NBA and Cinedigm to bring this 3D HD presentation exclusively to select theaters throughout the country. Theaters will also offer contests and prizes, opportunities to text and to vote on the winner of the Sprite Slam Dunk contest while taking in the super crisp, every-bead-of-sweat-falling digital coverage. The first sporting event to be broadcast publicly in this digital cinema format was the BCS College Football Championship on Jan 8, 2009 and the All Star game is the second event. You can find the theater near you on the Cinedigm website.

A couple of days ago I wrote about the troubles for Le Bron James's charity foundation. It made me wonder about other NBA player foundations. The Salt Lake Tribune has a fascinating piece on NBA charities. They did an analysis of 89 stand-alone NBA player charities and found that while all together they reported revenue of at least $31 million between 2005 and 2007, only about 44 cents of every dollar raised (around $14 million of that $31 million) went to needy causes. Furthermore, the average NBA player foundation put just 51 cents of each dollar it spent toward charitable programs which is below the 65 cents most philanthropic watchdog groups view as acceptable. Some charities are well-financed and well run but many suffer from poor planning and inflated administrative costs. Part of the problem is that players put family members and friends on their boards and some hold fundraising galas that make a big splash but not a lot of money. About a third of NBA player charities analyzed instead remain funded by the athletes' own wealth. Player charities also fold because of lack of support or because athletes move on.

There are NBA charities that work. Former Houston Rockets center Dikembe Mutombo was praised by President Bush in his 2007 State of the Union address for helping to build the first new hospital in the Republic of Congo, Mutombo's homeland, in 40 years. Some of these charities have budgets of over $1 million. Many however end up wasting money and finding themselves unsure of how to take the leap into making their charities publicly supported enterprises. Without hiring people who have experience in fundraising and nonprofit work, charities often find themselves floundering. The NBA and the NBA Players Association have begun to make education on starting foundations part of the league's annual rookie orientation.

So far most of the news I've heard about sports teams in this economy has been pretty positive. New stadiums are still being built and luxury suites are being filled. But Gary West writing in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram has a piece that points out that sports are going through their own cost-cutting measures. Attendance is down at professional baseball games. The NCAA is curbing spending on postseason travel and the Grand Prix du Canada, the only Formula One race in North America is struggling to find funding. And layoffs have even come to the NBA which is cutting their work force by 9%.

More than ever professional sports depend on revenue from advertising, sponsorships and naming rights but with many corporations in trouble those opportunities are drying up. As the Dallas Morning News reports the Cowboys have a new $1.1 billion stadium expected to be completed by next June and they are looking for a naming-rights deal that could be worth hundreds of millions. There are less and less companies now that would be interested in a deal of this magnitude.

And Nascar, which has risen to be one of the most popular sports in the U.S. is really feeling the pinch. General Motors, Chrysler, Sears Holdings and Chevron will cut or drop sponsorships next season. Perhaps more than any other sport this economy has a dramatic effect because it takes so much money to compete. Dario Franchitti, the 2007 Indianapolis 500 winner, was forced out of the series by a lack of sponsors and teams from names like Petty, Waltrip and Earnhardt may enter 2009 with unfunded cars. Nascar may even have trouble filling up their 43-car fields because so many teams have had trouble finding sponsors.

Certainly professional sports aren't going anywhere. Watching sports has always offered distraction and succor in tough times. Cheering for our teams lets us experience both joy and defeat in a way that doesn't impact our daily living. But in a time when companies are forced to cut back, sports teams, which are businesses too, will be forced to readjust. Some franchises may have to close. Teams that have relied on lucrative corporate suites deals may have to focus more on getting regular customers into seats.

The last NBA season is but a memory even for Celtics fans but Kevin Garnett's 2008 NBA Finals $1,000+ limited edition sneakers are still up for sale. Adidas made 56 pairs last year and still has 13 pairs available for $1,017. Boston Sportz points out the Celtics have a big banner on their online store counting down the leftover sneakers but probably won't be dropping the price anytime soon.

Continuing my look at sports star homes lingering on the market, this week's WSJ Private Properties column also mentioned the home of Rasheed Wallace, a Detroit Pistons forward who played for eight years with the Portland Trail Blazers. Wallace bought his 1924 brick house in Portland, Oregon for around $3 million back in 2000. The Tudor-style home is on 2.16 acres that include a pool, sports court and guest house. The five-bedroom home has a red home theater, built-in saltwater fish tank, home office and more. The listing agent told the WSJ that Wallace and his wife Fatima spent more than $1 million on improvements. The couple briefly listed the house in 2006 for $5.5 million before relisting it last year, for $5.2 million and have now lowered the price to $4.895 million.

Experience more lush living in luxury homes and mansions or see the stars living large with celebrity homes galleries at AOL Real Estate.

Former NBA bad boy Latrell Sprewell's days of cruising Lake Michigan aboard his yacht are over. A U.S. Marshal seized Sprewell's 70-foot yacht, "Milwaukee's Best." The $1.5 million yacht has a $1.3 million loan and the bank claims that Sprewell has not kept up with the $10,322 monthly payments and has not maintained proper insurance on the boat. The bank would like the boat sold to repay the debt. Sprewell famously turned down a $21 million contract a few years back. The yacht was built in 2001by Azimut-Benetti and Sprewell bought it in 2003.

Recently I brought you Dwayne Wade's flamboyant house. Now let's take a look at a more restrained home belonging to another Miami Heat player, Alonzo Mourning. Today's listing comes courtesy of the always fascinating Big Time Listings. They report that the Miami Herald wrote about the house in November 2006 when the house went on the market for $10 million. Mourning paid just $3.2 million for the five-bedroom home in 1996 when the house was brand spanking new. Mourning and his wife have since moved on to a fancier eight-bedroom home in Coral Gables that they bought in 2005. Toni Schrager has the listing for this home now set at $9.5 million.

Details include a rooftop deck, four car garage and a car port, a private boat harbor with three slips and a pool with a Jacuzzi. It has water views of Biscayne Bay, Key Biscayne and the Miami skyline. Mourning's home, while smaller than Wade's is a pricier location, hence the higher cost even though it is a smaller home (still over 10,000 square feet though).

There are extravagant notes, the dining room's ceiling is elaborately painted and the overall scale is standard McMansion largeness. Yet compared to Wade's home this one is rather sedate, anyone could move in immediately without having to repaint over pictures of the previous owner on the walls (or retile the pool). Mourning makes his tastes known more in a more subtle way, through the art on the walls and the books on the shelves (note the massive tome, Jazz Life, artfully placed on a table). After the jump, chess with a view.

The home of Miami Heat basketball star Dwayne Wade is one that I am just itching to hear your thoughts on.The massive home in the Pinecrest, Florida area puts to shame other NBA homes I have seen such as those owned by Shaquille O'Neal and Karl Malone. Like Shaq, Wade personalized his pool and like Malone, Wade went a wee bit crazy with the murals.

From the outside the nearly 12,000-square-foot French-style home seems rather sedate but once inside the six-bedroom home things get a bit Flashtastic. Wade, known as "Flash," has put a "W" inlaid in the marble floor in the entrance hall and the listing includes the furnishings, artwork and some of Mr. Wade's memorabilia. There are rooms in the home, such as the dining room that are rather elegantly decorated, there are also touches like the Spider-man-themed bathrooms and the many, many renderings of Mr. Wade, that make this a home in need of some work. The home is so idiosyncratic that you would really have to be a fan to live here and I wonder if he will have as tough a time selling as Malone did. There is also a one-bedroom guest house, pool and patio with a summer kitchen on the property. The home is listed at $8.9 million. After the jump, a monument to ego.

UPDATE: Wade has struggled to sell the home, reducing the price several times. It is now listed at $4.599 million.

[via The Real Estate Journal]

Somehow, it seems that we missed the boat on the NBA Finals Shoes. More than likely, it's because we're more interested in watching the World Cup than in watching basketball. Nevertheless, these limited edition shoes are pretty cool. Only 60 pairs were made - with 12 pairs were sold online and 48 pairs at the NBA store in New York. Each pair was individually decorated by graffiti artist Oscar Gale/Toast and sold for $175.

If NBA fans weren't so fanatical about their shoes, I'd expect to see a pair on eBay soon, but as it is, you might have to wait until after the finals season until anyone is willing to part with a pair.

Knowing my love for celebrity real estate a reader let us know that ex-Sacramento Kings player Chris Webber has put his Granite Bay, California home on the market. Details of the four-bedroom home include a courtyard with a fountain and a statue, a truly expansive great room with a home theater system, a large dining room and a kitchen with cherrywood cabinets. The master bedroom has a fireplace and an amazing walk-in closet. The home sits on 1.3 acres and there is an eight car garage. It is listed at$2.499 million and has been on the market since May.

[Thanks, Jason]