A night at a Vegas casino with LeBron and his crew

                    

	LeBron James and Dwyane Wade make sure Chris Paul (center) remembers he's still a rookie. drew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images
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LAS VEGAS -- Even off the court, LeBron James never misses an opportunity to call the shots.

Walking through the lobby of the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas well past midnight on Thursday morning, James and Chris Paul pull up to a $500 minimum-bet blackjack table and set up shop. It isn't long before James takes control of the table.

"C'mon Mike, you're my man, give me a nine," says James to the diminutive dealer. "Don't let me down."

For the most part, the dealer doesn't and James ends up buying Mike a drink before he's subbed out by another dealer, Traci, who ends up being the "closer" to the hot table, knocking out Paul and a couple of his friends. The only thing missing was the dramatic opening of the bullpen door and the soothing sounds of Enter Sandman as she stepped to the table. "I knew it was over when she came," says Paul. "I was done."

Across the way, James and Paul find comfort in cheering on a table full of high rollers, betting as much as $10,000 a hand, high-fiving the suits after every win. "There you go," says James. "Hit it again."

Further down the pit, Carmelo Anthony is playing blackjack at $200 a hand with his new teammate JR Smith, rocking a sideways Yankees cap. Shortly after seeing his stack of chips dwindle down to nothing, Anthony leaves the table, takes off his collared shirt, swings it over his shoulder and heads back to his room. "He played a lot," says Smith. "He just didn't win a lot."

Behind the table, Jermaine O'Neal took the smart route and watched his friends lose their money. Meanwhile, sitting next to a row of slot machines, Chris Bosh does the same as he walks up to James and Paul who return to the blackjack table after lucky Mike returns. A short time later, Dwyane Wade rolls up to the table to see how his boys are doing. "Are you playing?" asks James. "No, man, I'm not losing my money," responds Wade, wearing shorts and sandals as he heads back to his room. "I'm good."

While James and Paul do fairly well on their return, they close out, a little behind on the night but a little ahead on the trip.

"Blackjack's not my game, I play a little game called booray," says James who's had plenty of booray games at his ridiculously large suite in the Wynn since checking into the hotel last week. "That's my game. I'm the best booray player."

Notes on a Sidekick

• There are many unwritten rules in the NBA and one of them is that a rookie is still a rookie until he plays the first regular season game of his second season or until he plays 82 games, depending on who you talk to. The bottom line is being a rookie is a year-round deal and not a tag that gets taken off immediately after you finish your first season. That has been especially evident during Team USA's training sessions in Vegas as Paul is constantly being called "rook" by his teammates.

"It's all about the 82 games," says the Wizards' Gilbert Arenas. "If you don't have 82 games under your belt, you're still a rookie. I played all the way through the middle of my second season and I still had to get donuts and stuff for the older guys. Anyone who says it's only about your first year doesn't know. It's 82 games, even if it takes you four years to get to 82 games, so be it. It's not my fault."

"I say you're a rookie until your first regular season game of your second season," says Wade. "Not preseason, regular season. So Chris is a rookie until November."

Paul, whose mother, father and brother are traveling with him this summer, has taken all the ribbings and chores (carrying players' bags to and from the bus and hotel) in stride and knows it comes with the territory of being the youngest guy on the team. "It's fine, I played 79 games last year so I'm almost there," says Paul. "I can take it for a few more months."

• Back in March, when Steve and Elaine Wynn insisted that Team USA and their friends and family stay at their hotel while they trained in Vegas they probably didn't envision the team turning the hotel into a basketball resort. The team, for the most part, has spent its entire time in Vegas at the hotel, gambling in the lobby, partying at Tryst, dining at Wing Lei and SW Steakhouse and enjoying all the amenities of the world class spa.

Take a stroll through the hotel on any given night during Team USA's stay in Sin City and you'll likely see Jerry Colangelo ponying up to the blackjack table; Mike Krzyzewski with Duke assistants Johnny Dawkins and Steve Wojciechowski; Jim Gray wandering around the lobby with Bill Walton, Rick Carlisle chatting with Jermaine O'Neal and Mike D'Antoni; and Brad Miller walking past AJ McClean of the Backstreet Boys on his way up to his room. Oh, and that was just last night.

• Even players who have no connection to Team USA have come to Las Vegas this week. Some other sightings so far this week include Ray Felton and Sean May at Ghostbar; Michael Finley and Nick Van Exel at Tryst; and Deron Williams, Daniel Ewing and Dan Gadzuric at Pure.

• Shelden Williams was at practice on Wednesday to talk to Coach K and some of the other former Duke players such as Shane Battier and Elton Brand. As Williams watched the team go through drills from his seat three rows behind the basket, he felt some serious déjà vu. "The whole practice was pretty much run like a Duke practice," said Williams. "Almost everything they ran and everything they did was what we did at Duke. It was kind of weird. I felt like I was sitting back and watching one of our practices."

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