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NEW YORK -- Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah have been All-Stars on winning teams, yet also have struggled with injuries.Carmelo Anthony is still an All-Star, though his best days may be behind him. Kristaps Porzingis could be one eventually, but for now his best days may be too far ahead.For every reason to believe in the New York Knicks, theres another reason to question them. Even the guy who assembled them is optimistic but unsure.We hope that this team is going to prove that theyre capable, said Phil Jackson, the Knicks president of basketball operations.If healthy, it should be. The talent has been ungraded with the trade for Rose, the former NBA MVP, and signings of Noah, Courtney Lee and Brandon Jennings. Yet all but Lee have missed significant time at some point because of injury, and Rose and Noah in particular have seen sharp drops in their production in recent years.But Jackson decided to take some risks after the Knicks went 32-50 last season to miss the playoffs for the third straight year. And he hired another coach, bringing in Jeff Hornacek to open up the offense.He hasnt had much time yet to see how well it can work.Rose missed much of preseason while in Los Angeles because of a rape trial that ended Wednesday when he was cleared in a $21.5 million lawsuit that accused him and two friends of raping an ex-girlfriend while she said she was incapacitated from drugs or alcohol.Rose made it through 66 games last season, his highest total since his injury troubles started with a torn ACL in the 2012 playoffs.Noah got a late start on exhibition play because of hamstring and ankle injuries, renewing concerns about the center. He averaged a career-low 4.3 points last season in Chicago while limited to 29 games because of a dislocated left shoulder.So the Knicks will be figuring things out as they open Tuesday at Cleveland. The potential is there for a strong season, but it can also be wrecked by the injury bug that Rose knows all too well.If him and Noah stay healthy, they can be a dangerous team, TNT analyst Charles Barkley said.Here are things to watch as the Knicks begin their 70th anniversary season:ON POINT: The Knicks are confident in Jennings running the team whenever Rose is unavailable. He said he is fully recovered from a torn Achilles tendon that sidelined him about a year and has regained his quickness.GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY: Anthony has advanced in the playoffs just twice, both in seasons after he won Olympic gold medals. He became mens basketballs first three-time gold medalist this summer and will be hoping this season resembles 2009 in Denver and 2013 in New York, when he was the NBAs leading scorer.SHAPE OF THE OFFENSE: In two seasons under Derek Fisher and Kurt Rambis, the Knicks ran the triangle offense that Jackson used to win an NBA-record 11 championships as coach. Hornacek said they will still run some of it, but will also look to push the ball more quickly to take advantage of Roses speed and create more easy baskets.WILLY FROM SEVILLA: While scouting Porzingis when he played in Spain, the Knicks noticed Guillermo Willy Hernandez, his teammate in Seville. The Knicks acquired Hernangomezs draft rights from Philadelphia in 2015, signed him in July, and hope the 6-foot-11 center who played on Spains bronze medal-winning team in the Rio Olympics can become an important player off the bench.PHILS FINALE?: Jackson has an option in his contract to leave after this season, which he said he had included in case there was a lockout. But he said he hasnt been thinking about what hell do.---Follow Brian Mahoney on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/Briancmahoney Tony Gwynn Padres Jersey . -- Chicago Bears cornerback Tim Jennings was selected Monday to his second straight Pro Bowl, while guard Kyle Long made it after a solid rookie season. Manuel Margot Jersey . Now, correct me if Im wrong but I saw one official distinctly pointing at the net indicating a good goal but after an inconclusive review they overturned the goal. Shouldnt the ruling on the ice (good goal) stand after an inconclusive review? Why was this overturned? James Veaudry Pembroke, ON -- Hey Kerry, Youll get a lot of these, but why was the Montreal goal against Nashville Saturday night overturned? Eller puts the puck on net and the on ice ruling from the ref behind the net is a Montreal goal. http://www.padressale.com/padres-franchy-cordero-jersey/ . PAUL, Minn. Matt Strahm Padres Jersey . -- Adam Snyder returned to the San Francisco 49ers this season because the offensive lineman thought it was his best opportunity to win a championship. Tony Gwynn Jersey . The third-ranked Ivanovic, who won the event in 2008 and 10, served five aces and broke Wickmayer, also a former winner in 2009, five times. "The result looked easier than it really was," Ivanovic said. RIO DE JANEIRO -- On the eve of hosting the worlds largest sporting event, Rio de Janeiros decade-long push to curb violence in hundreds of slums appears to be crumbling.Murders rose sharply in the first half of 2016, just as officials wanted to use the Aug. 5-21 Olympic Games to showcase the city as a tourist destination. Shootouts erupt daily, even in Rio slums where community policing programs created to pacify them had successfully rewritten the narrative in recent years.The number of people killed by police, who many residents accuse of shooting first and asking questions later, has spiked in the past two years after dropping significantly the previous six. Police, in turn, are increasingly under attack: 61 have been killed in Rio since January, the majority while off duty.2016 has been a very bad year. We have seen a dramatic increase in homicides, robberies and other crimes, said Ignacio Cano, a sociologist at the Violence Studies Lab of Rio de Janeiro State University. We lost a big opportunity to transform police and develop a new public safety model.The victims are overwhelmingly young, black men like Jhonata Dalber Mattos Alves, a 16-year-old who was shot to death June 30 -- family members say by police -- in a slum with a much-vaunted community policing program.Witnesses say the high-school student was killed as he walked down a dark path with paper bags for the popcorn he had fetched for his 4-year-old brothers daycare party.I want them to pay for what they did. They ripped out a part of me, said his mother, Janaina Mattos Alves, her voice breaking. They are taking away innocent lives. Thats my fear.Law enforcement experts say Brazils worst recession since the 1930s is at the heart of the surge in violence in Rio. A financial crunch in the oil-producing state has put thousands of government workers salaries and pensions on hold, police budgets have been slashed and daily announcements of layoffs have added to the angst.Rights groups additionally blame a culture of combat still at the core of much of Rios law enforcement, instincts more likely to emerge when officers feel under attack.Cano says tourists coming for the Olympics will likely be spared the violence lived daily in the slums, though it periodically does spill into the citys tourist-friendly and affluent south. The 85,000 soldiers and police assigned to patrol the streets is a force double that of the 2012 Games in London.The big question is not the Olympics but what comes afterward, said Cano, who like many experts, believes that deeper cuts in police budgets are likely.On a recent afternoon, two Associated Press journalists watched as half a dozen officers sheltered behind a cable car station shot it out with suspected drug traffickers in Complexo do Alemao, a sprawling cluster of slums in north Rio. Minutes after the gunfire stopped, several schoolchildren walked by the building as gun-toting police stopped and frisked drivers and bikers.Amnesty International counted 265 such shootings last week, the first since launching a crowdsourced app to help alert people living in violence-plagued areas.The racial element of the violence is undeniable.Black people are three times more likely to be killed by Rio police as whites, according to data from the state governments public safety department. In the U.S. the apparent disparities in how police treat blacks and whites sparked the Black Lives Matter movement, which has organized large rallies after unarmed blaack men die at the hands police.dddddddddddd The rate of police killings here is almost 10 times that of the U.S.The mother of Jhonata Alves hadnt heard gunfire the day she asked him to go pick up paper bags used to put popcorn from his aunts house in the slum of Borel. The family home is partly shielded from the slum by a forested hill, but the bang, bang, bang of clashes make their way to Janainas silent street on a regular basis.A witness who would not show her face told Globo news station that after Alves was shot, police fired off bullets to fake a shootout. Residents that were in the area told the family that officers tried to plant a gun on the teenager, but they didnt allow them to do it.Police carried him as blood dripped from his head and put him in their car to take him to the hospital where he died. Police did not respond to a request for comment on the case.A Human Rights Watch report released earlier this month found many instances of police killings that followed a similar pattern: Officers shoot at unarmed people, in custody or trying to flee, then simulate shootouts, plant guns and transport victims to hospitals where they arrive either dead or in critical condition.Such killings, combined with the ensuing flimsy investigations and prosecutions, have dented the credibility of security efforts.In the first five months of 2016, the number of killings that cover all homicides, including slain officers, shootings at the hands of police and as a result of robberies, increased by 18 percent to 1,870 in greater Rio, compared to the same months in 2012, when killings reached their lowest rates of the past decade.Lt. Carlos Veiga, who leads the community police unit in the Babilonia slum, says police are under a lot of stress. The training of new officers has been cut from 12 to nine months and only two weeks are dedicated to explaining community policing.You are looking at a weak training program, police working under difficult circumstances, in places where people love breaking the law. All that adds up and makes the job of a cop very difficult, Veiga said.The Pacification Police Units, known by its Portuguese acronym as UPP, were created in 2008 to change that dynamic.Police set up community stations in at-risk areas. They took over mazes of pathways run by gangs, removed weapons and gave residents some relative peace while integrating access to public services such as utilities and garbage collection.Fabio Amado, head of human rights at Rio de Janeiro Public Defenders Office, said the pacification units worked only in smaller, more densely populated slums. As the effort moved north and away from affluent areas and into sprawling hills, residents showed increasing dissatisfaction with police, according to a recent survey by Fundacao Getulio Vargas, a university and think tank.A drug gang leader who recently spoke to the AP on the condition that his name not be used called the program a facade. He said drug dealers were initially worried and kept a low profile, but soon it was back to business as usual.Trafficking returned with even greater strength, said the man, wielding an AK-47 assault rifle. The UPP is powerless.---Associated Press photographer Felipe Dana and AP video journalist Yesica Fisch contributed to this report.---Adriana Gomez Licon is on Twitter: http://twitter.com/agomezlicon ' ' '