anyone has this mid-court stuttering?

pc specs
Athlon X2 4800+ 2.5ghz
Palit 9800gt Sonic OC'ed
2x2gh Corsair XMS2
Emaxx MCP61P

all setting high except player and crowd
no msaa

the game runs smooth when you are on the ends of the court, the lag/stutter occurs when the player cross the half-court.. that's the time when i feel that the game is stuttering because the FPS suddenly drops for about 5-10 fps and then it returns to normal when you are already on the side..

anyone having this problem?

I do, just not so horribly. The reason is that the mid-court is the time when you see a lot of different details in one go (both benches, crowd, etc). Setting the game process' priority to realtime in task manager solves the problem for me ;0]

I think it's not because of graphics, mostly because of processor/mem. While corssing the half-court line, many things like tactics and players/refs behaviour change, so the game has to load and cope with the things. Everybody has such problems, not only you, bro.
Still, I don't recommend to set priority higher than "High", especially "Realtime", 'cause it may affect not only system-time to go the wrong way, but also overall system stability...