07 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights



History says the NBA Champion will be the Finals Game 4 winner
By the end of Game 4 of the NBA Finals on Friday night in Miami, we’ll know who will be hoisting the Larry O’Brien Trophy. It won’t have anything to do with the Denver Nuggets having a possible 3-1 series lead, or if the Heat have stormed back to tie the series at 2-2 before things shift back to Col...

Don’t be so quick to count out the Western Conference's top-seeded teams
A large swath of NBA media is out on the top seeds in the Western Conference — and it makes sense, because, for the first time since the 1996-97 season, the East is far and away superior....

Sacramento’s Mike Brown is NBA Coach of the Year — and it shouldn’t be close
The NBA regular season is rolling toward its end, which means award talk is heating up. You’ll hear about the MVP race primarily, but a few other awards are handed out each year that matter. Coach of the Year is one of them, and no one is more deserving in 2023 than Sacramento Kings head coach, Mike...

Mid-majors to watch in this year’s NCAA tournament
March Madness is just around the corner. Conference tournaments will be underway and soon enough, we’ll be down from 350-plus teams contending for a championship to 68. The high-level conference teams that’ll compete for a title have been well-documented and we’ll no doubt see some of them make it d...

Being a backup QB is the best gig in all of sports
Amid the controversy surrounding the holding penalty at the end of Super Bowl LVII, rumors of Andy Reid’s retirement, and people trashing Travis Kelce for saying everyone doubted Kansas City when absolutely zero people doubted them, several other storylines have been overlooked. While Andy Reid may ...

The NBA’s newest award is a better fit for MLB teams
It’s bad enough that there have been 16 NBA playoff spots since 1984. At that time there were only 23 teams in the league. It’s 2022, and still more than half of the league gets into the playoffs, and that’s not even counting the highly entertaining Play-in Tournament. Sure the New Orleans Pelicans ...

How the mid-2000s Suns f’ed it all up
Everything we love about the current NBA was made mainstream by the “seven seconds or less” Phoenix Suns of the mid-2000s. They mostly ran lineups that went four out, surrounding their All-Star big man, Amar’e Stoudemire, with space to dominate less athletic bigs. In the 2000s, just about every othe...

Wouldn’t you know it, Cristiano Ronaldo is being a whiny turd again
If one were interested in fairness when it comes to Cristiano Ronaldo — and I’m not for a host of reasons, including the big glaring one (actually two) — one would have to concede that being a professional athlete requires an absurd amount of defiance. At some point in our childhood, we’re all told ...

Portland Trail Blazers hired Chauncey Billups over Dawn Staley and Becky Hammon, who both won championships this year
Becky Hammon and Dawn Staley were literally right there. ...

LeBron James is all about L.A., not the Lakers
LeBron James has changed....

Kevin Durant’s destiny is to complete 2010 Point Guard Bingo with Dame Lillard
Kevin Durant is under contract for one more year with the Brooklyn Nets, but based on the bevy of reports and leaks on the extremely fluid Kyrie melodrama and its potential fallout, his employment is volatile. That uncertainty has spawned a multitude of options for Durant, but only the Portland Trai...

The JaMarcus Russell story is much more complicated than you think
JaMarcus Russell really does feel like one word. That’s the way that it goes for athletes like him, Tony Mandrich, Ryan Leaf, Anthony Bennett, and Trent Richardson. The reason for that, only one word comes to mind at the thought of them: Bust....
