Locker Page 59 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

‘Davidson Steph Curry’ is showing up tonight – it’s over for the Memphis Grizzlies
If Quin Snyder was smart, he’d already have the Utah Jazz preparing to play the Golden State Warriors for Game One of their first-round series that will start Sunday night in Salt Lake City. Any time spent on game planning for Ja Morant and the Memphis Grizzlies will be a waste of time, given that t...

Hockey is the dumbest sport
It’s funny (but not), and fitting, that in a week where we’ve spent a great deal of time talking about baseball’s old, drunk, incontinent demons still plaguing the youthful and logical, hockey strolls into the saloon, hitches up its belt, and says, “Oh, you think you’re stupid? I’ll show you stupid....

Home cookin’ won’t be equal for all NBA playoff teams
For the first time in two years, we might actually get to talk about home-court advantage in the NBA playoffs, but in a weird, 2021-ish kind of way....

Leave Kwame Brown alone
When you poke the bear, you best be ready for the consequences. And Kwame Brown is a 6-foot-11, 290-pound bear that was in hibernation until his rest was disturbed by two of his former teammates....

Sorry, Phoenix: The reward for your historic season is a first-round series against the world's best player and his championship team
Man, the Phoenix Suns are fantastic, so this isn’t to say they can’t do it, but it sucks that awaiting them in the first round after their fifth-best regular-season ever are LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers....

LeBron cements the continued existence of a game he hates
Look, the Play-in Tournament is stupid. Everyone pretty much knows it. The players certainly hate it, and even the ones who get to participate in it probably don’t like it much more. It’s manufactured drama. We’ve had 72 games this year, and in normal times we’ll have 82, and if you’re not in playof...

Now would be a great time for a Ja Morant statement game
The Memphis Grizzlies play the San Antonio Spurs in the play-in game tonight that people aren’t talking as much about....

Jeremy Lin, who might’ve retired last night, should give himself more credit
During the Play-In games, Jeremy Lin was probably so bored that he felt it was the most appropriate time to hint at retirement on a post from his official Twitter. ...

The East Play-Ins sucked, but Warriors/Lakers was really all we cared about here, right?
Tonight is when we will see if the Play-Ins were worth it....

The Charlotte Hornets are doomed to run the ‘treadmill of mediocrity’
The “treadmill of mediocrity” is a term coined by former Portland Trail Blazers GM Kevin Pritchard in 2011. It’s pro basketball limbo — being good enough to sneak into the playoffs but not good enough to win, yet not quite bad enough to earn a top-5 draft pick and select a serious game-changer. And ...

As Rudy Giuliani’s kid runs for governor of New York (yes), let’s revisit his ridiculous lawsuit after getting dumped by Duke golf
Andrew Giuliani has been an obnoxious twit for so long that when his father Rudy was elected mayor of New York in 1993, it wasn’t out of line for Saturday Night Live to lampoon him by having Chris Farley portray the out-of-control seven-year-old....

Tony La Russa sold out his own player, and for what?
This Tony La Russa sociology experiment on the South Side of Chicago is going exactly as anyone familiar with the White Sox team and La Russa figured it would. And really, the only thing bailing La Russa out is that this roster was so turn-key when he took it over that even the injuries to Luis Robe...

Get vaccinated and maybe this dingus will stop trying to look cool in a Nets jersey
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is back on his shenanigans again. ...

Breaking Down the Beef: Three old NBA guys go at it like drunk uncles
Kwame Brown had time this week....

Warriors-Lakers shows just how much fans miss Warriors-Cavs
The NBA’s first-ever play-in tournament starts tomorrow — eight teams, six games, four playoff spots up for grabs. But if you turned on SportsCenter at any point in the last two days, you’d think only one game was happening tomorrow — Warriors at Lakers. ...

Columbus Crew fans reject name change, and win
Perhaps it’s not on the level of preventing a team from moving away from your city, but fans of the Columbus Crew once again took on ownership of the club and once again came out on top. ...

NBA's Play-in Tournament is garbage
It’s Trash Talking Tuesday, and today I’m trashing the NBA and its Play-in Tournament....

Does the 'hot hand' really exist? Deadspin investigates, using Steph Curry's historic streak
On April 2, Golden State’s season reached its nadir with a 53-point loss to the Raptors in Tampa. Stephen Curry, who had recently returned from a five-game absence, sat out the second game of a back-to-back, Draymond Green was out with a finger injury, and it was the kind of night where the dynasty ...

Don’t be fooled, LaMelo is surrounded by talent in Charlotte
I know the national media never talks about them, but the Charlotte Hornets have hoopers not named LaMelo Ball....

Kyrie Irving is the NBA’s MVP – Most Valuable Person
When Weldon Irvine wrote “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black” for Nina Simone in the late ‘60s, he was talking about folks like Kyrie Irving....