LeBron James deposited the Cavaliers (and probably the Rockets) in the trash can this morning and will become an unrestricted free agent, so expect LeBronWatch comes to a frenzied, frothy climax over the next few days. Leave it to the very frothiest, ESPN’s Brian Windhorst, to report that LeBron James is meeting with…
A token of J.R. Smith’s eternal shame is up for sale on the NBA’s auction site. “He played 38 minutes and registered 10 points with 2 assists and 6 rebounds,” reads the very charitable caption. In some sense, this is the greatest piece of LeBron James memorabilia that money could buy.
An undeniable spoil of victory is the unassailable right to talk mad shit about your vanquished foes, forever, no matter their prominence nor how splendidly they performed. The Warriors are very good at this, as in the case of Draymond Green using t-shirts to mock LeBron James after each of the last two Warriors…
In the immediate aftermath of Game 4, Warriors rookie Jordan Bell wielded two bottles of celebratory champagne. These were the results:
When the Warriors took to the streets of Oakland a year ago to celebrate their championship, Draymond Green marked the occasion by donning a “Quickie” t-shirt featuring the logo from the Cavs arena. There’s a long history of sartorial beef between the Warriors and the Cavs, and highlights from the other side of the…
It was otherwise a shitty, forgettable NBA Finals series, but at least it produced this fascinating outcome: Nick Young (!) joins fellow Cinnamon Challenge hero and former Wizards knucklehead JaVale McGee (!!) as an NBA champion. The sheer improbability of Nick Young finding a role on a championship team was not lost…
I am certainly not going to pretend to believe this might’ve significantly changed the trajectory of the series, but it’s also not nothing: LeBron James reportedly played the last three games of the Finals with a busted-up hand after he punched a black board following Cleveland’s world-historic boner of a loss in Game…
Man, Game 4 sucked. Just as a basketball exhibition, it sucked, in exactly the way that all blowouts suck, before we even get to the part where it was an elimination game in the NBA Finals. However valiantly the Cavs fought earlier in the series, Game 4 made clear just what a ghastly, hilariously lopsided Finals…
It was the third quarter, and the Warriors, already ahead on the scoreboard and up 3-0 in the series, were doing their third-quarter thing. That is to say, they’d decided to apply the 12 minutes of focused full-bore effort it takes to render them effectively invincible. A game they’d led steadily pretty much from the…
Even though LeBron James and Steph Curry had already said that neither of their teams would visit the White House if they won the NBA Finals, today Donald Trump tried to pretend like he wouldn’t have invited them anyway. Surely the basketball players will regret the opportunity to watch a septuagenarian trot his…
Kendrick Perkins, nominally on the Cavs roster, is just there to wear a suit and start shit. He’s a large, rude chaperone who escorts the team from Cleveland to the Bay and back, occasionally stepping up to yell at or near Drake or knock knees with Steph Curry. Last night he fully embraced his role during his old OKC…
Let me take you inside the game for a moment: we record the Deadcast a little while before you actually hear the Deadcast. It is not, despite the seamlessly integrated ads and effortlessly fluid riffage, a live show. When we recorded this one on Wednesday morning, the NBA Finals were not quite as extravagantly over as…
Last night, it was not “KD you suck” that got Kevin Durant’s attention and made him walk slowly in the direction of the heckler, but rather that classic barb that gets under everyone’s skin: “KD! You cheesebutt!”
The bad dream that’s afflicting LeBron James is a long one, replete with horrors. J.R. Smith is there, wandering around with a lit M-80 in his hand. Jordan Clarkson is somehow lurking around every corner, wearing Kobe Bryant’s face as a mask. Kevin Love’s drowning in a glass water tank and LeBron can’t break him out,…
Even if everyone already knew the Warriors were eventually going to win the NBA Finals regardless of what happened tonight, Game 3 was actually pretty fun. The Cavs gave the Dubs their best shot on the way to a respectable 110-102 defeat. Kevin Love came to play, Rodney Hood reminded us that he was a qualified…
An impossibly stupid saga is raging in the NFL, and the NBA has already offered a response via its two biggest stars: Neither Finals team will visit the White House. LeBron James made that clear today in a press conference:
At the end of the third quarter of Game 2, Steph Curry missed a three and sauntered back towards his bench in front of the Cavaliers. Most of the Cavs let him walk freely, but not Kendrick Perkins, who refused to close his widespread legs and knocked knees with Curry.
Yes, Game 2 already happened, and it went just about as everyone expected after the Cavaliers blew their chance last week. It’s still worth going back to look to Game 1 and the exact moment this Finals series ended.
Steph Curry makes you want to ragequit. Throw up your hands; throw the controller across the room; swear, loudly, to an empty apartment. It’s a videogame term, but he’s a videogame talent: hitting low-percentage (for anyone else) shots at a rate that should be beyond human capabilities, and when the algorithm decides…
I watched Game 1 of the NBA Finals from extremely expensive seats in Oracle Arena, but I didn’t see J.R. Smith’s towering goof.
