bama Page 24 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Nikola Jokić made a mockery of Heat culture
Imagine being Pat Riley, Jimmy Butler, and the Miami Heat’s training staff right now. They spent two decades preaching the advantages of elite fitness, conditioning, and mining for diamonds in the rough. Every season, Miami mandates that its players maintain a body fat percentage low enough to go wa...

Meet Jimmy Butler, the NBA’s Neymar
They go about it in opposite ways, but Neymar and Jimmy Butler end in the same place. They’re both very good to great players. They’re billed as epicenters. It’s just as important, if not more so, that they’re seen as THE guys than just being them. Neymar goes about it with flash and showmanship, wh...

Is it too late for the Miami Heat even if Tyler Herro returns for Game 5?
The Miami Heat have had a hellacious run to the NBA Finals, and they’ve done it all without one of their best offensive weapons, Tyler Herro. He suffered a broken hand in the second quarter of game 1 during the first round against the Milwaukee Bucks. Herro had already scored 12 points in the game, ...

The Nuggets are immune to the Heat’s Dark Arts
The Miami Heat’s success has been hard to define all postseason. Words like resilience, toughness, and intelligence certainly apply, but that can be said about any team in any sport that makes a deep playoff run. No, Miami has been Jonathan Crane, injecting fear into Gothamites and Bostonians alike....

Miami Heat need Tyler Herro out there STAT
The Miami Heat have made sure to throw the pace of the 2023 NBA Finals into Karo Syrup. The Denver Nuggets have the best offensive rating of any team in the 2023 postseason, but have yet to score 110 points in the finals. This Heat run through the postseason has been mind-boggling, but after three g...

Why is it 'Playoff Jimmy' and not 'Playoff Jokic?'
How many triple-doubles do you have to pile up before you get your own playoff persona? When do the pundits start referring to “Playoff Jokic?” to differentiate Nikola Jokic from what goes on October-April? One would hope that Jokic is close to it by now, seeing as how he racked up his 13th out of ...

Jimmy Butler was good enough in Game 2
There was a little too much fouling of 3-point shooters for my taste on Sunday night, but other than that, the Miami Heat and Denver Nuggets played quite the thrilling Game 2. The Nuggets threw run after run at the Heat, who ate every blow and kept countering. Eventually the Heat put the Nuggets on ...

Miami Heat can’t survive NBA Finals with a punchdrunk Jimmy Butler
Jimmy Buckets was in standby mode for Game 1. Maybe it was the altitude that Ball Center resides at, or the altitude of expectations, but regular season Jimmy Butler pulled up for Game 1. Butler seemed more intent on picking his spots and taking the Denver Nuggets’ temperature. Likewise, the Miami H...

Sage Steele’s beef with ESPN is legit, but you can’t play the victim after being the villain
Despite how she may identify, Sage Steele is a Black woman. That needs to be addressed because, within the sports media landscape, you’d be hard-pressed to find many, or even a few, women — especially Black ones — and Black people who’ll advocate for her. What also needs to be addressed is that Stee...

Alabama walk-on Kai Spears suing New York Times for linking him to Jamea Jonae Harris shooting
More than two months after the New York Times published a story stating Alabama basketball walk-on Kai Spears was in Brandon Miller’s car during the fatal shooting of Jamea Jonae Harris in January, Spears is suing the Gray Lady....

The definitive NBA Finals player rankings
The NBA Finals are upon us, and it’s time to rank the players involved. You’ll notice Tyler Herro is just an honorable mention, and that’s due to his injury status and not fully knowing when he’ll play in the series. These rankings are based on the level of importance and influence each player will ...

Will Nikola Jokić lead Denver to its first title or will Jimmy Butler fulfill his playoff prophecy?
One of the least anticipated matchups in recent memory is upon us. The Denver Nuggets and Miami Heat. Let’s be real here. No LeBron, no Jayson Tatum, and no Boston Celtics legends in the stands. Media members have been openly grousing all week about having to cover the Nuggets. That’s a cornball pos...

Sure, the Boston Celtics won but they still have a Jaylen Brown problem
The Boston Celtics rose to their feet, spit out the blood, wiped their mouths, and got back to fighting in their Eastern Conference Finals series against the Miami Heat. Down 3-0 after getting the snot knocked out of them on Sunday night, they got their first win of the series with Jayson Tatum and ...

Joe Mazzulla and the Celtics have Boston on the edge of misery
Joe Mazzulla versus Erik Spoelstra has been a lopsided showdown between two coaches with a devotion to film study. Spoelstra famously began his brilliant coaching career as a video coordinator with the Miami Heat in 1995. Joe Mazzulla is more of a pure cinephile. One of the more interesting peeks in...

The Miami Heat kicked the Celtics in the head, teeth, calf, and everyone else in Game 3
I have seen some ass-whuppings administered in my lifetime. I remember in the fifth-grade baseball playoffs beating the top overall seed by about 20 runs. To put a championship cap on Alabama’s 2012 football season the Tide ran through Notre Dame so viciously, that their opponents lost the desire to...

Boston and Miami battle to see who's the Beast in the East
In a rematch of last year’s Eastern Conference Finals, the Boston Celtics and Miami Heat are set to square off for the third time in four years to crown the Beast in the East. While the Celtics remain the No. 2 seed, the Heat have been forced to defy the odds of returning to the ECF as the No. 8 see...

The NBA's young stars balled out in the second round of the playoffs
The boisterous people of Sacramento were not a part of the second round, but the basketball as a whole was no less exciting. As predicted, the Miami Heat and New York Knicks matchup was late 1990s NBA without the fights, but the 2020s NBA was at its best in the other series....
![College athletics is a perfect breeding ground for gambling scandals [Update]](https://images.deadspin.com/tr:w-900/3cb9df7f9558ba1253c34f502be74833.jpg)
College athletics is a perfect breeding ground for gambling scandals [Update]
Updated Nov. 15, 2023: Ex-Alabama baseball coach Brad Bohannon and his associate Bert Neff Jr. will be banned, pending an appeal, from Ohio sportsbooks due to an alleged inside information scheme involving a Crimson Tide baseball game, according to the Ohio Casino Control Commission....

Nick Saban made his presence known at the NFL Draft
I see what you’re doing Nick Saban. You knew that you were going to have two players selected top five in the NFL Draft, and you were not about to let that recruiting opportunity go to waste. It was time to remind the world who the true boss is in college football....

How did the Milwaukee Bucks ever win a title?
I won’t pretend to be any kind of basketball expert, and my brethren here will spend the day breaking down the Milwaukee Bucks coughing up a curd-ridden hairball in the first round to the Miami Heat. But I know a deer caught in headlights look when I see one, and Bucks coach Mike Budenholzer spent a...