There are any number of reasons why it’s easy to goof on Bill Simmons, and all of them are honestly pretty solid. Many of these have to do with the way he acts—grandiose and aggrieved and prickly-petty and, now that he’s ascended to demi-mogul status, prone to dilatory rich-guy extemporizing on The Future Of Apps.…

Okay, yes, goddammit yes, I was wrong, the Houston Rockets, who tied the Western Conference Finals at two games apiece last night in Oakland, have a chance to win the series. A frighteningly strong one, if like me you break out in hives at the prospect of a Larry O’Brien trophy consecrating into canonical Championship…

Fourteen years ago, when Diana Taurasi began her WNBA career with the Phoenix Mercury, she was fresh off a legendary career at UConn, where she helped lead the Huskies to three straight NCAA championships on top of her individual awards. She was also in the midst of training with the U.S. Olympic team, playing…

Despite some early hiccups and, um, premature pronouncements of doom, the Rockets held a 53-46 lead going into halftime in Game 4 of the Western Conference Finals against the Warriors. For the most optimistic of Rockets fans, that advantage might’ve been enough to nervously hope for an even series. Everyone else was…

One of the coldest, most ruthlessly efficient scorers in the NBA froze up on a wide-open three that Draymond Green was cool to let him have. P.J. Tucker eventually missed his own three to end the possession, but if you’re wondering how badly the Warriors own James Harden and the Rockets right now, here’s your answer:

The video footage of Bucks guard Sterling Brown’s arrest is set to be released this week, and judging by how Milwaukee authorities are scrambling to do damage control, it sure seems like it’ll tell a very different story from the one police first told. Brown was arrested on Jan. 26 for resisting arrest after officers…

What’s going on here? Just what the heck is this?

Probably the highest praise to give LeBron James is that his 44-point game tonight wasn’t even all that exhilarating, particularly when it didn’t come packaged with quite as many boards and assists (five and three) as his previous five 40-point outings this postseason. The Cavaliers’ 111-102 defeat of the Celtics to…

The bleak doom of all good things in this terrible psycho-capitalist hell-society we have made is to be processed and metabolized into an inert clot of blind, gray, mindless nano-goo by precisely the kind of antiseptic, hyper-rational, ahuman actuarial math on display here:

Slovenian wonderteen and sure-fire top-three pick in the upcoming NBA draft Luka Dončić led his Real Madrid team to a EuroLeague title Sunday, in an 85-80 win over Fenerbahce Dogus Istanbul. Doncic scored 15 points on eight shots, and after the game was named EuroLeague Final Four MVP.

The Cavs opened Game 3 with a huge 22-6 run, and that was more or less that. This was not a case of the winning team grabbing an early lead behind a fluky start and nursing it cautiously until the final buzzer—the Cavs were forceful and decisive early, and did some cool and different things to challenge Boston’s…

Through all those tough years in Orlando to his current stint in Phoenix, the most notable feature of Elfrid Payton’s game has been his head. Not his “basketball IQ” or his “clutch mentality”—just that majestic drooping frond on top. Every season it protruded further past the point guard’s forehead. It looked like it…

The NBA Playoffs should be at something like their apex right now, and in the least entertaining possible sense they may well be. There are four notionally entertaining teams left, and they have combined through four games for maybe three entertaining quarters. The league’s biggest and most brilliant stars are still…

DeMarcus Cousins is in tricky, unpredictable territory now after tearing his Achilles tendon just as the Pelicans were easing into a groove. Without him, they sped up and swept the Blazers. This summer Boogie hits unrestricted free agency while recovering from an injury has sapped many previous stars of their juice.…

The Rockets can pass! That’s the most stunning takeaway from their 127-105 win against the Warriors tonight, which evened the Western Conference Finals at one game apiece and introduced a prettier, more kinetic version of the Rockets than the team that won 65 games in the regular season. Game 2 saw Houston move away…

Mike Budenholzer, the head coach who parted ways with the Atlanta Hawks last month after a 24-58 season, has agreed to become the new coach of the Milwaukee Bucks, according to Woj. What a lucky bastard.

The Knicks did not luck out, which is basically an evergreen sentence. Their lottery pick did not leap into the top three, which had only a six percent chance of occurring last night. It instead landed at nine, as expected. I feel a little good about this.

High school was a fun time for many people. But would you actually want to go back and relive it? Maybe, if you could star on a school’s basketball team!

For what feels like the first time in recent franchise history, the Sacramento Kings got lucky. The Kings briefly held the reins in the NBA’s greatest-ever tank-off last season, but they were soundly out-tanked over the stretch run, and wound up finishing with the lottery’s seventh-best odds after ending the season…

The Cleveland Cavaliers, lifted by a huge first half from LeBron James, began the second half of Game 2 against the Celtics with a seven-point lead. This was a vast improvement over the circumstances they found themselves in during Game 1, when the Celtics had put the result out of reach by the end of the first…