basketball Page 199 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Report: The Warriors Had To Wash Their Hands A Lot
After sweeping the Cavaliers in last season’s NBA Finals, retiring big guy David West gave a cryptic answer about the team facing unreported difficulties behind the scenes, the kind of thing that made their season more challenging than outsiders could comprehend. What’s more, according to West, only...

Luka Doncic Gets Pumped And Jacked About The NBA, Also Happens To Play In It<em></em>
Luka Doncic is the most productive rookie in the NBA. He is also the smiliest goof I can remember ever seeing on its basketball courts. This passage from Rob Mahoney’s nice SI profile of the Mavericks’ Slovenian teen rang true:...

Fred Hoiberg's Disappointing, Forgettable Time With The Bulls Has Come To An End
The Chicago Bulls have fired head coach Fred Hoiberg today, after three full seasons, one playoff series, and a 5-19 start to the 2018-19 campaign. Yes, he was still there....

Mario Hezonja Steps Over A Fallen Giannis Antetokounmpo After Breakaway Dunk<em></em>
Mario Hezonja has never been one to be short of confidence. When asked in 2015 if he went to see Lionel Messi play during his stint at Barcelona, the Croatian replied, “Let Messi come to see me.” Three years later, that confidence has yet to fade....

James Harden Uses Incredible Defensive Awareness To Pull Off No-Look Steal
The idea that “James Harden is so good that he doesn’t even need to try” is mostly used to describe the efforts of last season’s MVP on offense. In fact, Harden’s defense throughout his career has been somewhat of a detriment to how he’s viewed as a player. But his typical defensive demeanor came in...

Markelle Fultz Shooting Form Update: Shoulder Investigation Continues
One week ago, Markelle Fultz’s agent and attorney Raymond Brothers announced that the struggling Sixers guard would sit out a week of action to see a bunch of specialists in New York, who could presumably help with his interminable right shoulder injury. A sad update on the prognosis: The work conti...

Pascal Siakam Is Fun For The Whole Family
Six-foot-nine and a grinning menace on the fast break? Check. Seven-foot-three wingspan and can be switched anywhere? Check. Glitch-like speed and the sweetest spin move going? Check. Extremely powerful name? Check. Dropped a 26-point, 8-for-10 bomb on the Warriors? As of last night, check....

Shaq Unveils Innovative New Player Ranking System
At this point, TNT’s NBA studio show is good for one thing: watching the bleary-eyed hosts agitate and confuse the hell out of each other. Confusion reigned during last night’s episode when Shaquille O’Neal spent nearly two minutes trying to turn his co-hosts’ brains into soup....

Dwight Howard Needs A Buttectomy
Okay, fine, probably it’s not a buttectomy. But it’s at least a buttotomy or a buttopsy. The butt pain that has kept Dwight Howard out of all but nine Wizards game this season will reportedly require surgery:...

So, Andrew Wiggins Is Doing Great
Okay, so, the following otherwise delightful tweet, by Carter Rodriguez of SB Nation’s Fear the Sword blog, isn’t quite right....

Kevin Durant Is Absurd
The Toronto Raptors beat the Golden State Warriors in overtime Thursday night by the score of 131–128. The matchup lost some of its potential juice due to the absence of Steph Curry and Draymond Green, but the basketball itself was terrific. Kawhi Leonard was great. Pascal Siakam was great. Even Ser...

Report: Intra-Kings Beef Getting Spicier By The Day
The Kings are not handling success very well. A schism is widening between head coach Dave Joerger and the front office, and it has now reportedly escalated to the point where Joerger doesn’t even want certain of the team’s front office personnel in the same room with his players....

A Suddenly Well-Rounded Nikola Vucevic Could Help You Win
Many otherwise curious basketball fans might be guilty of ignoring the 10-12 Magic. Maybe because they are regular people just hoping to get through the day’s tasks without staring at an infinite procession of 6-foot-10-ish dudes scuttling across the hardwood in search of a jump shot. But if you are...

Luka Dončić Does Cool Things
There was a funny moment midway through the third quarter of Wednesday night’s Mavericks road win in Houston, when Luka Dončić drove the paint off a nifty show-and-go move, slowed up in the lane, and lofted a smooth, high-arcing floater over the outstretched arm of Clint Capela, one of the NBA’s mor...

The Slow Dismantling Of The Cavs Marches On
While everyone was waiting on the Cavaliers to trade old-ass sharpshooter J.R. Smith, a different old-ass Cleveland sharpshooter was instead told to ship out, as Woj is reporting that the Cavs have traded Kyle Korver to the Utah Jazz:...

Trae Young Has The Freedom To Chuck These Stupid-Fun Three-Pointers From The Logo
Twenty-one games in, Hawks rookie Trae Young has had his moments. Barring catastrophic injury to Luka Doncic and Jaren Jackson Jr., and, honestly, some other dudes too, Young won’t be the Rookie of the Year, but he’s been an entertaining strain of semi-bad that you can really get behind....

Jamal Murray Adds A New Chapter To His Campaign Of Lakers Antagonism
Jamal Murray apparently loves being a dick to the Lakers. Last December he caused a brief kerfuffle by dribbling rudely around Lonzo Ball in the closing seconds of a Nuggets home win. Three months later he again pissed off the Lakers—and drew a classic Not Mad response from Lonzo—with something he s...

Darren Collison Crossover Sends Young DeAndre Ayton To Pooptown
DeAndre Ayton is going to do many cool and impressive things over the course of his NBA career, but if he plays for 30 years he will never quite live down this moment, when Darren Collison turned him into a sack of dirt:...

Here Is a Truly Putrid Basketball Sequence
The Bucks lost to the Hornets yesterday, thanks largely to the following sequence in which they missed what feels like 15 shots in what feels like five seconds. There’s no one standout here, as every single Milwaukee player’s ability to trip over himself is remarkable and laudable; a special note of...

Dammit, Durant
Stephen Curry has missed the last 10 Warriors games with a groin injury. Draymond Green has missed nine of the last 11 Warriors games. The Warriors have looked mostly like crap over that stretch, with losses at home to the Bucks and Thunder, and road losses in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and to th...