basketball Page 223 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Maybe, Just Maybe, The Knicks Might Have A Functional Defense
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. ...

Coach: 25-Year-Old Who Posed As High Schooler To Play Basketball Was “Average Player”
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!...

It Appears The Kings, Who Always Screw Up, Can't Possibly Screw This Up
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 e...

How Are The Cavs Like This?
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 ...

Uh Oh, The Cavs Might Actually Be In Trouble<em></em>
An all-timer of a first quarter from LeBron James, in which he scored 21 of his team’s 27 points, and a 42-point triple-double for the entire game all went to waste in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals, as the Boston Celtics took down the Cleveland LeBrons, 107-94....

Here's How The NBA Draft Lottery Went Down
The team with the worst record in the NBA this season, the Phoenix Suns, won the draft lottery tonight, and with it the choice of either Arizona’s Deandre Ayton or Real Madrid’s Luka Dončić. Whoever of those two the Suns don’t pick will likely go to the Sacramento Kings, who defied the odds and took...

The Warriors Are Better Than The Rockets
Look. If we are being honest with each other, here, let’s acknowledge what we all know: The Rockets are 100 percent dead in this series, have virtually no chance whatsoever even to push it to a seventh game, and could spend Game 2 jump-kicking each other in the face for all the good they can do by e...

Warriors Edge Out The Rockets In The Game 1 Everybody Expected
In a game that saw the two best teams in basketball each play exactly how you’d expect them to, the Golden State Warriors beat the Rockets in Houston, 119-106, to take a 1-0 lead in the Western Conference Finals. Despite the best efforts of James Harden and his 41 points, the Warriors managed to exp...

Cavs Comprehensively Wrecked By Scrappy Celtics
Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals was never close. The Celtics went on a 17-0 run in the first quarter, and that was that. The central question of this series is whether Boston’s impressive team defense will be able to slow down a Cavs offense that ranked number one in the NBA in offensive eff...

Dwane Casey Thanks Raptors Fans For Being Canadian
It sucks that the Raptors fired Dwane Casey. They probably had to do it—they’ve lost like a hundred straight playoff games to LeBron James, and the systemic and cultural changes Casey engineered this past season made not even the slightest dent in James’s dominance, and they can’t any longer credibl...

Brett Brown: 76ers "Need Help" To Win A Championship
However disappointed the Sixers and their fans may feel about a five-game series loss to the depleted Celtics, their season was an enormous success. They won a playoff series, and were the favorites to win another, and they certainly look closer to championship contention than all but maybe two or t...

LeBron James Just Got The Coach Of The Year Fired
Toronto Raptors head coach Dwane Casey was voted by his peers as the NBA’s coach of the year two days ago. He received this award for coaching his team to a 59-23 record and the top seed in the Eastern Conference. Today, Casey lost his job. This is because LeBron James exists, and happens to play ba...

Condoleezza Rice Claims NCAA Commission, Which Failed, Wasn't A Failure
Two weeks after Condoleezza Rice and the Commission on College Basketball were lambasted for spending six months to come up with a largely useless set of recommendations for how to fix the sport, the former Secretary of State is trying to save face. ...

Jayson Tatum Gave The Celtics Everything They Needed
As the Celtics dispatched the Sixers with shocking ease, observers were quick to point to Al Horford’s defensive heroics and Terry Rozier’s sudden emergence as instrumental in Boston’s unexpected conference finals appearance. After all, Boston needed to stymie Joel Embiid (which the supposedly stout...

Some Pretty Funny Things That Happened In The Sixers-Celtics Series
Here’s a list:...

Nigel Hayes Has Some Pretty Great Ideas About How To Fix The NCAA
The NCAA turned to Condoleezza Rice and a committee with no players or professors to fix college basketball; it should have just turned to Nigel Hayes....

Potential 2018 NBA Finals Outcomes, Ranked
1. Cavaliers def. Warriors...

The Philadelphia 76ers Should Blow Up The Team And Not Worry About The Short-Term Consequences
After half a decade under head coach Brett Brown and four years and two contracts into the career of star center Joel Embiid—the team’s only All-Star—the Philadelphia 76ers and their fans face a moment of reckoning. It’s a painful one, but it won’t get any less painful if we ignore it. The facts are...

Ben Simmons Was Bad But So What
Nobody needs it explained to them that it’s relatively normal for a rookie, no matter how talented, to play like ass for an entire series in the second round of his first trip to the playoffs. This is how things are generally supposed to go....

The Frail Celtics Still Took Down The Sixers
The Celtics are one more decently bad injury away from barely being able to field a full NBA-caliber rotation, but that didn’t stop the guys they have left from carrying their team to a 114-112 Game 5 win over the 76ers, clinching Boston’s spot in the Eastern Conference Finals....