basketball Page 228 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
The Wizards Of Aughts: The Post-Millennium Washington Wizards And The Bloggers Who Immortalized Them
The late-model Washington Wizards are broadly competent, secretly mediocre, spotty, and more boring than they are not. They could be nutshelled as an equal and opposite reaction to their counterparts of a decade ago. Those Wiz teams, which weren’t better but sure were stranger, boasted a bigger coll...
The Time Has Come For Carmelo Anthony To Hit Some Damn Shots
For all the handwringing over Russell Westbrook’s stat-chasing and shot selection, and over Paul George’s occasional listlessness, an even bigger problem has spent the season lurking in Oklahoma City. A Melo problem....
Erin Popovich, Wife Of Gregg Popovich, Dies
Erin Popovich, wife of San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich, died today at the age of 67 after battling an illness:...
Larry Nance Jr. Spikes Trevor Booker's Weak Shot Attempt Directly Into Hell
The Pacers are grinding their way back from Playoff LeBron’s personal game-opening 16-1 run, with no help from this sorry Antawn Jamison-ass quasi-hook flip shot by Indiana’s Trevor Booker, which Larry Nance Jr., acting as the living incarnation of righteous justice, pounded into the parquet so hard...
Playoff LeBron Goes On 16-1 Run To Start Game 2
After getting smoked in Game 1 of their first-round series against the Pacers, the Cavaliers came out for tonight’s Game 2 with zero interest in fucking around. Or, to be more specific, LeBron came out with zero interest in fucking around—which he demonstrated very clearly by building a 16-1 Clevela...
Playoff Rondo Is Truly Back
For essentially the duration of Anthony Davis’s career, the Pelicans have been knocked for being a one-man team with precious little depth, no wing players, and little dynamism to their offense that doesn’t start and finish with Davis. The addition of DeMarcus Cousins helped allay the severity of th...
The Raptors Put The Wizards In The Trash, Where They Belong
The competitive part of last night’s Game 2 between the Toronto Raptors and Washington Wizards was over, long over, by the time some combination of shame and embarrassment sparked a smidgen of detectable pride or competitive intensity in any Washington player. The result was a laughably misleading ...
Jrue Holiday Decided The Pelicans Would Win (And They Did)
The Pelicans went up 2-0 on the Blazers in their first-round series Tuesday night with a 111-102 road win. They did this thanks in part to main man Anthony Davis—who picked up a 22-point double-double—but mostly because point guard Jrue Holiday took the game over and willed the Pelicans to a narrow ...
Suddenly, Jaylen Brown Is The Celtics' New Leader
The Boston Celtics are generally broken and injured for this year’s playoffs, but after a 120-106 win to take a 2-0 series lead over the Bucks, they’re in prime position to survive at least the first round. And for both of the Celtics’ wins so far in the postseason, they owe a huge debt to Jaylen Br...
Which NBA Owner Reportedly Berated His Coach For Winning And Harming The Tanking Campaign?
ESPN basketball reporter Adrian Wojnarowski dropped an enticing little anecdote on his most recent podcast, which was noticed today by an astute Reddit sleuth. Woj was talking to Bobby Marks about the NBA season’s hotly contested tank-off and said an owner recently yelled at his coach for winning a ...
Nothing Matters, But LaMarcus Aldridge Was Awesome Last Night
They have to say they believe they can win, of course. More than that, they have to actually believe that it’s at least possible, or they would not be the sorts of people capable of claiming the West’s seventh playoff seed with a roster that looks like somebody sat on a keyboard. None of the rest of...
How Many More Times Can The Heat Do That?
It’s true that the Miami Heat dominated most of last night’s Game 2 against the Sixers, only wobbling late in the fourth quarter before being steadied once again by Dwyane Wade. It’s true that Wade was spectacular, and hewed much closer to the 2010 version of himself than the player he’s been recent...
Joel Embiid Is Not Happy After Tonight's Sixers Loss
Joel Embiid cleared concussion protocol yesterday—nearly three weeks after he initially landed in said protocol by smacking heads with teammate Markelle Fultz and fracturing his orbital bone—but the Sixers center was still on the bench for tonight’s Game 2 against the Heat. He’s apparently not too t...
It's 2018, My God, And Dwyane Wade Just Won A Playoff Game Through The Force Of His Own Will
Dwyane Wade established tonight’s Game 2 against the 76ers as a Dwyane Wade Night, a performance bound to get the word “vintage” repeatedly attached to it, pretty early on: certainly before the end of the first half, by which point he’d scored 21 on 8-for-9 shooting off the bench. In the second quar...
Pro-Trump Spurs Fans Willingly Show Their Asses, Complain About Gregg Popovich's Politics
The Washington Post today published a Cletus safari of Donald Trump supporters, but with a twist—these people are also fans of the San Antonio Spurs, whose coach, Gregg Popovich, isn’t shy about giving his liberal takes to the press. Popovich’s criticism of the president—and not the fact that the se...
Elgin Baylor Is Finally Ready To Tell People He Was Great
Elgin Baylor’s gotta be the most underappreciated superstar of all time, in basketball or any major sport. The guy was NCAA Final Four MVP and NBA Rookie of the Year. He was First-Team All-NBA 10 times and an NBA All-Star 11 times. Baylor led his team, the Minneapolis/Los Angeles Lakers, in the trif...
Donovan Mitchell Isn't Wasting Any Time
The Thunder won the first game in their series against the Jazz on Sunday, thanks in large part to the dominance of Paul George. But if you’re looking for someone in Utah with the ability to rise to George and Russell Westbrook’s level and keep this series competitive, look no further than rookie gu...
Steven Adams's Arm Seems To Have Survived This Dunk
Please turn up the volume on your computing device, and listen to the goddamn sound this Steven Adams alley-oop made. ...
One Of These James Harden Step-Backs Is Unlike The Others
James Harden was comically unguardable in Sunday night’s 104-101 win over the T-Wolves, certainly if your name was Andrew Wiggins, and even if your name was Jimmy Butler. Houston must have been relieved to see it. The Rockets’ offense relies on the three-ball more than any other team’s, with fully 5...