boston Page 19 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

NBA play-in tournament: Tuesday’s matchup preview
It’s play-in tournament time, and now that we know all the participants, let’s look at Day One, which will be the seven vs. eight seed in each conference. We have intriguing matchups here and two teams that weren’t expected to be dealing with the play-in when the season started back in October....

Oh no MJ, please don’t even think about trading for Russell Westbrook
MJ, please don’t do this....

Breaking down the logjam for the No. 2 seed in the East
With three games remaining for Boston, Philly, and Milwaukee, and the three teams all squared up at 49-30 for the two through four seeds, The Race Not to Finish Fourth in the East has massive implications on who plays Phoenix in the Finals, who wins the MVP, and who likely faces Toronto in round one...

There’s something in the water in NBA and NHL arenas
Rarely does it make sense to link the NBA and the NHL, other than they tend to play in the same buildings at the same time of year. You wouldn’t really call them roommates, because when one is home the other never is. Though that probably makes them perfect roommates, come to think of it. Still, on ...

Kyrie Irving’s return to full-time has seen his numbers come back to earth
Brooklyn Nets guard Kyrie Irving had the sweetest deal of any player in recent memory for most of the season, where he only had to play half the games on the schedule due to his vaccination status....

Winning Time: ‘Piece of a Man’ explores Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s relationship with Islam
What makes Winning Time’s tapestry of stories enthralling is how it reflects the chaotic jazz of our lives. Every character is at odds against the world and themselves. Magic, Jerry Buss, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, each man is fighting a private war. For many of them, it’s a war of the spirit against the ...

The White Sox are getting to their proper level of cantankerous
The term “White Sox” in baseball basically means anger. Or at least a heavy pinch of it to go with however else it might be defined. There is always an undercurrent of seething with the White Sox and their fans. It’s part of their identity. The White Sox are a symbol of their part of Chicago, the So...

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s take on the Will Smith/Chris Rock situation is an outdated view of progress
Sometimes, even the NBA’s all-time leading scorer misses an easy one....

MLB ventures further into the Why Not?
It has become tiring to describe baseball and those in it and just outside of it, as crusty. But it also hasn’t stopped me from being crusty on certain subjects that MLB has discussed to try and liven the game up. I hate the expanded playoffs. I don’t mind the DH in the NL anymore, though I used to ...

Hornets sign Isaiah Thomas for the rest of the season
These last few years have been tough for Charlotte Hornets guard Isaiah Thomas. He’s been on nothing but 10-day contracts recently, and after consecutive 10-day deals in Charlotte, the Hornets have decided to keep Thomas on for the remainder of the year....

The return of the Celtics
It wasn’t long ago that the Boston Celtics were viewed as one of the more underachieving teams in the NBA this season. ...

Steve Cohen Tax? It’s Mets’ rivals flashing cash
One of the headline parts of the new Major League Baseball collective bargaining agreement was the “Steve Cohen Tax,” a new level of the not-a-salary-cap salary cap system designed to rein in the Mets’ billionaire owner....

The decline and fall of the New York Yankees
It’s not just that the Yankees haven’t won a World Series since 2009, although it can’t be repeated enough that the Yankees haven’t won a World Series since 2009....

Familia latest Phillies’ free agent folly
The Phillies had a 4.60 bullpen ERA last season, sixth-worst in the major leagues. Philadelphia relievers’ 2.36 strikeout-to-walk ratio ranked 19th in the majors in 2021. And the Phillies’ bullpen corps served up 89 homers last year, tied for seventh-most in baseball....

Winning Time Episode 2: “Is That All There Is?”
“You look like one of us,” a young woman tells Jerry West at a bar, fresh off a championship but stuck in his own ennui. The woman is part of a group mourning a deceased loved one, some dude named Bob. West is three hours removed from winning his first NBA championship in 1971, after six attempts. W...

Pop goes the winner
When this season began, Ray Allen was the NBA’s all-time leader in three-pointers, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had the record for combined regular season and playoff points, and Don Nelson was the winningest coach in league history....

Still waiting for Kyrie Irving’s post-All Star Break warning to come to pass
“Just watch how our squad comes out of this All-Star Break,” - Kyrie Irving...

Big Baby got caught on candid camera at the Celtics game today, and he deserved it for that lame shirt
We may not have this opportunity this year, but who hasn’t purchased a bleacher seat at a Major League Baseball game and then sometime after the third inning — or third beer, whichever comes first — tried to find a better view, or received some free concert tickets at their high school part-time job...

Let’s talk the Lakers, the Magic and HBO's '<em>Winning Time'</em><em></em>
Before the Los Angeles Lakers drafted Earvin “Magic” Johnson with the first overall pick in 1979, the league was on the verge of a fate worse than death — irrelevancy. ...

Jaylen Brown injury speaks to the fragility of Boston’s makeup
I almost wrote about the Celtics on Tuesday because I heard about these projections that had them with heavy title odds, but when I went to FiveThirtyEight to try to find them, it felt like I was trying to decipher binary code. So I held off to wait to see if anything came of the research I loosely ...