early Page 2 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Baseball America’s Top 50 names in college baseball is missing some Sharts and a Hug
Baseball America has ranked this year’s top 50 names in college baseball, and it’s a good list....
Nearly Perfect: Even On A Bad Night, Michael Jordan Could Still Fuck You Up
It is impossible to watch the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls without viewing them within the context of the contemporary Warriors surpassing their historic 10-loss season. It’s only natural to compare the two teams, and for the virtual entirety of the Bulls’ tenth loss of the season, home against the Indiana...
Nearly Perfect: The Night The Bulls Were Tired
On April 8, 1996, the Chicago Bulls trudged into the United Center on an unseasonably cold Monday night to face the Charlotte Hornets. They hadn’t lost at home in 44 games. The Hornets, meanwhile, entered the game as the East’s eighth seed, with a record that was just one game over .500....
Nearly Perfect: Night Of The Raptor
Maybe it started when they named the team after a dinosaur in a Steven Spielberg movie, or when the first player they ever drafted refused to report, or when the team’s greatest player left the country to attend his college graduation on the morning of the biggest game in franchise history. But if y...
Nearly Perfect: Modern Basketball Arrived Before Anyone Knew How To Play It
Over the past 20 years basketball has evolved from a sport based around throwing the ball to brutes in the post into one based around flighty sprites flinging three-pointers from ever-increasing distances. But in watching a Bulls-Knicks game from 1996, it was illuminating to understand how this actu...
Nearly Perfect: For One Night, Rex Chapman Was King
Michael Jordan made me hate basketball. That’s not supposed to be the effect of one of the greatest players of all time, not if he plays for your team or you’re a connoisseur of the sport. But for me, a young sports fan in South Florida who sort of understood basketball, I looked at Michael Jordan’s...
Nearly Perfect: Charles Barkley Was The Patron Saint Of Moral Victories
I’m a sucker for those moments when athletes lose themselves a little bit. When Jose Bautista gets mad at baseball and then throws a bat into baseball’s face; when Rajon Rondo realizes it’s him against the world and still asks LeBron James to come get some; when Baron Davis decides that the only app...
Nearly Perfect: The Chicago Bulls Were Frauds
Children don’t pick their heroes, they gravitate to them. This youthful ignorance is blissful insofar as it frees one to feel that magnetic pull without questioning why it exists in the first place. The Jordan-era Chicago Bulls thus became the team of my childhood without any real reason beyond the...
Nearly Perfect: The Indiana Pacers Were A Vanished Ideal
The Indiana Pacers were a pretty, pretty basketball team. Do people know that now? It all came back at once, watching the bleary video of them facing the Bulls on Boxing Day of 1995. The in-game graphics reminded viewers that the Pacers had won the Central Division the year before—Michael Jordan’s b...
Nearly Perfect: An Unremarkable November Finals Preview
By November 26, 1995, everybody already knew the 10-1 Chicago Bulls were very good; nobody knew they were the best team in NBA history just yet. Michael Jordan was in his first full season back from retirement, the Bulls had gone down meekly in the playoffs to the young Orlando Magic the season befo...
Nearly Perfect: The Meteoric Rise And Fall Of The Orlando Magic
The Chicago Bulls’ path to the NBA’s then best-ever record and the first of three consecutive titles wasn’t as inevitable then as it seems now, with hindsight, and that’s in large part because of the rise and fall of the Orlando Magic....
Nearly Perfect: Understanding The Greatest (For Now) Team In NBA History
“It’s a nice number, 72-10. It rings well.” - Phil Jackson...
Knicks Guard Cleanthony Early Shot During Roadside Robbery
Knicks guard Cleanthony Early was shot in the right leg when a group of at least six men held up the Uber car he and his girlfriend were riding in early Wednesday morning. Early was robbed of jewelry, cash, and his cell phone, and his injuries are not life threatening....
Cleanthony Early Hammers Dunk Over Kentucky
Fred Van Vleet found Cleanthony Early streaking to the rim near the end of the first half of Wichita St.-Kentucky and it was just all over. Done. Said Shockers coach Gregg Marshall, "I just wish we had more time in the half." Same....
Hundreds Of Heat Fans Leave Game 6 Early; A Nation Laughs
LeBron James called it "by far the best game I've ever been a part of." It's too bad lots of ticket-holding Heat fans weren't left to see the end. Gotta beat traffic, you know....
Wichita State Players Know As Little About Wichita State As You Do
Wichita State: What is it? A university named after a city with a population of less than 400,000—and which isn't even the capital (of Kansas)—Wichita State hasn't enjoyed the surge of interest around the school that accompanied March Madness upstarts like Florida Gulf Coast, or Harvard. Even after ...
This Is What Lance Armstrong's Fall From Grace Sounds Like To Consumers
Things are bad for Lance Armstrong these days. Marketing wizards have been trying to find out just how bad and the answer is "extremely."...
Will Clark Saved The Giants, And I Missed It
The Hall of Nearly Great hits web shelves today, and it's a bargain at $12. It has 42 terrific writers—heavyweights such as Rob Neyer and Joe Posnanski, and Deadspin folks, too: Owen Good and Will Leitch—with essays on the nearly great players they love. You can read about Brad Radke, Andy Messersmi...
Something Good Happened To The Knicks!
I think it's fair to say no one understands how NBA contracts and salary cap rules work. That's why ESPN hires a guy solely for the purpose of answering obscure questions about it. But a strange situation involving Jeremy Lin and Steve Novak, a situation we really would have expected to come up some...
Grandpa Was A Baller: The Weird, Wonderful Tales Of An Early NBA Player, Who Happens To Be My Grandfather
Republished from The Classical....