eastern-conference Page 13 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

CFP-staples Alabama, Ohio State, Oklahoma, and Clemson rejoice!
Get ready for more of the gridiron rotation of Alabama, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Clemson and occasionally others. College Football Playoff executive director Bill Hancock announced Friday that the CFP will stay at its current four-team format through the end of the 2025, when its current 12-year contra...

So the Phoenix Suns are really good in clutch situations
The ability to come away victorious in close games is a great way to determine a team’s championship viability. The final five minutes of a close is when we get to see each team’s talent and coaching at the forefront. It’s when we get our best approximation of a team’s ceiling, and by golly, the Pho...

The Knicks are living a regression to the mean nightmare
I know I spend way too much of my time mocking the plight of New York Knick fans and their undeserved cockiness, but Thursday night’s fiasco felt like a turning point. They may finally be devoid of hope. For the third time in their last seven games, the Knicks squandered a lead of 20-points or mor...

Joe Cool after the loss
Not many outside of Southern Ohio have seen a year No. 3 from Joe Burrow as a starting quarterback. He never started a game in his three seasons at Ohio State and had two superb years at LSU. His second year taking the mantle of the Cincinnati Bengals ended with a 23-20 loss in Super Bowl LVI to the...

Arkansas will pay for fans rushing the court after beating Auburn, but who cares?
It was a matter of if, not when, Auburn men’s basketball lost another game. As its football team, the biggest draw of the athletic department that overshadows every other sport combined, goes through unsettling offseason turbulence, the fightin’ Bruce Pearls are putting together the school’s best re...

An old beef classic has returned: Stephen A. Smith versus Kevin Durant
It all started with Stephen A. Smith’s Thursday appearance on NBA Today, which included a searing hot take about Kevin Durant. The Brooklyn Nets at the time were on a six-game losing streak that on Friday extended to seven. They are currently on a five-game Western Conference road trip that ends fol...

Hate Tom Wilson all you want but he deserves to be an NHL All-Star
There are few names that drum up hockey fans at large with such visceral rage as Tom Wilson. His introduction to the league has been well-documented as a young, tough, ultra-physical, trash-talking specimen Capitals’ fans adore. The rest of the league’s fans, not so much. Especially in Boston and Ne...

Guess what Ben Simmons? You proved Shaq’s point
Philadelphia 76ers’ guard Ben Simmons has not played a single game all season. Why? He wants to be traded. Why? Because after an abysmal 2021 postseason that saw Simmons shoot 34.2 percent from the free throw line before getting bounced by the Atlanta Hawks in the second round, Simmons rightfully re...

Why this Chicago Bulls moment matters
It wasn’t supposed to last this long. When Michael Jordan slightly pushed off Bryon Russell to square up for a 17-foot jump shot with 5.2 seconds left in 1998, the future was a giant question mark. The moment the shot clock expired, the rebuild began. Bulls fans knew the band was broken up. This wou...

<i>My time in Permian Panthers country</i>
I didn’t know how I was going to feel eight months out of college packing up everything I own, shoving it into my midsize sedan, and moving nearly two time zones away from the East Coast for the first time. But I knew for growth personally and professionally, I needed to feel it....

Tyler Herro told us he was a bucket and we should have listened
The Miami Heat have been playing lights out recently, with an 8-2 record in their last 10 games. Amid their hot streak, the Heat have taken over sole possession of first place in the Eastern Conference. Wednesday night, Miami had even more firepower added to the lineup with the return of Tyler “I’m ...

Now Daryl Morey thinks he can land Harden in the offseason? Just make a trade already, man!
Daryl Morey is really trying to apply that “shoot for the moon, if you miss you’ll land among the stars,” saying to his attempts at a Ben Simmons trade. Actually, knowing what we know about Morey he would probably debunk that saying with the explanation, “the stars are actually light years farther a...

SEC out to conquer more than football as Auburn hoops is No. 1 for first time in school history
The Southeastern Conference doesn’t have a plan only to dominate in football. The league’s leadership believes a monopoly, like its 12 of the last 16 national gridiron championships, including the last three with a trio of different schools, can be achieved across the board....

Auburn beats Kentucky, could get first AP No. 1 ranking in school history
With a decisive victory against the Kentucky Wildcats, the perennial kings of the SEC, the Auburn Tigers have likely made school history (not to jinx them or anything). At 18-1, this year’s squad is positioned to reach the No. 1 seed for the first time since the AP began ranking teams in the late ...

Three possible trade scenarios for John Collins
What the hell is happening in Atlanta? They went on a Cinderella-esque run in last season’s playoffs, reaching the Eastern Conference Finals. This year? They currently sit 12th in the East, out of the Play-In Tournament, and 22nd in the entire NBA. During the summer of 2020-21, the Hawks happily wen...

A rough stretch for the Bulls doesn’t look like it’s going to get better soon
The clock has struck midnight and the Chicago Bulls 2021-22 Cinderella season has turned into a pumpkin at the halfway point. It started with their big Wednesday night matchup last week against the Brooklyn Nets who, at the time, had all three of their stars on the court. After a competitive first h...

This is what happens when you get the aristocracy’s attention
A good portion of fans, most I would say, fail to recognize just how long the NBA season is. Goes for the NHL and MLB ones, too. It’s always hard to explain to a lot of them that there are nights in the middle, or maybe on the second of a back-to-back or the last of a four games in six nights, when ...

The Wizards of odd
It feels like such a long time ago that the Washington Wizards were in first place in the Eastern Conference, winning 13 of their first 20 games. Since Nov. 29, however, Washington has gone 8-13, dropping it all the way down to ninth place in the East at 21-20. Talk about a fall from grace....

The Celtics need to wake up and move on from either Jayson Tatum or Jaylen Brown
The Boston Celtics have one of the richest legacies in North American sports, but as of late, they have not been able to get over that hump to capture another NBA championship. In recent years, their two young stars, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown have led them to multiple Eastern Conference Finals a...

Give DeMar DeRozan his flowers for putting the Bulls in first place
What a three-game stretch for the fifth-leading scorer in the NBA, DeMar DeRozan. Mr. Anti-analytics has been letting his mid-range shot fly all season, propelling him to a scoring average of 26.9 points per game. With 28 points and six assists on Monday DeRozan was the Chicago Bulls’ leader in poin...