nas Page 28 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Don’t let Mike D’Antoni grant superpowers to LaMelo Ball
Mike D’Antoni is to star players what a radioactive accident is to superheroes and supervillains. He gets to a team and grants the best player powers beyond their greatest imagination. What they do with them is their choice. While the best case results have been Icarian flights that flirt with title...

David Griffin is Executive of the Year
Before Feb. 8, New Orleans Pelicans executive Vice President of Basketball Operations David Griffin was getting dragged for the team’s sorry state he oversaw. The Pelicans were 21 and 32, headed toward another disastrous season until that point. At the same time, Zion Williamson avoided the team at ...

<em>Winning Time </em>Episode 9 “Acceptable Loss”
Jerry West is out for blood. The real Jerry West, that is, not the Jason Clarke avatar we have seen stalk and storm through the first season of Winning Time. The flesh and bone West, who is a part of the Lakers organization as much as Kobe Bryant or Magic Johnson, is really fucking pissed. Recently...

An incomplete list of Mark Emmert lowlights
It’s hard to know what standards soon-to-be former NCAA President Mark Emmert held himself to. His idiocy, incompetency and overall aloof nature have been well documented. It’s an interesting topic in the changing landscape of college athletics what the role of overseeing those sports and athletes s...

Ladies and gentlemen, we have 'Yankee Letter' news
After months of speculation concerning the contents of the “scandalous” sealed letter that supposedly contained evidence of a previously unknown cheating scandal involving the New York Yankees, the contents were allegedly revealed in a report by Andy Martino, an MLB Insider for SportsNet New York, i...

Ben Simmons is an NBA medical mystery
Mental health issues aren’t unheard of in the NBA. All-Stars like Kevin Love and DeMar DeRozan have openly discussed their battles in recent years. However, Ben Simmons’ inability to play through a mysterious mental block and his reticence to speak about it has turned him into an NBA medical mystery...

The Nets are so weird
And thus ends yet another attempt by the Brooklyn Nets to skip the line and crash into the NBA penthouse. Actually, “another Nets experiment” sounds a little more apt. Because the Nets, the Brooklyn version, have always felt like one....

Funny how the Boston Celtics took off once Danny Ainge and Brad Stevens were out of the way
Ime Udoka is who so many fans — and media members — desperately wanted Brad Stevens to be....

The Pelicans turned the NBA’s least interesting playoff matchup into can’t-miss television
Even after the New Orleans Pelicans’ disastrous 1-12 start to the 2021-22 season, it’s not as if there was some seismic shift. Their first winning streak came in mid-December when they tallied four victories in a row. Before that, they were still only 9-21 on the season. Since that streak they have ...

The Nets might get swept, but don’t put any of that blame on the supporting cast
“If Kyrie and KD average 30 and 35 points per game, that’s only 65 points. Where are the rest of the points going to come from?” ...

<em>Winning Time</em> Episode 8: “California Dreaming”
Since the poems, short stories, and writings of Henry Dumas, a specter has risen out of the outer fringes of American arts and letters — Afro-surrealism. A hallmark of this genre is a self-awareness by the reader, author, and fictional characters that the world they inhabit is off-kilter. The term h...

Whatever is in the ‘Yankees Letter,’ the team and the league didn’t want it made public
A letter containing information about the 2015 and 2016 Yankees’ sign-stealing investigation will be made public in about a week, and Astros fans are awaiting its release like Democrats anticipated the findings of Robert Mueller’s Trump investigation. ...

Kyrie and Kevin Durant’s hero ball system is killing the Nets
Kevin Durant has the utmost confidence in himself and his unique talent. Whether it’s during back-and-forths with the media or in response to team drama, he’s constantly repeating his mantra, “I just wanna hoop.”...

J.J. Redick found out that yelling about sports is Mad Dog Russo’s 3-point line
I didn’t grow in New York, so I didn’t get to listen to Mike and the Mad Dog. My most vivid memories of Chris “Mad Dog” Russo are working lunch shifts at a restaurant and watching his lips flap open and closed at 3X speed on a muted bar television playing MLB Network’s High Heat with no sound. At th...

Let them play!
A ban from the FIFA World Cup didn’t stop any needless aggression from Russia in its brutal war on Ukraine. Even those Russians brave enough to speak out against Vladimir Putin’s needless invasion have felt the consequences of the barbaric actions of the Russian army, like Fedor Smolov. As another h...

Jerry West and the Showtime Lakers are mad about their depiction in a Hollywood production of the most Hollywood era in sports
Jerry, Kareem, and Magic are pissed....

Paging Mr. Ben Simmons: Would you please report to the court?
Ben Simmons still has not played a game for the Brooklyn Nets. ...

Marcus Smart’s move to point guard earned him DPOY
The most surprising aspect of the Boston Celtics in-season turnaround was that the team did it with a position change rather than trading a major asset. Acquiring Derrick White helped with some much-needed guard depth, but really Marcus Smart being allowed to run point solidified his role and gave h...

Ranking the NBA’s first round matchups by how likely we are to see an upset
The NBA’s playoffs are easily the most predictable of the major American sports leagues. Without the variability of baseball or the single playoff game format like football, it’s pretty rare that there are any true upsets in the first round of the NBA playoffs. In most years you look at the bracket ...

Can we please get an LS-U <em>30 for 30</em> already?
It’s hard to quantify what makes a thing charismatic. I recently went to New Orleans for the first time, and before I arrived, I was a little skeptical because often when people can’t shut up about how great something is, the expectation is set so high that anything but perfection is going to be a l...