nba-playoffs Page 29 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

God Bless Playoff Rondo
The Pelicans grabbed a vital and unexpected win in their second-round series against the Warriors Friday night, in a game that was never close after the Pelicans ripped off a 10-1 run near the start of the second half. Anthony Davis and Jrue Holiday were fabulous; Nikola Mirotic got loose for a doub...

Kevin Love Finally Woke Up
In every playoff series, LeBron James is going to have a handful of games where he’s utterly unstoppable and goes for some ridiculous stat line like 45-12-14 just because he can and because his team needs him to be everywhere all the time. The Cavs found out how far LeBron alone can take them in the...

The Celtics Are In Control
In the most basic sense, there’s the 22-point comeback. There’s also the complete disassembling of Ben Simmons and Terry Rozier’s fearlessness and Al Horford’s craft and a whole host of other things that explain how a Boston Celtics team missing both its two best players and a full-strength Jaylen B...

The Sixers Blew It
With a little more than five minutes remaining in the first half tonight, Robert Covington drained a three, stretching the 76ers’ lead over the Celtics to 21 points. Philadelphia was in control here, with no signs of loosening their grip. And then they sent all of that to hell. Over the next quarter...

LeBron James Remains A Damn Miracle
The No. 1 seed Raptors, again, built a first-half lead tonight only to squander it, losing 128-110 to fall behind 2-0 in their second-round series against the Cavaliers. And while it may be tempting to file this one away as yet another classically Raptorsian playoff performance, there’s only so much...

Report: NBA Tells Drake To Stop Cussing At The Game
Drake spent time during the Raptors’ spectacular Game 1 choke getting into it with Kendrick Perkins, a man much larger than him, and at one point even called him a “fucking pussy” while the two were surrounded by approximately 500 security guards. It was one of those fake NBA fights where both guys ...

Dante Exum Is Now Doing Things
With Ricky Rubio out, Utah’s long, long specimen Dante Exum was stuck with one of the most frustrating defensive assignments in basketball: James Harden and the 1,001 dribbles. The stringy Australian has spent just over half of his NBA career injured, but in those healthy stretches has shown serious...

Heckling Weenie Gets His Phone Smacked By James Harden
Russell Westbrook has a theory that Utah Jazz fans are particularly mouthy toward players, and it’s one that was supported by a fan at last night’s game between the Rockets and Jazz....

The Most You Can Do Is Keep LeBron From Feasting
There is no such thing as a LeBron Stopper. There are LeBron Inconveniencers, and if you are one of them, and have eaten a well-balanced meal and hydrated deeply and prayed to all the relevant deities, you might “hold” LeBron to a triple-double and 26 points on 40-percent shooting, as the Raptors di...

Rajon Rondo's Really Trying To Bug Draymond Green
The Warriors facing the Pelicans in the second round means that two notorious shit-stirrers will be on the court together, and even if the series result is lopsided, the antics of Rajon Rondo and Draymond Green will compensate for it in entertainment....

Draymond Green Dares Charles Barkley To Punch Him In The Face
As he often does during Inside the NBA, a show designed to bait its hosts into late-night ramblings, Charles Barkley got to talking shit last night. Specifically about Warriors forward Draymond Green:...

Steph Curry Makes The Warriors Invincible
The version of the Golden State Warriors that dispatched the Spurs in five games and cruised to a blowout Game 1 win against the Pelicans is a fine NBA team. One that, if not destined to, certainly looked capable of winning the title while being led by top-five NBA player Kevin Durant. The version o...

Nobody Pukes Up A Game Quite Like The Raptors
I’m not here to argue that the Raptors’ collapse in Game 1 of their second-round series against the Cavaliers is proof that their 59-win season was totally hollow and that they are in fact fraudulent pretenders unworthy of the No. 1 seed and should be expelled from the NBA so that no one ever again ...

Drake And Kendrick Perkins Start An Amusingly Lopsided Feud At Game 1 Of Cavs-Raptors
Noted Toronto fan (and former failed basketball player) Drake stirred a little beef with Cleveland bench goon Kendrick Perkins during tonight’s Raptors-Cavaliers Game 1. It started with some words at halftime......

Raptors Prove That They Can Choke Spectacularly Even When They're The Top Seed
After jumping out to an early lead, the Raptors caved and let the Cavaliers take a Game 1 victory in overtime tonight, 113-112. ...

Meet Al Horford, Playoff Monster
Coming into this postseason, Al Horford’s playoff reputation never really stood out. He spent most of his career on a series of Hawks teams that were doomed to be steamrolled by LeBron James every spring. In the 17 times he met James in the playoffs, he only won one game, and that was on his 15th tr...

Dear Celtics, Please Unleash The All-Beef Lineup
Last night’s Game 1 between the Celtics and Sixers was a pretty good time. Terry Rozier looked like fuckin’ Chris Paul out there and Joel Embiid was unstoppable and Jayson Tatum did some cool whirly-bird moves that made me go, “Ooh! Nice!” But what I was most excited to see was the late-game introdu...

Ben Simmons Went Between The Legs
Ben Simmons was soundly outplayed by wee Terry Rozier in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference semifinals. Simmons still had 18 points on 6-of-11 shooting but did not connect on any shot farther than three feet from the rim. Many of his usual pinpoint passes landed in the hands of teammates who collectiv...

The Celtics Gave The Sixers A Game-One Beatdown
The 76ers had nearly a week off between closing out their easy first-round series against the Heat and kicking off their second-round one against the Celtics, and it showed. Against a Boston squad missing Jaylen Brown, who was sidelined with a hamstring injury, they couldn’t hang—getting beat down b...