nba Page 139 - 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....
NBA playoff matchups we’d love to see (and one we wouldn’t)
The 2022 NBA playoffs is an annual garden of forking paths. Teams don’t know who to expect awaiting them in the next round or when their season will end. One injury can swing momentum in the other direction. What we do know is that there are particular matchups that are more palatable than others. C...
The Rockets didn’t win much, but they were a blast to watch towards the end of the season
Once the NCAA Basketball Tournaments come around, the rest of the NBA season can feel like a slog. If you were already upset about players missing games, the volume gets ratcheted up on that, and at that point it’s fairly clear which teams are the best in the league. It’s also hard to muster excitem...
And the award for Most Unreliable Player of the Year goes to…
The NBA season has finally ended, and now it’s time to hand out some hardware. But this isn’t your usual NBA award. We’re handing out the MUP for the Most Unreliable Player of the Year. The criteria’s open to anything from being unavailable due to frequent injury, dealing with bouts of narcissism, t...
Frank Vogel found out he got fired via Woj’s tweet and Adam Schefter reduced Dwayne Haskins’ life to his NFL career — ESPN spent $80 million on the duo
You get what you pay for. And the “worldwide leader in sports” just spent close to $100 million on two men that took Ricky Bobby’s father’s words a little too seriously. ...
Baseball Zen is the rare case of MLB doing something right
If you’re a veteran of getting various out-of-town sports packages (Monday morning is a bit early for the jokes that would normally go here) you’ve probably been annoyed by what goes on during commercial breaks. DirecTV would just show you your market’s commercials, but if you go through the streami...
This NBA season was not fantastic
The NBA ended its worst season in recent memory on Sunday. Yes, it was really that bad....
Why Embiid’s scoring title is a BIG deal
Joel Embiid capped off his chase for the scoring crown on Saturday night by summoning a brilliant 41-point, 20-rebound outing in the Philadelphia 76ers’ 133-120 win over the Indiana Pacers. A dazzling 40/20 game was the perfect way to secure the best individual accomplishment of his career....
Kyrie Irving thinks Giannis intentionally tried to injure him in last year’s playoffs
When Kyrie Irving rolled his ankle last year in the Eastern Conference semifinals against the Milwaukee Bucks, it seemed like a common unintentional injury we often see on the NBA hardwood. Devin Williams, a trainer who works with Irving and other players, says it may not have been what we initially...
The end of the NBA regular season is nigh
Because the NBA regular season doesn’t really matter — seriously, the barometer of advancing to the postseason this year was, “are you better than the clock-struck-midnight on Julius Randle version of the Knicks or the bunch of corpses that LeBron James couldn’t animate to 35 wins in Los Angeles?” —...
Chasing the Bengals' path to glory
The avalanche started with the fifth pick in the 2021 NFL Draft. The Cincinnati Bengals selected Ja’Marr Chase from LSU, reuniting Chase with national-championship teammate and Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Joe Burrow, Cincy’s selection with the No. 1 overall pick in 2020. Those were far from t...
We forgot about Trae
Led by Trae Young, the Atlanta Hawks began this season with more buzz than the city’s best lemon pepper wings. They were a quality young League Pass team who’d matured into an Eastern Conference heavyweight overnight. The 2021 postseason served as the setting for Young’s glow-up from empty calorie s...
Have to admit, the Play-in is adding a lot of intrigue
Everyone’s favorite time of the year is finally here. We’re just days away from the NBA’s Play-in Tournament as eight teams battle for the right to get their spines pulled from them in the first round. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t a big fan of the Play-in when it was first introduced. I thought it water...
Just shorten the season, Chumley
One of the headlines coming out of the NBA yesterday was Adam Silver’s lament that the league’s star players don’t actually dress for enough games during the regular season. This has been a grievance lodged by the media and fans for a while now, ever since the term “load management” entered the lexi...
Oh no MJ, please don’t even think about trading for Russell Westbrook
MJ, please don’t do this....
The Chiefs and Bills see a third playoff matchup down the line, and they're getting ready for it now
The hard-cap struggles of the NFL. How to improve, but yet stay financially flexible. It’s a dance every team does every offseason, but it’s especially important for those with generational quarterbacks. Sure the Los Angeles Rams defeated the Cincinnati Bengals in the Super Bowl, but I wouldn’t argu...
Fictional Hooper Bracket: Billy Hoyle is the king of the silver screen
When Billy Hoyle told Sidney Deane he’s hustled players a helluva lot better than him, I was skeptical. How many times can you show up to a pickup game and aww shucks your way into a wad of cash? Well after six rounds and thousands of votes, it seems the scheme is still humming along....
Stop laughing at the Lakers for two seconds and give the Phoenix Suns a standing ovation
For those of you who were still awake when the Los Angeles Lakers sandcastle of a 2021-22 season finally washed away, we had a good time didn’t we? The jokes have been piling up all season with this new roster that improved on none of their weaknesses from last season and also had none of their stre...
Could the Kansas Jayhawks beat the G-League Ignite?
While TV talking heads and sports scribes fixated on Coach K and UNC, it took until the second half of the national title game for most fans to notice that Kansas was in the Final Four. College basketball’s 2022 National Champion hid under the radar all season. Not only because the Jayhawks are a va...
It should be demolition derby time for this Lakers team after finally being put out of their misery
A season that started out with so much hope in Los Angeles came to an end Tuesday night against the Lakers’ I-10 rivals, the Phoenix Suns, 121-110. The Lakers have three remaining games on the schedule, but the 11-point loss to the Suns eliminated LA from play-in contention. So, the Lakers have abso...