nba Page 253 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
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...
Terry Rozier Is Maybe Not Quite Ready To Let Go Of His Beef With Eric Bledose
Surely Terry Rozier reminding the world of how badly he smoked Eric Bledsoe will terrify the Sixers. Or maybe he’s just a fan of the Drew Bledsoe-era Patriots....
Pat Riley Calls Out Hassan Whiteside For Not Having His Shit Together In The Playoffs
Hassan Whiteside was awful for the Heat in their five-game playoff series against the Sixers, and everyone knows it. The 28-year-old big man, who broke out as an in-the-paint stud with Miami back in the 2014-15 season, looked completely checked out in his first postseason games since 2016. He was do...
Sometimes LeBron Just Decides To Fuck You Up
This is in no way the most impressive highlight of LeBron James’s series-clinching performance in Game 7, which he started a perfect 7-of-7 from the field and finished with 45 points on 25 shots, but it’s the most representative of what it’s like to face LeBron James in a do-or-die scenario:...
Defiant, Moldering Melo, On Moving To The Bench: "That's Out Of The Question"
NBA exit interviews can be a hoot. Players are mostly fresh off a loss, and are feeling wistful or pissed off or utterly spent, and some use the occasion for a kind of honesty that might generally be inadvisable for public people. For example, John Wall used his to trash his team’s useless centers a...
The Warriors Revved Up And Beat The Pelicans At Their Own Game
There was a short period during the first quarter of Saturday’s Game 1 between the Pelicans and the Warriors when it looked like the Warriors were a little flustered by New Orleans’s frenetic pace. That five-game first-round series with the Spurs was downright sluggish, by Warriors standards: at 95....
Pour One Out For Joe Prunty, Who Turned A Bunch Of Shit Into A Pile Of Shit
Here’s a pretty remarkable stat: the Bucks used 16 different lineups Saturday night, in their Game 7 loss to the Boston Celtics; the five most used lineups of the bunch played about 35 minutes, and finished plus-11; the other 11 lineups played a total of just over 13 minutes, and were outscored by a...
Grim And Gritty Ricky Rubio Will Be Grimly And Grittily Cheering From The Bench In Game 1 Of Jazz-Rockets
Ricky Rubio, who looks like the very happiest bearded child in that damn photo up there, will reportedly not be available for Game 1 of Jazz-Rockets, to be played Sunday afternoon in Houston. The hamstring injury that sidelined him for most of the final game of Utah’s series-clinching win over OKC w...
The Raptors Finally, Mercifully Spared Us Any More Of The Washington Wizards
The Wizards, who won 43 games during the regular season—that’s three fewer than the Denver Nuggets, who failed to make the playoffs in the much tougher Western Conference—and were the Eastern Conference’s 8th seed, were eliminated on their home floor by the Toronto Raptors Friday night. ...
The Thunder Were The Ugliest Version Of Themselves In Game 6
The Utah Jazz dispatched the Oklahoma City Thunder Friday night, closing out the first round series with a narrow and vaguely controversial victory on Utah’s home floor behind more stout defense and just enough shot-making from their various role-players. Donovan Mitchell was fantastic, dropping in ...
A Cool Thing Jayson Tatum Does A Lot
One of the best ways for a basketball scorer to shake free from a committed defense is to catch the ball while on the move, instead of from a stationary position, so that his individual defender and the broader opposing defense don’t have time to get between him and a good look at the basket. ...
Old GM Yells At Cloud
After the Giants drafted Saquon Barkley with the No. 2 overall pick, general manager Dave Gettleman sneered at a question about the positional value of running backs in today’s NFL. Gettleman even mimicked the act of typing on a keyboard, just to emphasize his disdain for what all those analytic-min...
Shaq Appears To Have An Insane Method For Saving Money On Gasoline
After last night’s Bucks-Celtics game, the jokesters at Inside the NBA got in an argument about the gas efficiency of large cars that is best watched through your fingers....
NBA Says LeBron James's Outrageous, Pivotal Block Was A Goaltend
Victor Oladipo burned LeBron James one-on-one in what ended up being the Pacers’ last possession of Game 5, then went up for a scoop layup. James, in the mood to add some fresh tape to his career reel, recovered to pin the ball against the glass—but only after the ball had made contact with the gla...
There Are Too Damn Many NBA Jerseys
The Thunder beat the Jazz last night, staving off elimination in their first-round series. The Jazz were in white jerseys. They’d worn white in Game 4, too, but in game 1 they were in blue. In game 2, bright yellow. And in Game 3, they wore orange-red gradient jerseys....
The All-Too-Brief Basketball Career Of Reggie Rose
On Monday night, TNT play-by-play man Kevin Harlan welcomed Reggie Rose to the NBA, excitedly shouting his name on several instances. Signed by the Timberwolves, Reggie Rose scored 17 points in a Game 4 loss to the Rockets, and somehow, in his NBA debut, already appeared to be on his last legs....
Russell Westbrook Played Basketball And Stayed Alive
Once the Thunder were down 3-1, the Russell Westbrook obituaries had already begun to roll in; down 25, the eulogizers had probably started dipping their quills back in purple. What we’d already heard many times over was going to be repeated once again, at blaring, self-satisfied volume: You can’t w...