playoffs Page 76 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
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. ...
Alex Ovechkin Pulls A Crosby And Beats The Penguins
With 1:07 to play in tonight’s Caps-Penguins Game 3, which was tied at three, Alexander Ovechkin delivered a stellar game winner on a two-on-one to put Washington up 2-1 in the series. And he did it by batting a puck from mid-air and into the net in the signature style of his rival Sidney Crosby. (S...
Tom Wilson Strikes Again
Washington Capitals bruiser Tom Wilson, after escaping discipline for knocking Pittsburgh’s Brian Dumoulin out of Game 2, made his presence felt again in Game 3 of their series tonight. As Penguins forward Zach Aston-Reese tried to take the puck out of his own zone near the benches in the second per...
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 Golden Knights Won A Game Of Inches
Series can hinge on the slimmest of margins, but rarely can you see those margins so starkly as in Monday’s Game 3. It is no overstatement to say that the Golden Knights are up 2-1 in their series with the Sharks because of an inch here, an inch there....
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:...
This Is What We All Came To See
Because these are two relatively young franchises, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking of the Jets’ and Predators’ rosters the same way, as playoff ingénues. But Nashville has been here before, seven postseasons in nine years, and has carried over most of the same faces from last year’s Fina...
Isn't This A Goal? It Sure Looks Like A Goal
Soon after the Capitals killed a Penguins power play, at about the 11-minute mark of the third period of today’s Game 2, with the Capitals holding a 3-1 lead, the Penguins scored what sure looked an awful lot like a goal:...
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. ...