rudy Page 5 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
How bloated are the preseason win totals for the NBA teams fans love to hate?
When oddsmakers release NBA win-total futures, most casual fans scan right to their teams’ over/under and say, “My team’s better than that.” After a prolonged and misguided rant about sharps who do this for a living doing their job, the next move is to find the franchises they hate and bitch about t...
Karl-Anthony Towns saying ‘championship or bust’ was more for his teammates than the media
It’s always a good idea to consider all answers when an athlete opts to give a boneheaded response to a reporter. In some instances, the player goes off the rails on their own volition. In other cases, it’s a lose-lose situation, and Karl-Anthony Towns is forced to pick between getting scorched by t...
Danny Ainge has turned the Utah Jazz into a League Pass offseason team
Now in his third decade as a general manager or team president, Danny Ainge is in the next stage of what’s been a blessed NBA existence. As a supporting player on a pair of championship Celtics teams, he was one of the league’s first 3-point specialists, and reached the NBA Finals with Portland, the...
NBA player movement junkies stuck smoking roaches this offseason
Rudy Gobert being the biggest name to change teams during free agency made this iteration feel like an overhyped, under-delivered trade deadline. While there’s still quite a bit of time left in the offseason, all but a star is running it back with last year’s team. Unless the Brooklyn Nets find a tr...
The Jazz wouldn’t say it, but Donovan Mitchell’s days in Utah are likely numbered
Danny Ainge gave no tells during the Utah Jazz summer league press conference on Saturday. The Jazz team president answered, maybe, three questions during the whole session, leaving most of the talking to General Manager Justin Zanik....
Of all people, Jeanie Buss caused a social media stir on a holiday weekend
Jeanie Buss came out of nowhere with a tweet that left social media buzzing over the weekend. She isn’t very active on the platform, tweeting at the absolute most four times per month. Her last two were about WOW Women of Wrestling, of which she is a co-owner, and the one before that was a retweet o...
If I’m Victor Wembanyama, I’m all good on being called a unicorn
Now that Aleksej Pokuševski and Franz Wagner have understudies and Jabari Smith Jr. has a couple more guards who won’t pass him the ball, it’s time to peek inside the 2023 NBA Draft. And if you’ve done that, you’ve no doubt come across the name Victor Wembanyama. The French big man has a frame simil...
Mavs just picked the Rockets’ pocket
Late last night, after Dallas citizens had finished dinner and stretched out on the couch, ready to watch reruns of Cheaters, the Mavericks front office and The Athletic’s Shams Charania dropped a bomb out of nowhere. The Mavericks would be trading the No. 26 overall pick of the 2022 draft, Boban Ma...
Who’s going to win (lose?) the Rudy Gobert trade extravaganza?
Rudy Gobert is this offseason’s CJ McCollum in that every GM is going to call about the star player and get counteroffered with the secondary player. Yes, we know you called about Donovan, but for the low price of a couple draft picks and a salary dump, you can have Rudy at $38 million to $46 millio...
2022 NBA Draft Profile: Chet Holmgren
It almost feels too perfect. The scrawny, 7-foot, 195-pound sopping wet Chet Holmgren from Gonzaga playing for the Oklahoma City Thunder. It’s easy to imagine him sharing the court with Josh Giddey and Aleksej Pokusevski. Three caucasian dudes, all above 6-foot-8, and all with diverse skill sets and...
Which NBA players saw their stock fall during these playoffs
A player’s worth is most accurately weighed in the playoffs. Just refer to last season’s Julius Randle debacle. Randle averaged 24 ppg, 10 rpg, and 6 apg on scorching shooting splits of 46%/41%/81%. Every metric but his FG% was a career-best. Then came the playoffs. In that first-round series vs. th...
International stars are here to stay on All-NBA Teams
Thirty years after the Dream Team introduced the NBA to the world at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, the league has transformed into something that the late David Stern would be proud of. Basketball has truly become an international game....
Not to worry Luka, it happens to the best of them
Sure he had to hear his eulogy while he was still living after Andrew Wiggins read him his last rites in Game 3, but Luka Dončić has nothing to be ashamed of. The Dallas Mavericks star led the NBA postseason in scoring, but his singular output was futile against a Golden State Warriors team that pla...
Is there something wrong with Dallas that we don’t know about?
I think it’s fair to say that Dallas isn’t going to get the press that Boston has been getting since about a month into its second-half turnaround. Jayson Tatum has been unbelievable, which is new for him because he’s lacked the consistency that’s demanded of great players. What Luka Dončić is doing...
Those Game 7s were a dud, but that doesn’t dilute the outstanding performances from the second round that deserve recognition
That was quite an exhilarating second round of NBA Playoff action… until it wasn’t. ...
Knicks fans have bought the most expensive tickets in the NBA for 12 consecutive years — this is so New York
The city that never sleeps doesn’t know how to budget, either....
Long live Nikola Jokić, the NBA’s Most VORPable Player
The impending news that Nikola Jokić will be awarded his second-consecutive MVP award has sent the NBA community into a border war formation between respect for analytics and the eye test. Jokic’s back-to-back wins is a resounding victory for the NBA’s mathlete contingency. This isn’t a diatribe aga...
Joel Embiid might be a world champion after all
Joel Embiid’s best chance of becoming a champion is unlikely to happen in 2022. A concussion and right orbital bone fracture have cast doubt on his availability for the Sixers’ semifinal series against the Miami Heat. If he’s unable to play, the Sixers are doomed and The Process-era Sixers will repe...
Message to Jazz: Trade Donovan Mitchell to the Knicks... and other fire-sale moves
Before the Utah Jazz even began their first-round playoff series against the Dallas Mavericks, there were significant questions about their chemistry, viability as a winner, and ceiling. It was no secret that their two superstars, Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert, don’t care for one another. The ten...
The NBA X Factors
The playoffs have started, and it’s been one of the most chaotic first rounds in recent memory. Both conferences feel very wide open thanks to critical injuries and various superstars playing underwhelming basketball. Going into this year’s postseason, it felt like a rematch of last year’s Finals be...