zion-williamson Page 2 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Who will win as the Lakers, Timberwolves, Pelicans, and Thunder battle for play-in spots?
The 2022-23 NBA regular season has come to a close, and it’s time again for the league’s newest tradition, the play-in tournament. This year the Western Conference had the race to watch down the stretch as it was tighter than spandex in the wrestling ring. In fact, the west was close for most of the...

Congrats, you were right about Zion Williamson, now shut up about it
One of the most maddening things about take culture is people want to be right so badly that they end up rooting for the take over all else. So if your reaction to the latest, depressing Zion Williamson injury update was: “I told you he was made of glass,” I don’t have the time or energy to entertai...

B1G Disappointment: The teams that have won national titles since the Big Ten last cut down the nets
Facebook hadn’t been invented yet, Zion Williamson didn’t exist, Mad Cow Disease was the “pandemic” of the time, and Y2K is what so many thought would be the end of modern civilization. The year 2000 feels like it was so long ago, but it feels even further away for Big Ten hoops fans. Twenty-three y...

NBA Schedule: Make some time to watch the Knicks
Bing-bong, bang-bang, pick whatever onomatopoeia you desire to properly emphasize the 2022-23 New York Knicks, as long as you acknowledge that this team is for real. They have won nine games in a row and are 4.5 games ahead of a play-in tournament appearance....

Lakers and Pelicans stars should be back...sometime soon
Somehow the Los Angeles Lakers and New Orleans Pelicans are simultaneously in different and similar situations. One major commonality they share is all-star caliber talent due to soon return to action — Anthony Davis for the Los Angeles Lakers and Brandon Ingram for the Pelicans....

We’ve reached the Ringling Bros. part of the NBA schedule
You know we’re nearing peak NBA midseason slog when teams resort to parlor tricks to attract fans and viewers. Case and point: The San Antonio Spurs hosted a game at the Alamodome on Friday that broke the NBA attendance record. ...
![Told ya: Chris Beard will likely coach again — this time at Ole Miss [Updated]](https://images.deadspin.com/tr:w-900/d7ccd4138fe04126c116525cc00f9178.jpg)
Told ya: Chris Beard will likely coach again — this time at Ole Miss [Updated]
Updated March 8: Chris Beard is emerging as the front-runner for the men’s basketball head coaching job at Ole Miss, according to ESPN, citing sources. Beard was fired from his position at the University of Texas following a Dec. 12, 2022 arrest....

Chris Paul is going to lose any argument that’s anti-Zion Williamson dunking
The NBA season is nearly one-third over, and the team with the best record in the Western Conference is… the New Orleans Pelicans. They have the highest average point differential of any team in the conference by almost two points, outscoring teams by 7.1 points per outing....

I hope Evan Mobley is as true as he is in my dreams
While often depicted, lamented, and sanctified as liberating, hope can also be a virus. It can rot rationality from the inside. It can lead to danger, injury, and death. As Ellis Boyd Redding, best known by his friends and fellow convicts at Shawshank State Prison as Red, once said… “Hope is a dange...

Jordan Brand keeps signing Duke guys because North Carolina can’t produce worthy candidates
Rivalries are all about tradition — and being petty....

Catching up with the soap opera drama of the NBA
The NBA is one of the longest-running unscripted nighttime soaps on television. Even outside of tip-offs and the final buzzer, its headliners are some of the most accessible figures in professional sports. The rosters are smaller, their faces aren’t obstructed, their games air nightly for at least h...

And the nominees for this NBA season’s only-great-in-video-games teams are …
There’s a rage-inducing aspect of NBA 2K every year that makes me feel like I need to take those seminars to avoid turning into my dad. A few crazy-talented teams become fan favorites and get overused to the point of exhaustion due to sheer star power despite being middling to garbage in real life. ...

‘How to lose an all-star before his rookie extension’: A Charlotte Hornets production
This year was supposed to be Zion Williamson season. Not Zion Williamson’s season. Zion Williamson season in the same fashion that it’s duck or rabbit season. Prior to missing all of 2021-22 to rehab a foot injury, the discussion heading into the year was “Will Zion forgo his max rookie extension to...

The Pelicans have finally taken flight
Bourbon Street in New Orleans exists in a loop. Every night the street clicks back into a state of debauchery, repeated with perverse precision. Lonely men drift in and out of red neon strip clubs holding cans of Natty Light. Police on horses stroll between sleeping bums, screaming preachers, pools ...

Things Done Changed: Zion going into this season with brand new body, but a B.I.G. spirit
NBA, what you gonna do when Big Poppa comes for you?...

Winners and Losers of the NBA’s potential relaunch of the Preps-to-Pros Draft Era
The NBA’s preps-to-pros pipeline was welded shut nearly 20 years ago by the late Commissioner David Stern due to NBA general managers’ drafting tendencies beginning to resemble Leonardo DiCaprio’s dating preferences. The narrative that preps-to-pros prospects were too young, too unproven, and that t...

Which state can field the best starting 5?
Now that the Warriors have returned to glory post-Durant, NBA fans just survived one of the most unbearable periods of the NBA. One filled with superteams and razor-thin parity between the three to four coastal teams with stacked talent (Warriors, Lakers, Nets), and the rest of the small-market team...

It’s all smiles with the Pelicans and Zion Williamson these days, or so they tell us
Barring any unforeseen circumstances, such as another Zion Williamson injury, in the 2022-23 season expect to see the full New Orleans Pelicans team that basketball fans wish had taken on the Phoenix Suns in the first round of the NBA Playoffs. The Pelicans can offer Williamson a max contract extens...

We're seeing an NBA coaching reformation
If the success of Boston’s Ime Udoka and New Orleans’ Willie Green has taught NBA ownership anything, when it comes to hiring coaches, it should be out with the old, in with the new. These two rising coaching stars stepped into dysfunctional messes, with Udoka trying to bring together a team that wa...

The Pelicans turned the NBA’s least interesting playoff matchup into can’t-miss television
Even after the New Orleans Pelicans’ disastrous 1-12 start to the 2021-22 season, it’s not as if there was some seismic shift. Their first winning streak came in mid-December when they tallied four victories in a row. Before that, they were still only 9-21 on the season. Since that streak they have ...