Welcome to the real season. Now that the Super Bowl is over and the NFL finally fades into the background of the American sports scene, many casual sports fans turn their attention to the NBA, as if the only sport that existed from Mondays to Saturdays in January was Herm Edwards and Ron Jaworski yelling hyperbolic nonsense at each other. Football’s bloated specter can be overbearing at times, especially with The Worldwide Leader making Daily Mail stories out of day-to-day NFL occurrences.
It was a performance the entire league was talking about. The prolific scoring forward was going off, just knocking down jump shot after jump shot, rarely subjecting the ball to even the slightest graze of the rim. He had 20, then 30, then 40, and there was still plenty of time left in the fourth quarter. He was at NBA Jam levels of On Fire, replete with the flaming basketball and the echoed enthusiasm of the announcers. It was the type of game that
If you haven’t seen Lance Stephenson’s All-Star video, please take a moment to familiarize yourself with it before we begin this column. I’ll wait. For the rest of you—nice weather we’ve been having, right? Yeah. So, you come here often? I hope so. We’ve got some pretty cool stuff here. It’s a nice website. OK– you’ve seen it? So that was pretty cool, right? It reminded me of the old Michael Jordan-Mars Blackmon commercials. [Read more…]
As the great Jerry Seinfeld once said, knowing George Costanza was like taking a walk through the jungle. He didn’t know what he was going to find next, and he was real scared. I feel the same way about this NBA season. All of the injuries – Derrick Rose, Russell Westbrook, Chris Paul, Jrue Holiday, Brook Lopez, and now Most Improved Player favorite Eric Bledsoe – have basketball fans treading lightly, hoping not to get eaten by a tarantula or something with
Imagine for a second that this column is a talk show. It’s easy if you try. Now, imagine I told you that Isaiah Thomas and Reggie Jackson were going to be on it. Imagine all the people who would watch that show. Yoo-hoo, oooh. You’d be pumped, right? Isiah Lord Thomas. Zeke. One of the greatest basketball players in history. And Reggie Jackson. Mr. October. The man who hit three home runs in a World Series game?! What a show we’ve got for you tonight! You’d be glued
As the sun sets over 2013, and the meters of our lives continue to run inexorably with no quarter slots, there is one thing in this crazy world that we can know for sure. Andre Drummond is balling, dude. Though the rest of his Pistons teammates seem to be lost in an existential paradigm (What’s the point of playing defense; we’re all just going to die anyway?), Drummond has taken control of his destiny as much as one can in our world. He’s
Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the league, not a player was balling, not even Jeff Teague. The Most Improved Rankings were crafted with flair, in the hopes that somebody might actually care. Danny Ainge was nestled all snug in his bed, while visions of Asik danced in his head. J-Kidd in his kerchief, Lopez in his cast, the Nets have settled down for their long winter’s nap. When from the Wells Fargo Center there rose such a clatter, I sprang from
When you write a column about the NBA’s Most Improved Players, things can get emotional. As you can probably imagine, you start to adopt the guys you write about each week. It’s a common theme for those of us who chronicle the Most Improved Players in the league each season, and everyone I’ve ever met who does it feels the same way. OK, so we’re the only ones who do it. But still. You root for your guys, feel a sense of pride when they