Donald T. Sterling Sterling World Plaza Beverly Hills, Calif. 90210 Dear Donald, Welcome back! I know, you didn’t really go anywhere, even if your Clippers stopped being the Clippers we’ve known for all these years. I mean, welcome back as the Clipper owner that those of us who write NBA columns or lines for Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien knew and loved. Wasn’t this season fun, while it lasted? As hyped as your guys were after getting Chris Paul, and as forgotten as they were when the Lakers
csprtContainer(); Question: What’s the difference between the NBA and the outfit formerly known as the World Wrestling Federation? Answer: Beats me. Actually, there’s a huge difference between a game highlighting athletic grace and hand-to-hand combat between players assuming heroic or villainous personas: The WWF doesn’t have a ball. Otherwise, it’s getting too close for comfort for the NBA, even if league officials prefer to pull the strings from New York rather than issuing proclamations in the ring like Vince McMahon. These playoffs look less like a
// Time to pass the torch—hey anyone know where we put it? Ask Rudy Garciduenas, our equipment guy. Oh, right. We laid him off before the lockout, with most of the support staff, all the way up to assistant GM Ronnie Lester. I remember now! We haven’t had our torch since Dallas blew us out of the water a year ago. Forget about passing it to the Thunderkinder. We already gave it to the Mavs, who were even older than we were. You know
LOS ANGELES — L.A. uber alles…. As in days of yore, we are once more the center of the basketball universe with two (2) of the NBA’s remaining eight teams! Actually, it only turned out to be one day of yore… from Sunday afternoon when the Clippers upended the Grizzlies in Game 7 to Monday night when the Lakers, who had just escaped the Nuggets in their Game 7, took the floor in Oklahoma City. By Tuesday night when the Spurs wore down
LOS ANGELES – Still crazy after all these years…. There was a time when the Lakers were just a good NBA team, like their romantic underdogs in the ‘60s with Jerry West and Elgin Baylor, and the Showtime teams that threw off the Celtics’ dominance in the ‘80s. Then came Shaq, Kobe and, a few years later, Phil, and nothing was the same for years…. Besides the feud that broke up their dynasty with three titles when Shaq was shipped to Miami as
// Check out this video of Jack Nicholson Mark Heisler, our Hall of Fame columnist, weighing in on the state of NBA basketball coverage in the day and age of social media, the 24/7 news cycle and the journalistic need to sensationalize coverage in order to engage eyeballs. Give a close listen to what Mark has to say. It’ll be the topic of his column Wednesday. It makes a lot of sense, and it comes from the perspective of a super-respected senior writer
This BS has got to stop, all right. Dallas Coach Rick Carlisle was right, noting “The dirty BS has to stop,” after losing Games 1-2 in Oklahoma City, not that a lot of tears were shed at seeing his defending world champions’ hair, and skeletal systems, mussed up. The Mavs play as rough as anyone, as Carlisle all but conceded in his plea for humanity. “Playoff basketball is physical,” said Carlisle. “We don’t like the cheap shots when they give them. They don’t
I finally figured out the problem with the NBA’s lockout-shortened 2011-12 season … They didn’t shorten it enough. These days, all sports’ regular seasons seem like interminable waits for the real deal, even if they’re cut from 82 games to 66, crammed into 123 days that started on Christmas, fooling the veterans, most of whom apparently stopped working out at Thanksgiving. If it was an inelegant rush to put this mess behind them, you could see the season as a triumph… if you fell