Point guard is the most important and deepest position in the NBA. How deep? Take a look at some of the players not featured in our top 10 rankings at the position. You won’t find Derrick Rose, the league’s youngest MVP four years ago. Over the past three seasons, Rose has missed 185 of a possible 246 games. Asking Rose to return to his MVP form is out of the question. Asking Rose to return to his All-Star form appears bleak, too. How about
Because it’s early October and we have college hoops practices getting underway, along with NBA preseason action, I figured it was a good time to give my basketball lifer’s opinion on some different rankings and lists I’ve thought about and put together. Why have I done this? Well in this country, we count championships and rings. We keep score and rank and list. I can hear my wife laughing now saying “these are the things you are wasting your brain power on and thinking about during your
One of my favorite weeks of the year recently arrived, the week the major sports books release their NBA season win total over/unders. Yes I will concede, these bets for the most part are ‘sucker’ bets and definitely not the way to launch your professional NBA gambling career. However, every year there is just a walk up LOCK. Sometimes multiple. Last year it was those hopeless New York Knicks (the line was 40 1/2; they finished at 17) and this year
It’s not easy to take an 11-hour flight, but that’s what former NBA player and current Maccabi Tel Aviv point guard Jordan Farmar was getting ready for on Sunday afternoon as he slowly got dressed in the locker room inside Madison Square Garden. After a two-city tour in NBA arenas, Farmar and his teammates were about to head back to Israel, traveling even further away from his native Los Angeles. Farmar, 28, was born in Los Angeles and went to high
NEW YORK – Dragan Bender is the trending name amongst NBA general managers and executives after Maccabi Tel Aviv’s tour in Chicago and New York. At 17, the Croatian forward has the league drooling over his long-term potential and future lottery teams scheming for the ping-pong balls to select the 7-footer in next year’s draft. League executives and scouts from Denver, New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix and Utah were on hand at Madison Square Garden to watch Bender. “Closest thing to Pau (Gasol)
Larry Brown was like your grandfather. Or at least, that’s how everyone around college basketball described him. He was an unchallenged legend, revered as one of the game’s great teachers, a man who could parachute in to an irrelevant program in a borderline-irrelevant conference and turn it into a budding basketball hotbed. He was old (75), small, gentle and soft-spoken. He wore little circle glasses, paced around nervously and looked and acted like an English Lit professor. He talked constantly about teaching kids, teaching
What would it take for Kobe Bryant to win the 2015-2016 NBA MVP award? As we handicap the MVP race for the 2015-2016 season, we’ll take a look at last season’s top five finishers— Stephen Curry, James Harden, Russell Westbrook, Anthony Davis and LeBron James— along with Kevin Durant. But a question many Angelenos and basketball fans around the world have is what kind of numbers would Bryant have to put up in his age-37 season to take home the crown? To
Will Kevin Durant be the next superstar to opt for a change of scenery in the summer of 2016? If not, could it be Dwight Howard instead? (Yes, again) Will someone change teams and then change his mind during the moratorium period again like DeAndre Jordan did? One thing is for sure, the salary cap is going up dramatically next summer – projected to be in the $90 million range – and roughly 20 teams will have room for at least one maximum salary contract. In