March Madness seems like ages ago, and it did not leave all that many enduring memories. Well at least for those outside of Connecticut. While the NCAA basketball tournament is full of ups and downs, upsets and buzzer beaters, it is over in a flash. Three weekends of a basketball binge … and it’s gone. One team celebrates while 67 others just go home. It’s so impossible to predict that even a $1 billion bracket bet was over the first week. Now
SALT LAKE CITY, UT — While the start of the 2014 NBA Playoffs mark the end of another marathon of a regular season, the eyes of the nation were just focused on Massachusetts as the country honored the departed from last year’s bombings in Boston and celebrated its survivors. The more than 200 surviving runners and spectators from the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings are adapting to their new lives with a variety of prosthetic limbs, crutches, wheelchairs and rehabilitation; all of which will
The Jordan Brand Classic introduced us to the game’s future stars. And from the looks of it, the future is bright. Top recruits from Duke, Kansas and Kentucky dazzled in the All-American Game and showed why each program has drawn considerable buzz heading into next season. Seton Hall – which had five recruits named to the Jordan Brand Classic – dominated the Regional Game. Canada shined in the International Game once again thanks to Jahvon Blair’s MVP performance with the help of his
There were 1,230 games during the NBA season, and I read the stories and boxscores for every single one. That is how I compile Page 2 of my weekly notes column, which features the categories Quote of the Week, Line of the Week, Line of the Weak and the Trillion Watch. It’s also how I find gems like Mo Williams mysteriously playing for the Philadelphia 76ers. After my column is published every Monday, I take the winners of those weekly categories and save
LOS ANGELES — It’s Clipper time, at last, in L.A., or was. No. 3 seeds in the Western draw, with the town to themselves, at last, after finishing 30 games ahead of their cross-town rivals, the former Lakers, the Clippers had it all going for them, at last… Well, at least until they tipped off Game 1 against the Golden State Warriors, who didn’t have Andrew Bogut although they supposedly did have all sorts of internal issues, who nevertheless held themselves together long
“I want to be a free agent,” Carmelo Anthony told the New York Observer prior to the season. By publicly saying so, Anthony’s impending free agency became a constant and colossal distraction as large as the Empire State Building and simultaneously induced a chain reaction of numerous rumors during the season. J.R. Smith playfully alluded to the constant media speculation when asked if he would talk to Anthony about his future this summer. “I’m not going to talk to him at all,” Smith
There were 1,230 games during the NBA season, and I read the stories and boxscores for every single one. That is how I compile Page 2 of my weekly notes column, which features the categories Quote of the Week, Line of the Week, Line of the Weak and the Trillion Watch. It’s also how I find gems like Mo Williams mysteriously playing for the Philadelphia 76ers. After my column is published every Monday, I take the winners of those weekly categories and save
In a break with tradition, I am casting my NBA awards ballot after the 81st game, not the 82nd. It’s a rarity, but this season I will not hem and haw and sleep on it until the afternoon after the final day of the season. You’re welcome. I have been an official NBA postseason awards voter for nearly a decade, and it would have been longer if not for a rule at the Associated Press, where I worked from 1987-2005, forbidding