This guy also had a higher ranking week ago, like the Lakers and Thunder OK, who had the No. 3 Knicks starting 3-0, the No. 15 Thunder and No. 20 Celtics falling on their faces and the No. 24 Lakers going into the toilet? Not me. On the other hand, here at the World’s Greatest NBA Rankings (According to Us) we don’t just rank teams, we provide solutions to their problems! (We also take them one season at a
It was fun while it lasted, or can someone call the Lakers and tell them the season has started? Ending three months of post-resurrection celebration, the legends-in-their-own-minds are 0-10 this fall, losing eight exhibitions, getting turned every which way but loose in the opener by the Dirk-less Mavericks, then getting bombed, 116-106, in Portland by last season’s No. 11 team in the West. Of course, the Lakers have been here before, will be OK, etc. No, Coach Mike Brown isn’t in trouble. He’s
There’s a reason I’m billing this the World’s Greatest NBA Rankings, beyond mere chutzpah. Or cojones, if you know more Spanish than Yiddish. Or, if you don’t understand either, bal–, ah, forget it. I not only rank the NBA teams, according to some rational/intuitive system even I don’t understand, I tell you what it all means. Nothing. Well, not quite nothing, hopefully, or I’m wasting a lot more time doing these than you are reading them. As an exercise, it’s so labor intensive for
Take flopping, please. Happily for the NBA, it’s going away, even if the league will pay a higher cost than it knows from crime-and-punishment headlines, stemming from David Stern’s decision to make it a crime, not a basketball play, punishable by huge fines. How hard would this have been: Tell the referees to make defenders be stationary for a count, not an instant. What’s the hard part? Tie goes to the offensive player, as it does to the runner in baseball. Unfortunately, nothing is easy
The Lakers are back? If they made it to another Media Day, they made it back from the summer, anyway. Don’t laugh. Some seasons around here, that was an issue, like 2007-08, when Kobe Bryant, who had spent the summer demanding a trade, swore privately he wouldn’t report and didn’t say anything publicly until showing up that morning. So, as far as actual news from Monday goes, all these Lakers showed up! Of course, in today’s talk-show world, it’s important to foretell outcomes that
Having trumped up, er, written more intracity rivalry stories than I care to remember, there are three things I know. 1. They’re really no big deal. So what if the Clippers don’t like the Lakers, who don’t deign to notice the Clippers? The Clips don’t dislike the Lakes any more than the Suns or Warriors do, to say nothing of the Celtics. This isn’t high school. It’s not even USC-UCLA. This is the NBA, where only the Clips would remember if they swept the Lakers,
LOS ANGELES — And so, Dwight Howard winds up with the Lakers… just as we said he would! Of course, we said that in the spring of 2011, after All-Star Weekend when Dwight was asked which player here he’d most like to play with, and he answered “Kobe Bryant.” In the 18 months since, we said a bunch of other things: He was going to the Nets with Deron Williams. He was going to the Mavericks with Deron Williams. He was going to Houston. He wasn’t staying
No, this U.S. team isn’t as good as the Dream Team, or even the 2008 team, which five of them played on. Not that there’s any way of demonstrating it, not even the press’s fave, asking Dream Teamers and awaiting the laughter. Of course, the Dreamers had a huge edge, aside from all those centers and power forwards the 2012ers are so light on. The Dreamers were famous. Leaving out out the incomparable Michael Jordan, the 2012ers’ Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Kevin Durant