It’s the final edition of the Sixth Man Award Rankings, and we know that fans out there are going to be devastated. I’ve only been writing about the Sixth Man award for six weeks, and like an NBA player coming off the bench, I feel like I’m just starting to find my rhythm, and coach is taking me out again. The season is just too short (said no one ever). In the last edition of the Sixth Man Rankings, we reached our
It’s that time again. We’ve come to the end of another unforgettable season of the Most Improved Player Rankings, and like John Kasich, I’ve already made a pact with myself that I’m not going to cry, no matter what happens. It’s been a great season in this column space. We’ve written classic poetry, made fun of Kobe Bryant, checked in with presidential candidates, wondered if Steph Curry is really just an elaborate Old Spice commercial, kicked LeBron while he’s down, and quietly made
The team that passed on Stephen Curry oh so many years ago got beaten in the NCAA championship game by what else? A 3-pointer. You have to believe the folks at Davidson, especially one particular ex-student, took a little extra gratification from Kris Jenkins’ title-winning 3-pointer at the buzzer that lifted Villanova over North Carolina. Because it was Davidson, you may recall, that benefited most from the decisions by North Carolina and Duke to take a pass on the player who
Welcome back to Sixth Man Madness! It’s the most ill-conceived fake tournament since Most Improved Player Madness, which ended with me declaring that we’d never do this again and then doing it again two years later. Time heals all wounds! This week, we’re taking you through the second round and into our Sweet 16. Like any tournament, this event isn’t just about who the best candidate is, it’s about who’s playing best at the right time. As Nike’s NCAA Tournament warm-up
This D’Angelo Russell thing is really confusing, so I want to make sure I’ve got it right. Pledging your lifetime love, support and fidelity to a woman in the form of a highly public engagement, then displaying your unequivocal callousness for that woman’s dignity and feelings by cheating on her while your wedding is being planned, that’s OK, right? But secretly recording a teammate who talks about this callous behavior as if it is the equivalent of brushing your teeth, that’s not
Loud people may not understand this column. But as Rocky Balboa once pontificated, there is such a thing as “the disease of being shy.” It’s a tough thing, really. You can’t easily overcome shyness, and it doesn’t really go away over time. Shy people don’t always get everything they deserve, because non-shy people often mistake their shyness for docility or indifference. In our extrovert-dominant, squeaky-wheel-gets-the-grease society, being quiet can hurt you. You don’t see a ton of shy people winning Academy Awards, or running for President,
It’s March. And for those of us basketball junkies, that means it’s the most glorious time of the year. March is filled with sneaker-squeaking, channel-flicking, mini-hoop jamming madness. It’s a time when we fill out brackets until the blood from our paper cuts advances to the Sweet 16. We place an inordinate amount of self-worth into our clicker skills and hear buzzers sounding in our sleep. During media timeouts, we chase down the leftover pizza in the fridge down like LeBron
We publish these rankings roughly twice a month, an exercise in futility tantamount to being a 50-year old on a beach in Panama City looking to re-live his conquests of the mid-1980s back when Fort Lauderdale and The Button were the hot spots. So now that I have revealed my Easter weekend plans (not really, but it is not 100 percent out of the question), I will reveal my mid-April plans: I am going to fill out my MVP ballot, and