BROOKLYN – Mikhail Prokhorov will reportedly be in Turkey on Sunday celebrating his 50th birthday with legions of $20,000 models hoping to console him after his American playtoy’s season came to a crashing halt at the hands of the Atlanta Hawks in Game 6 Friday night. So what does the unabashed playboy do with this broken playtoy? A little more than five years ago, Prokhorov vowed to bring a championship to Brooklyn or get married if that didn’t happen within five years. Now,
ATLANTA –If the Hawks intend to live up to their reputation as the Spurs of the Eastern Conference, they will need Al Horford to be Duncan-esque throughout the playoffs. On Wednesday night, Horford fulfilled the tall task with arguably his best game of the season. Horford scored 20 points, grabbed 15 rebounds and tallied five assists as the Hawks maintained the lead from the start of the game and edged out the Nets by a final score of 97-87. For the first time
The mix of beige and off white dominating DeAndre Jordan’s post-game wardrobe was appropriate. All the color, after all, had drained from the Los Angeles Clippers following a critical, emotionally brutal 111-107 loss to the San Antonio Spurs Tuesday night at Staples Center, giving the Spurs a 3-2 lead in this titanic opening round matchup. At this point, you sympathize with Clippers fans who must feel like they’re being trolled. San Antonio isn’t the dominating force of last season, but even beat
Game 5 of the Clippers-Spurs series was a great one, going down to the final minute. But it lasted nearly three hours, ending just before 2 a.m. EDT on the East Coast. This, folks, is a problem. And the NBA needs to solve it. You simply CANNOT have the best basketball of the postseason being played when two-thirds of the country is asleep. What if there was a magic formula that could shave an hour off the game time? Would the NBA even consider looking
BROOKLYN— Barclays Center may never have been louder than it was on Monday night. Normally, the Brooklyn arena is filled with many fans of Nets opponents and it would take something extraordinary or abnormal for the crowd to really get to a decibel level worthy of the postseason. After a three-game stretch that signified one of the lowest points in his disappointing tenure with the team, Deron Williams energized the Brooklyn Nets and this arena like nothing before seen in this
In Game 1 of the Western Conference first-round series between the Clippers and defending champion Spurs, San Antonio was overwhelmed by the energy of the home team. Los Angeles, even when making mistakes in defensive rotations, did so with so much speed and commitment that it often didn’t matter. The Clippers, with an assortment power dunks from Blake Griffin and power spikes from DeAndre Jordan, had the capacity crowd at Staples Center in a frenzy all night. The Spurs didn’t have an
It’s been less than a month since Houston Rockets coach Kevin McHale laughed at media questions over additional playing time for rookie big man Clint Capela. In fact, exactly three weeks before Tuesday’s Game 2, McHale said the idea of meaningful postseason minutes for Capela would mean that “a lot of guys are hurt”, adding that the Rockets would be “in trouble” if that happened. Yet there Capela was on Saturday night at Toyota Center, running the floor like a gazelle while playing
A funny thing happened on the Clippers’ way to continued ignominy. Imagine finishing the season on a 14-1 surge that takes you to the third seed in the brutal Western Conference and finding yourself facing the sixth-seeded booby prize, the defending NBA champion San Antonio Spurs, who are favored in the series opener on your floor. What else is new? As one buzzard said to another, “I’ve been having Clipper luck.” Oh, you say the Clippers won? Fairy tales can come true; they just