I was one of 25 voters who chose James Harden as the NBA’s MVP, and I feel as strongly about my decision today as I did back when I cast my ballot the day after the season ended. As I said then, it was the toughest MVP vote I’ve ever been a part of. What was interesting to me Monday when the ballots were released was the ledger of other voters who went for Harden over Curry. I imagine you have
Last I checked, soccer was a pretty popular sport around the globe. More popular than basketball, I might add. And if you’ve ever sat on the sofa and watched a soccer match, you’ve probably noticed that there are no TV timeouts. You get 45 minutes of action, then you can get up and make a sandwich, and then you go back and get 45 more minutes of non-stop action, commercial-free. Why can’t the NBA be quite as enjoyable? Don’t get me wrong …
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
If Sam Presti does not hire a coach that Kevin Durant is happy with, chances are Durant will leave Oklahoma City as an unrestricted free agent in July, 2016. That is a fact. Kevin Durant likes Kevin Ollie. That is a fact, too. And Kevin Ollie is Presti’s No. 1 choice for the job. That fact was first reported by respected colleague Adam Zagoria, and it is 100 percent on the money. So what to make of Ollie’s statement today, tactfully written in
Can I have last weekend back? I mean, seriously. The playoff games were duds, almost all of them. And the one game that went to overtime happened so early Saturday afternoon, lunch was not even finished. Watching playoff games should never feel like a chore, but it sort of felt that way the past two days. The second-most compelling thing I saw on video was Blake Griffin posterizing Aron Baynes twice in a row, and technically that did not happen over the
How many of the 16 teams in the NBA playoffs have a legitimate shot at the championship? It is a fair question, and it was posed to me this morning on NBC Sports Radio by host Erik Kuselias. Just to give you a preview, I did not answer “Trail Blazers,” “Pelicans” or “Celtics.” But I did give an answer that reflects what an odd situation we have on our hands after the first two days of the NBA playoffs. Clearly, the Los
I’ve used this line before, but I’ll use it again because it is a good one: Predictions are like armpits; everyone has them, and most of them stink. One exception would be our chief blogger, Jim Park (@SheridanBlog), whose preseason predictions included Stephen Curry as MVP and Steve Kerr as Coach of the Year. My own latest prediction is that Curry will receive 65 percent of the first-place votes in the MVP race, although he did not get mine. James Harden did.
There is a reason why I always wait until the 82nd game of the season is in the books before deciding on my postseason awards choices. Three words: What’s the hurry? This is a lesson I learned way back in 1999 when I was covering a late regular-season game at the Alamodome during the lockout-shortened 50-game season. There were still three of four games left, and I was sitting alongside a veteran reporter from USA Today and asked him which way he