What is the next big surprise? When will it happen? We are inside of 48 hours until the league’s moratorium ends, so fasten your seatbelts, folks. This summer’s free agency period has provided as much suspense and excitement as the NBA Finals. The San Antonio Spurs have agreed to terms with LaMarcus Aldridge and David West while retaining Tim Duncan, Kawhi Leonard, Manu Ginobili and Danny Green in hopes of returning to the Finals. West said he wanted to play for a title
There are Early-Only contests at 3:00 EDT that span the first four NBA games on the regular season’s final Sunday. Milwaukee and Brooklyn do not have the luxury of resting players, and regular readers know my loyalty to Brook Lopez $8400. [Read more…]
Indiana’s win in New York on Saturday night epitomized the current trajectory of the team’s season. It was a slow and ugly start, but the team persevered through strong defense and playoff-tested experience. The team’s slow and ugly start began actually began nearly eight months earlier, on a sultry Friday July evening in Las Vegas with Paul George’s horrendously gruesome leg injury. The bad luck and misery continued when rotation stalwarts David West, George Hill and C.J. Watson missed the beginning of the season with
Let’s get something out of the way here. Russell Westbrook is awesome. Westbrook is one of the game’s top five players, and I’ve felt that way for a couple of years. He may not be a better conventional point guard than Chris Paul or Tony Parker or Stephen Curry. But if any of those guys even dream about being a better player than Westbrook, they better wake up and get back to reality. I also love watching Westbrook play. I cannot recall
In today’s NBA, the formula for winning in recent years was simple: Accumulate as many maximum-salary stars as you can without breaking the bank. But when you start piling up eight-figure salaries against the luxury tax, the bank breaks pretty quickly. So teams fill out their rosters with minimum-salary veterans. And if you look at the top of the NBA standings right now, many teams are getting very productive seasons from veterans signed to minimum-salary deals. The Chicago Bulls added Pau Gasol to Jimmy
We now know that the deal sending Kevin Love to Cleveland will go down Saturday. Andrew Wiggins, Anthony Bennett and Miami’s 2015 first-round draft pick will go to Minnesota, and in a side deal Thaddeus Young will be sent from the Sixers to the Wolves for Luc Richard Mbah a Moute and Alexey Shved. Minnesota comes out with the last two overall No. 1 picks, Philadelphia comes out with an even worse team than before, and Cleveland comes out with …. In
In an interview in April 2013, Kevin Durant told Sports Illustrated he was tired of finishing second. Durant was the second player taken in the 2007 draft. He lost in the NBA Finals in 2012. He finished second in MVP voting four times. This past season, Durant took a huge step forward when he won his first MVP award, finally emerging from the shadow cast by LeBron James. But if he doesn’t win an NBA championship in the next two years with
Have the Indiana Pacers already gone as far as they can go with this roster? It’s a question overlooked with all the big moves being made this offseason in the Eastern Conference, and the Central Division in particular. A quick synopsis, for those who watched the World Cup and forgot about basketball since the Finals ended: Cleveland signed LeBron James, drafted Andrew Wiggins and could trade Wiggins to Minnesota in a blockbuster deal for Kevin Love. Chicago got rid of Carlos Boozer and