Indiana’s playoff hopes looked especially dim after a 15-30 start, but a stretch of inspired play in February and March had the team at 30-34 on March 12 after a seven-game winning streak. Paul George was set to come back and it looked like the Pacers were going to be the team no one wanted to draw in the first round. Since then, Indiana has lost eight of 10 including Monday’s crucial 111-106 setback in Brooklyn against the Nets. The Pacers
The MVP debate is a great one this season, and as I mentioned in my most recent edition of my MVP rankings: This is one season when things could truly go down to the wire. As in Game No. 82. But what about the other end of the spectrum? Who have been the Least Valuable Players? The guys you may never have heard of, or guys whose weaknesses are well-chronicled but particularly acute this season. Those players’ lack of production should not
BROOKLYN — A lot has changed since Brooklyn last wore its home whites on Feb. 6. The Nets have played better basketball in their fight for an Eastern Conference playoff spot with the help of smaller, younger lineups, going a very respectable 3-5 on a vicious eight-game Western Conference road trip that ended with a big win in Dallas on Saturday night. “I’m excited to be home, but I’m also excited that we’ve played better, been more competitive,” said Nets head
Earlier this week, we ran a blog post that led with the fact that Andrew Wiggins is running away with the Rookie of the Year race. What the post did not fully explain is how far ahead Wiggins is when compared to the rest of his classmates. It’s more than the injuries to fellow 2014 draft picks such as Jabari Parker, Joel Embiid, Aaron Gordon and Julius Randle which propelled Wiggins to the head of the class almost by default. It’s more than Wiggins
Why is the trade deadline different from all other nights of the year? It’s not. The West just got tougher. In the East, where there’s no life-or-death importance attached to getting better, the top teams sat this one out while the bad teams—your Knicks and 76ers—dumped, shut down or otherwise disposed of their best players in order to tank more definitively. [Read more…]
With the NBA trade deadline quickly approaching – Thursday, to be exact – teams around the league are scrambling to see what changes they can make to improve their rosters for now and/or the future. Goran Dragic, of course, has been dominating the conversation since it was reported on Tuesday that he wants out of Phoenix. The team has agreed to meet his wishes, and although the point guard has a wishlist in terms of where he wants to end up
With the Brooklyn Nets slumping despite Monday’s home win over the Clippers, and trade rumors swirling around the team’s highest paid players, at least two Nets players would welcome the return of center Andray Blatche, who spent the first five months of the season in China. Brooklyn, Memphis and Miami are among atleast three teams interested in Blatche, according to ESPN New York, whose Chinese club failed to reach the postseason, making the volatile nine-year vet a free agent. So would Nets players
Does an open-handed shove qualify as a punch? In what could set an important standard for future player altercations, the NBA league office seems to be saying that it does not. You’ve likely all seen the story. In the first quarter of Monday night’s game in Brooklyn between the Rockets and Nets, Kevin Garnett and Dwight Howard got into a bit of a scuffle. It started with a pair of minor slaps after a foul by Garnett and escalated when Garnett virtually lost his