April 13, 2016. The final day of Kobe Bryant’s illustrious career as an NBA player. The last time we will ever see one of the greatest legends of this generation playing the game of basketball. Whether you love him or hate him, the man known as “The Black Mamba” has had a profound impact in the NBA over the last two decades no matter how you slice it. It’s been a tough finish to his career over the last few seasons, though, as the
The NBA regular season is winding down, MLB has just begun and the biggest professional sport this week is golf. The Masters gets under way at 6:00 a.m. on Thursday morning, and you could win a million bucks at DraftKings by entering a huge fantasy tournament. [Read more…]
On Saturday night, while most basketball fans were watching the Final Four, the NBA playoffs got under way. Not officially, of course. That doesn’t happen until April 16. But for the Detroit Pistons, Chicago Bulls and other teams fighting for the bottom of the brackets, the postseason already has started. Detroit’s 94-90 victory at Chicago on Saturday wasn’t quite a Game Seven. The Pistons aren’t quite home free just yet, and the Bulls aren’t quite dead. But it sure looked an awful
There is an NBA team that started this season with a roster that included an MVP winner from this decade; a recent Defensive Player of the Year; the runner-up in the most recent Rookie of the Year voting; and two All-Stars, including one deemed the league’s Most Improved Player. The roster also included some highly promising youngsters and a handful of savvy, playoff-tested veterans. The team seemed to be a lock for the postseason, having made the playoffs every year but
The two aging giants came together at center court, a herd of national TV cameras surrounding them like those crazy, suicidal fish that swim alongside sharks and somehow get away with it. (Nature is weird, man). They embraced, in that bro-hug type of way players do, and shared a few words of mutual respect before going their separate ways, Kobe Bryant toward the ruthlessly dimming twilight of his career and LeBron James out of the visitor’s locker room at Staples Center,
Nazr Mohammed may not get a Kobe Bryant-esque farewell tour, but it does seem the respected veteran will be able to end his long NBA career on his own terms. [Read more…]
Basketball is one of those rare professions where at an age like 37, people talk about you like you are 80. In some ways, an older player does resemble a senior citizen. Compared to his peers, he’s not as fast, can’t jump as high, is not as agile and doesn’t shoot as straight as he once did. But we found another connection between old basketball age and old age Sunday night after the Lakers lost to the Bulls in Kobe Bryant’s final
TORONTO— Say this for Russell Westbrook: It’s only fitting that someone who embodies Kobe Bryant’s ceaseless competitiveness would take home the MVP award in Bryant’s final All-Star game. Westbrook-ASG Russell Westbrook scored 31 points, grabbed eight rebounds and dished out five assists to take home his second straight MVP award in a 196-173 win— a record number of points in the game and for the winning team— for the West over the East on Sunday night at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre. “That’s