LeBron James is headed to another Eastern Conference finals, the Los Angeles Clippers are headed to another Game 7, and who knows where Tom Thibodeau is headed. With those in mind – and no games on Saturday night for the first time since the World Series – we thought it would be a really good time for another edition of the Three-Man Weave. Here we go. 1. Are the Cleveland Cavaliers home free into the NBA Finals? [Read more…]
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,
Monday’s contest between the Minnesota Timberwolves and Utah Jazz featured two teams who have been in the bottom of the pack in the West for quite a number of years. The Jazz have been trying to find a way to re-identify themselves since trading away Deron Williams in 2011. The Timberwolves have essentially failed to recover since trading away Kevin Garnett in 2007, although their downfall began even with Garnett on the team. It was a bit of a surprise, then, to
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
James Harden rightfully led Monday night’s headlines with his second triple-double of the season and a virtual ankle-breaking move on Minnesota’s Ricky Rubio. After all, there’s a reason Harden appears to be the league’s probable MVP. But rookie swingman Andrew Wiggins served notice that he could very well challenge Harden and the NBA’s other elite players in the years ahead. On the night of his 20th birthday, Wiggins notched the third 30-point game of his young career, scoring 30 points on 12-of-24 shooting
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…]
Once a year, we take a break from evaluating rookies and examine how second-year players are doing. This seemed like a good week to do that. Because our Rookie Rankings run every Friday, this week’s cycle saw just two actual games played due to the extended All-Star break. And no rookies from our most recent rankings played in those games. Yes, we knew the trading deadline also was this week. But we didn’t think that would impact our rankings of sophomores. I mean,