Cleveland point guard Kyrie Irving is set to play in tonight’s crucial Game 5 between the Cavaliers and Bulls despite injuries to both of his legs. Irving’s right foot has been strained since Game 2 of Cleveland’s first round series against Boston, and now he’s said to be truggling with tendinitis in his left knee after overcompensating for the sore right foot. From Dave McMenamin of ESPN.com: “If the consideration is now, then, I mean, I should have been sitting out maybe about
BROOKLYN – You know the MVP race is something special when the player leading the NBA in PER (31.4), blocks per game (2.8) and field goals made per game (9.5) isn’t running away with the award. In fact, Anthony Davis is in a five-man cluster on the MVP leaderboard along with – in no particular order – Stephen Curry, LeBron James, James Harden and Russell Westbrook. But when most people are forced to pick one and only one name, you rarely hear
The Madison Square crowd was in a frenzy. New Orleans Pelicans head coach Monty Williams had just called a meaningless timeout with 8.1 seconds left and his team down 99-92 to a New York Knicks team that had lost 16 straight games dating back to Dec. 12. New Orleans failed to score after the timeout, and the Knicks won at home for the first time since Nov. 22. A 2-3 road trip against Eastern opponents looks bad enough for a New Orleans Pelicans
Kevin Garnett was the 2004 NBA MVP. He was the Defensive Player of the Year in 2008. He has been an All-Star 15 times. Garnett is an NBA champion, a surefire Hall of Famer and will probably go down as one of the top 25 players in NBA history. It would be unfair to place those sorts of career expectations on a 21-year-old, right? Not necessarily. If the 21-year-old in question is Anthony Davis, anything is fair game. If Davis’ first two seasons suggest
At this point last season, the feeling surrounding the New Orleans Pelicans was one of hope. The team had just gone through a rebranding, acquired Tyreke Evans and Jrue Holiday in the offseason and was ready for Anthony Davis to take his first step towards stardom after an up-and-down rookie season. Unfortunately for the Pelicans, all that hope ended quickly when the injury bug bit the team early and often and eventually cost the team any hope they had at the
As the New Orleans Pelicans enter a pivotal season in their potential progression to a playoff team, swingman Tyreke Evans appears to project as a reserve. The good news is that if Evans comes off the bench for your team, your roster is pretty talented. The bad news is that Evans has shown that he is a much better player as a starter. Evans’ first season in New Orleans was filled with adjusting to a new team and adapting to a new role off
When the Pelicans gave Tyreke Evans a four-year, $44 million dollar offer sheet last summer, fans and analysts alike were skeptical of whether Evans had earned that deal. After several years of franchise turmoil in Sacramento, Evans’ morale was at an all time low. The former Rookie of the Year had regressed from a prolific star in the making to a streaky enigma on one of the league’s worst teams. Committing near-max money to Evans looked like a gross miscalculation by a New
At this time of year, it’s common practice to categorize teams into tankers and non-tankers, but where a team is in mid-March isn’t necessarily where they were in October. You have your teams who started the year constructed to be historically atrocious, now rounding spectacularly into form (Philadelphia). Some expected to be bad, but turned out pretty good (Phoenix, Toronto). Some hoped to be maybe-we-scrape-the-playoff-ladder-if-all-goes-well-but-we-know-it’s-a-rebuilding-year competent, then saw everything go straight to the terlit (Lakers). Then there is the curious case of