Ah, the All-Star break. It’s like spring break for ballers, except it’s too damn cold unless you do what the non-All-Stars do and head to the tropics while the NBA takes a week-long break that really isn’t a break – not with the trade deadline coming Thursday. Imagine you were a college student and you were spending several days drinking Natty Lights, watching wet T-shirt contests, throwing up and using your best “Feel the Bern” lines to piss off Gloria Steinem
Ever heard of a racehorse named Twice a Prince? Ever heard of a young woman from Nevada named Nia Sanchez? Or how about the poker player Joshua Beckley, who had a whole bunch of TV time in November. Any of those names ring a bell? Probably not … and you know why? They all finished second. Twice a Prince finished a mere 31 lengths behind the legendary Secretariat in the 1973 Belmont Stakes. Sanchez, despite a controversy over whether she qualified for Nevada residency or
So it was a good morning and a bad morning. I awoke to learn I had won $45 in Wednesday night’s big contest at DraftKings, finishing 1,730th out of 22,900 entrants to make a profit of $25 after my $20 entry fee. My lineup was anchored by Paul George (26 pts, 10 reb), Rajon Rondo (triple-double of 14 pts, 15 ast, 11 reb), Dirk Nowitzki (31 pts, 11 reb), Jeff Teague (14 pts, 10 ast), Kyle Lowry (23 pts, 8 ast)
Greetings from New York, where Langston Galloway is the new face of the New York Knicks, and where Phil Jackson’s apologists are applauding the fact that his addition by subtraction trade of J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert netted a second-round draft pick in 2019. In other local news, the New York Times invited its readers to find better things for Scott Cacciola to do other than cover the ‘Bockers. His editors feel sorry for him. Memo to Phil: It is one
LeBron James pulled his jersey up over his mouth as he spoke to the players on the Miami Heat bench late in the fourth quarter of Cleveland’s Christmas day dud on Biscayne Bay, keeping the lip-readers out of the conversation. He id the same thing after the game ended when he spoke with Dwyane Wade, but his efforts at stealth could not elude the ESPN microphones. One snippet that was audible to the world was James saying he was making “like
It is too early in the season to start ranking the MVP candidates. Or is it? Hey, how many chances to you get to say the Grizzlies and Raptors are on course to meet in the NBA Finals? It would be like one big Canadian reunion. There will be Vancouver nostalgia columns run amok. (The Grizzlies moved from Vancouver to Memphis in 2001). Well, if that is going to be the case, we may as well beat everyone to the punch. My
My ballot will be e-mailed to NBA headquarters late at night one week from today, and I will then publish all of my picks for postseason awards — as is my standard practice. But not every one of the 126 voters makes his/her selections public. At least that is the way it has been in the past. But this year, transparency rules. The Pro Basketball Writers Association and the NBA media relations office have come to an agreement under which all of
The readers have spoken … and the readers are thinking the same thing I am thinking: Blake Griffin is a stronger MVP candidate than LeBron James. We published a poll late last week asking readers to chime in on the question of who should be sitting in the No. 2 spot beneath Kevin Durant, and Griffin drew 61 percent of the vote. Yes, it seems sacrilegious to list LeBron third-best at anything – especially after he had another one of his freakish performances