The Golden State Warriors are about to complete the best regular season in NBA history. The Warriors are going to win 73 games, one more than the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls. Even Warriors coach Steve Kerr, a reserve on that Bulls squad and one of the great winners in league annals, is blown away by his team’s accomplishment. “I never imagined when I was with the Bulls anyone would ever come close,” he said. “We’re close.” [Read more…]
No, it wasn’t last week when Blake Griffin slugged his buddy, equipment manager Matias Testi, who barely comes up to his shoulder. It goes all the way back to Doc Rivers’ arrival in the 2013-14 season that ended with Donald Sterling igniting himself, streaking across the sky like a fireball and disappearing from their sight forever. If that seemed like a good thing for the Clippers, it marked their zenith. They have been devolving ever since Steve Ballmer paid $2 billion for
This is the time of year when we give out our midseason awards. But before we get to the drudgery of Sixth Man Award and Most Valuable Player, let’s start the festivities with a special award for individual achievement that goes to Rashad Vaughn. Vaughn is a shooting guard for the Milwaukee Bucks and the second-youngest player in the NBA. He is one of the dozens of rookies who have made virtually no impact in their first season. He is averaging 2.5 points
The city of Portland is at a crossroads. With a new apartment complex on every block and thousands of new residents flocking to the land of fair trade coffee and cruelty-free, artisan baked goods, the battle between Old Portland and New Portland has Rip City searching for a new identity. In an ironic twist of fate, as the City of Roses undergoes an extended facelift, so too does its basketball team. Gone is four-fifths of the starting lineup that won 50-plus
The silence following Jonas Valanciunas’ contract extension was deafening. When the Toronto Raptors gave a reported $64 million over four years to Valanciunas, there were no proclamations from pundits that the NBA’s financial sky was falling. Owners didn’t start forming plans of collusion. No one drew comparisons to Jim McIlvaine. On the other side, there have been no whispers that Raptors GM Masai Ujiri engineered another steal. Virtually no one has suggested that Valanciunas got fleeced. Agent Leon Rose – who days
After taking a look at the offseason activity of a handful of teams in the Eastern Conference, we turn our focus to the Western Conference. The Oklahoma City Thunder, Sacramento Kings and Portland Trail Blazers all made significant moves for different reasons. The Thunder want to remain title contenders. The Kings want to make the playoffs. And the Blazers want to rebuild. But did they make the right moves? In this edition of the Three-Man Weave, the Sheridan Hoops staff takes a look
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…]
One of the biggest knocks against the NBA is that when the season starts, there are only five or six teams that can truly win the championship, making the regular season and the early playoff rounds interminably tedious. Not this season. As we reach the midway point – 18 teams have played at least 41 games, another nine have played 40 – there are no less than a dozen teams with legitimate title aspirations, including a handful that haven’t been in the