This column is soft. Every other week, we talk about the Most Improved Players in the league like we’re a modern-day Little League. We’re always telling everyone how great they are and giving them Fruit Roll-Ups, and letting them draw dinosaurs in the infield dirt during the game because they’re just creative and artistic and they’ll grow out of it and “everybody gets a trophy because look at how much you’ve improved!” Well, I’m sick of it. It’s time to come down hard on
We’re a quarter of the way through the regular season and the NBA landscape has shifted dramatically. Kobe Bryant is retiring after this season and wants to be remembered as a “talented overachiever” when it’s all said and done. Meanwhile, Bryant’s Los Angeles Lakers (3-15) trail only the Philadelphia 76ers (1-19) for the league’s worst record. With every loss, the Lakers grow closer to keeping their top-three protected draft pick and potentially land top prospect Ben Simmons. On the flip side, the Golden
As I said recently on NBC Sports Radio and in my previous free agent rankings — there are still bargains to be had on the free agent market. Just ask the New York Knicks, who landed Kevin Seraphin on a one-year, $2.8 million deal. Seraphin was No. 1 on our previous free agency rankings. Seraphin turned down several significant offers for a better chance at playing time with the prospect of cashing when the salary cap spikes next summer. [Read more…]
Free agency shopping at the end of July is similar to waiting all month for the giant coupon booklet from your neighborhood grocery store. With that in mind, which players will be this year’s bargains on the clearance shelf? Can you find a scoring guard and a big man off the bench with a $2.8 million mid-level exception? Yes, that is somewhat akin to a two-for-one deal on soon-to-expire potato chips at your favorite grocery store. Some of the unrestricted free agents in
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…]
If you were to browse through the list of NBA champions since 1980, you’d find that there is just one notable outlier to the rule that suggests title contenders need a superstar to win it all — the 2003-04 Pistons. While that Detroit team featured four players who were either already multi-time All-Stars or went on to become multi-time All-Stars later in their careers, no one would have mistaken any of those Pistons players as the prototypical “superstars” entering the 2004 postseason. [Read more…]
The NBA’s trade deadline is just a week away, and practically every team will be looking to improve its roster or its payroll over the All-Star break. Many of the media reports will come from the perspective of the teams and the executives in charge of making the trades, and few will detail how the players manage, cope and deal with being the subjects of these rumors and reports. Over the last few weeks, SheridanHoops spoke with nine NBA players on six different teams,
The Western Conference got a little crazier in December when Dallas acquired Rajon Rondo from Boston to become a dark horse contender, while Houston was willing to take on the volatile ways of Josh Smith, who was amazingly waived by Detroit. It seems the rest of the West won’t stay quietly as others shore up on their weaknesses. Oklahoma City traded for Dion Waiters earlier in the week, and apparently, all you have to do is pick up the phone and talk