Once upon a time, I discouraged any and all MVP talk until a quarter of the season (at the very least) had been played. Nowadays, I am a reformed man — and I have Sam Presti, Clay Bennett, Daryl Morey and Rob Pelinka to thank. After slightly less than one week of the NBA season, we find ourselves in a situation no one could have envisioned in the waning days of October. The game of poker between James Harden (repped by
The mixed messages coming from the Hornets and Eric Gordon about his knee are confusing. I’m not a doctor and haven’t seen the MRI, but my ‘diagnosis’ is, the desert heat in Phoenix would be a miracle cure. For fantasy purposes, he’s out indefinitely. Sorry about your luck, Gordon owners. You can’t cut him until there’s some tangible news, like another surgery. Tonight, it’s the first Sheridan Hoops Friday Freeroll of the season. It’s completely free to open a FanDuel account
(This is another in a series of 30 guest columns that will run in October, when optimism reigns supreme across the NBA. The theme will be “Five Reasons to Feel Positive About … ” We encourage you to follow the authors on Twitter and visit their sites. – CS) The fact that the San Antonio Spurs managed to win 50 games in the 66-game lockout-reduced slate should not be a mere footnote; it is remarkable. Translated over a normal schedule, the
Even for hoops addicts, watching NBA preseason games presents a challenge. The baseball playoffs are under way, the college football and NFL seasons are in full swing, and there is this small matter of a presidential election. There is no subscription package for the preseason. League Pass takes a pass until the regular season starts later this month. So the only way you can watch games right now is on NBA TV, which isn’t part of the basic package of a number
The French went down flagrantly, with a nut shot from Ronny Turiaf on Rudy Fernandez and a felonious foul by Nicolas Batum against Juan Carlos Navarro. France missed 11 consecutive shots before getting a meaningless one with 9 seconds left, and a new chapter of crunch time failure was added to Les Blues’ history book in a 66-59 quarterfinal loss at the Olympics in London. Batum committed an intentional foul that was so flagrant, a hard, long-armed swipe that knocked Navarro to
Team USA has been a spectacle in the Olympics’ first week, the conversation surrounding them filled with more oohs and aahs than X’s and O’s. We’ve dissected the records they’ve set more than the teams that they’ve beaten and gotten our compression shorts in a bunch over some hypothetical match up between 11 young NBA players (and Kobe Bryant) and 11 graying Hall of Famers (and Christian Laettner). Can this team beat the Dream Team? Who cares. Tell me about Russia. Up until now, Team
// Mike Krzyzewski has won 927 college basketball games, made 11 Final Fours, won four NCAA Championships and earned an Olympic gold medal since landing his first head coaching gig at Army in 1975. In those 37 years, he’d never sat courtside for anything this ludicrous. “Well, obviously, we just shot better than any team in a game that I have ever coached,” Kryzewski said after Team USA’s 156-73 dismantling of Nigeria. When the buzzer sounded, finally and mercifully, Team USA had
