Can I have last weekend back? I mean, seriously. The playoff games were duds, almost all of them. And the one game that went to overtime happened so early Saturday afternoon, lunch was not even finished. Watching playoff games should never feel like a chore, but it sort of felt that way the past two days. The second-most compelling thing I saw on video was Blake Griffin posterizing Aron Baynes twice in a row, and technically that did not happen over the
David Stern is disingenuous. How’s that for one of those million-dollar words that the NBA commissioner loves to use when talking to the hoi polloi about basketball? In slapping the San Antonio Spurs with a $250,000 fine for resting their trio of stars in a nationally televised game, Stern said in his customary, quite lawyerly fashion, “The result here is dictated by the totality of the facts in this case.” [Read more…]
Through his very last timeout huddle with his team, Oklahoma City Thunder coach Scott Brooks said all the right things. “We’re gonna treat them like they’re the champions,” Brooks instructed his club. “After this game, we’re gonna walk and shake their hands and acknowledge all of them. They beat us fair and square. However hard that hurts, they beat us fair and square. Give them credit.” Yes, Brooks said all the right things. It would have been nice if he had done all
OK, the NBA is back. Now what will it look like? In the days leading up to Christmas – and likely through the first month of a truncated season – there will be a fair amount of hand-wringing about the quality of play. Gloom-and-doom purists will reference the last lockout preceding the 1998-99 season, which by any measure was not among the NBA’s brightest days. In that forgettable season, the NBA was replete with quickly formed teams made up of poorly conditioned