I recently moved to Ohio, a couple hours down the Turnpike from Cleveland, and a couple hours (but a more complicated drive) from Detroit. I’m not sure how this is going to affect my NBA allegiances. When I lived in Baltimore, the obvious choice was the Wizards, but sharing with Washington people goes against a lot of the things I believe in. In Halifax, the Raptors were the de facto local team, but they played halfway across the country, and
Today the Knicks got destroyed by the Spurs. The Spurs are still great, and the Knicks are missing Tyson Chandler, but this can’t say good things about the Knicks’ ability to stay near the top of the East. [Read more…]
On a night in which 13 games transpired, three players managed to rise above the rest as the stars of the evening: Anthony Davis of the New Orleans Pelicans, Blake Griffin of the Los Angeles Clippers and Vitor Faverani of the Boston Celtics. Davis, Faverani and Griffin may not be the first names to come to mind when it comes to elite statistical production, but each of those rising big men found a way to dominate on Day 4 of the
The Los Angeles Clippers won a franchise-record 56 games and had the NBA’s third best scoring differential last season. Then after taking a 2-0 lead on Memphis, they proceeded to lose four straight, making an unexpected and disappointing first-round exit. Which begs the question – were last season’s Clippers the regular season contender or the postseason pretender? The team did not rest on its regular-season laurels during the offseason, adding a coach with a championship ring in Doc Rivers, a new set
It’s a bad time to be a coach in the NBA. Six of the sixteen coaches whose teams made the playoffs just a couple months ago are no longer with their teams, and the future of a seventh is still in question. Is that really how it’s supposed to go? Jim Boylan in Milwaukee is one thing, the Bucks had a losing record and only made the playoffs because the rest of the East was miserable, but George Karl? Vinny
Every professional sport lives by the famous adage, “Coaches are hired to be fired.” It is well known that when things go south, it is the coach and not the players who get the blame and the ax. In the NBA, with 15 players collectively making somewhere north of $60 million in salary and being almost impossible to replace, it is no wonder that the coach and his assistants are the usual fall guys for poor performance. Few jobs carry so
This just in from Clipper Nation, where the home team can take its pick among top coaching candidates Lionel Hollins, Jeff Van Gundy, Byron Scott and Brian Shaw. And the winner is … Let me get back to you on that. No decision may soon be forthcoming from owner Donald Sterling, as none was for weeks after his people recommended firing Vinny Del Negro, a no-brainer they had set up that way with Sterling’s help. It’s hard to to handicap the Clippers with officials
Chris Paul is being blamed for the dismissal of Clippers coach Vinny Del Negro and isn’t happy about it. Paul has spent the last two seasons with the Clippers, which not coincidentally have been the best back-to-back seasons in the history of the once-woebegone franchise. Now Paul is approaching free agency, the timing of which at the root of the blame. Is he ticked off enough to leave the Clippers over it? [Read more…]