Defense wins championships. Over the years, the same concept is continuously preached… all the while Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Michael Jordan rule the world with unmatched offense. However, in the end over the past 25 years, that theory has been proven correct more consistently than not. Read More »

Originally posted in October of 2011, we’re revisiting some of our favorite Kobe Bryant content after he became the fifth player to ever score 30,000 points last night.

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Kobe Bryant has maintained his spot as the best basketball player in the world because, even as his nagging injuries pile up and he moves into his 30s, he relies more on his skills and fundamentals than simple athleticism and explosiveness. Read More »

In the new issue of Dime Magazine, we took a look at the best – and worst – the game has offered since the turn of the century. From the players to jerseys to sneakers to teams to even trends, you can relive the past 12 years by scooping up the new issue currently on newsstands nationwide. In those pages, you’ll find the following feature… Read More »

The NBA experience is one remembered in ink. According to the exhaustive NBA ink watchdog nbatattoos.tumblr.com, 55 percent of NBA players in 2011-12 had a tat. Knowing the quantity of the NBA’s tattoo love, however, is only half the answer: Who has done it best? There are too many to include on a top 10, be it Brandon Jennings’ Roscoe’s tribute, Rasheed Wallace’s Egyptian depiction or Monta Ellis’ family tree that grows up his torso. They’re all crazy good tats, which gives you an indication of the kind of level these 10 have to raise up to. Read More »

Are people really still criticizing great basketball players for wanting to play with other great players? Two years after LeBron went to Miami, four years after Boston brought together the Big Three, and about 50 years after Bill Russell played on some pretty loaded Celtics teams that everybody seems to love, this is still an issue? Jeff Van Gundy took his shot at schooling the ignorant while talking to ESPN about Dwight Howard‘s move to the star-studded Lakers: Read More »

Going into next season, pundits and fans are putting the pressure target directly on Carmelo Anthony‘s back. It makes sense. He’s a star that’s never won anything. He hasn’t gotten any better since coming to New York City, and has developed a reputation as both a selfish player and a coach killer who doesn’t play defense and likes to shoot contested 20-footers after holding the ball for 4.7 seconds. Fair? Not entirely. But when you don’t win, the stories and rumors floating around you will be predictable. Then, they’ll attach themselves and suck the life out of you. With all of that being said, why isn’t anyone talking about Amar’e Stoudemire? If there’s anyone in New York who needs to step it up this year, it’s STAT. Read More »

Building an Olympic team shouldn’t be like constructing an All-Star team. A one-off All-Star team doesn’t need chemistry, role players or defense (definitely not any defense). An Olympic U.S. team requires all that and a dose of humility, too, a point underscored after the 2004 bronze medal Olympic performance and the World Championship failures surrounding it. This summer has broken out the nostalgia from the 1992 team, and the otherworldly talent on it. Picking that squad must have been like having a dozen straight first-round picks in your fantasy league. No team, though, is perfect, even with that much leeway. Try as a committee might, there are always deserving players left out when it comes time to represent a country at the Olympics. Here then, are the best 20 players of the last 20 years who never made a U.S. Olympic team. Read More »

Now that Lindecision 2012 is all over, and Jeremy Lin is going to be formerly introduced as a Houston Rocket sometime soon, we need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. No, we’re not talking about how, for once, the Knicks resisted the urge to indulge as they have so many times before (even though, for once, there were PLENTY of reasons to do it). We’re talking about how we got here. Lin never wanted to leave New York, and opened up about it to SI.com yesterday. Read More »

Wow. Nothing else really needs to be said at this point. Jeremy Lin has done some cool things, but last night he took it to another level, wetting a pull-up jumper in Canada’s face with less than a second left in a tie game. The swag was ridiculous; In the huddle before he closed the fridge on the Raptors, Lin told Mike D’Antoni to give him an iso. Then he went out and capped the best night yet of the Jeremy Lin tour with New York’s come-from-behind 90-87 win. Read More »

Yeah, that guy we all saw last year wearing No. 6 for Miami in the NBA Finals? That guy wasn’t LeBron James. He was someone else, an impostor, a fake, a poser. LeBron says the real LeBron is back. Should we believe him? James says for the first time since he got to Miami, he’s back to the real him. More alive and ready to go. That’s good to know; We aren’t sure how anyone could deal with the amount of venom he had to take in last year. But still, the whispers about clutch failures, disappointments and lack of heart will only grow louder with each misstep. It’s a full-on disease for him now, and the only way to cure it is to win a championship and do it in a fashion that’ll have people forget about James’ past playoff struggles. Read More »