Sometimes in the NBA Playoffs, two squads will matchup and eventually it’ll become so obvious who the better team is that even the players just have to give in. The Knicks and Celtics have reached that point, and they got there in the early moments of the second half during New York’s 90-76 Game 3 win. Carmelo Anthony was lighting people up on his way to 26 points, and whenever he took a break, J.R. Smith (15 points) responded with fadeaways and pull-ups. Read More »

Every year, NBA players, owners, coaches and general managers donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to charity. Not all of their philanthropy is voluntary. In the NBA, it’s a fineable offense to wear a headband upside down, to publicly criticize an official, or to execute a chin-up on the rim. As you can imagine, some of these things happen quite frequently. Read More »

There may not be a more fascinating front office than Minnesota’s, where GM David Kahn has been a lightning rod of criticism ever since 2009, when he succeeded Kevin McHale. He drafted Ricky Rubio and Jonny Flynn with consecutive picks in the same 2009 NBA Draft and gave Darko Milicic a $20 million contract, but also kept Kevin Love in uniform until at least 2015. This offseason was no different in Minneapolis, either. Most interesting are the doubts and decisions stemming from the latest moves from inside the organization itself. Read More »

Leave it to Kanye West to postpone the summer as long as David Stern did the NBA season a year ago. The G.O.O.D. Music performance that capped off Jay-Z’s Made in America music festival teased us almost as much as a new NBA 2K13 trailer from 2K Sports. But the best things in life are always worth the wait. Now, Yeezy has dropped Cruel Summer upon us, while the NBA’s offseason is at a dead period until training camp starts. Read More »

Portland and Minnesota have representatives in Las Vegas this week, carrying on a mini-feud that started with one team unwittingly a part of it, sucked in by people now long gone. Portland’s Neil Olshey and Minnesota’s David Kahn are GMs spending their time in Las Vegas trying not to look at one another when they’re not running around the city trying to deliver offer sheets. It’s a bizarre feud that has culminated (I think) with one of the more interesting free agency stories of this summer, Nicolas Batum, through a winding series of missteps by players, front-office types and even co-workers of those involved. For a feud dealing with teams that are at best mid-level squads in the Western Conference, it has surprisingly stuck. Here’s how it got this way. Read More »

Note to self: never ask an NBA star if his team, team A, can beat team B. These guys don’t become the greatest players in the world without having an overflow of confidence, blinders atop their eyes and extreme tunnel vision. If that’s a rule we should all live by, especially those in the sports media who have the access to routinely ask these questions, then an absolute law needs to be this: never ask Michael Jordan whether a team he’s on might lose. Just don’t do it. Well, someone did yesterday, repeating what Kobe Bryant said about the aforementioned Dream Team vs. Team USA argument. What was MJ’s response? Laughter. Read More »

Kevin Love is an All-Star, an MVP candidate, and a Team USA player slotted for a ton of playing time. Yet he just can’t quite seem to find the team success that many of his contemporaries have in the NBA. It didn’t help that Ricky Rubio went down for the year with a torn ACL, or that Minnesota has been in a rebuilding stage ever since he arrived, missing the playoffs for the last eight years in a row. But now Kevin Love is speaking out, because he’s just tired of losing. Read More »

The 3 p.m., March 15 trade deadline has come and gone as fast as your brackets will be busted by this weekend’s end. Most cats around the league can now breathe easy, knowing they haven’t been dealt and can focus on the remaining part of the schedule. Others, however, must deal with the reality they were shipped out like yesterday’s garbage. Either way, this a time for them to regroup and stop commenting on every rumor that appears on blogs and Twitter. Read More »

The clock is ticking. As if this compressed season hasn’t gone by fast enough, the NBA’s trade deadline is approaching as fast as Kobe deciding to pull-up for a jumper. March 15 marks the last possible day that teams can trade cats to either improve their shot to make a real title run or look to revamp their squads with an eye towards the future. As basketball fans, we all love to discuss trade scenarios probably more so than the actual play at hand. Now it’s time for GMs to get on the phone and make something happen. Read More »

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