Steve Blake offensive rebounds. Pau-to-Dwight lobs. Kobe Bryant M-V-P chants reverberating through the arena. With the way the Lakers’ 113-106 win in Portland ended, you would’ve thought all was right for L.A. They had finally held off the hot-shooting Blazers, going on a 17-2 run to start the second half and then an 8-0 run in the middle of the fourth before putting the clamps on Portland for the final five minutes. Read More »

The NBA All-Star Game is a showcase normally reserved for the great players who actually win games, and yet we haven’t heard one complaint about how Jrue Holiday is going to Houston next month. He’s been so good this season (remember, this cat is still only 22 years old) that everyone forgets his team kind of sucks. In a 17-point beating of New York, Holiday had 31 points at the end of the third quarter, finishing with a career-high 35. Read More »

With so much softness leaking into the modern game, we’re always anxious to annoint the next great rivalry. Where is the next Bulls-Knicks going to come from? Or the next Sacramento-Los Angeles? Everyone loves when players get a little nasty, and last night in Boston, the Celtics and Nets put on the first real throwdown of the season. Late in the first half, the Celtics weren’t getting any foul calls, and were getting run off their own floor. Read More »

Once the Lakers finished off their all-you-can-eat buffet of a summer, there was really only one man for the job. Sure Mike Brown was the coach at the time, but all along, didn’t this job have Phil Jackson‘s name written all over it? The job is his to lose now, with everyone from Kobe Bryant calling him the greatest coach in sports to Jim Buss sitting on his ego for once and acknowledging PJ is the man to even Jackson himself phoning his old assistants to check on their availability, according to the Los Angeles Times. Read More »

Yes, Emeka Okafor came out with a mixed bag in Washington’s 10-point loss in Brooklyn last night. But he did have a move in the opening minutes that literally made me jump off the couch. Taking advantage of a mismatch on the block with Joe Johnson, Okafor drop-stepped and then brought the hammer down on Kris Humphries‘ head. Read More »

Brooklyn’s executives had to be happy with the Nets’ opening night at the Barclays Center. Not only did they get the Wizards, one of the league’s worst teams, but they got them with people like John Wall and Nene out in street clothes. Washington has more injury problems than perhaps everyone outside of their neighbors from Baltimore (the Ravens), so it wasn’t surprising to see Brooklyn open up the new arena (at least basketball-wise) with a 98-88 win behind 18 points and 11 rebounds from Brook Lopez. Read More »

Think back. Can you remember who shot the Bulls back into contender form with countless threes in between the post-Michael Jordan and pre-Derrick Rose eras? He’s a two at heart in a point guard’s body. He was drafted No. 3 in 2004 after leading UConn to a national championship. Ben Gordon is 29 now, in his ninth season in the league, and as all the expectations that he would lead Chicago back to the promised land faded, so did his name. Read More »

Kevin Ollie takes over today as coach of Connecticut, succeeding his current boss and former coach at UConn, Jim Calhoun. Both were part of a combination farewell/introductory press conference today in Storrs that took listeners through his rocky beginning at Boston’s Northeastern, his drive down to his own introductory presser at UConn with the Boston Globe‘s Jackie MacMullan, and his three national titles. Those 26 years are hard to sum up, with his history with the NCAA’s infractions committee abutting his three title plaques, in one easy way. There are so many moments from that span that you’ll see a lot of top-10 lists. Read More »

Thirty names. The best 30 names. The dramatic summer of 2010 crafted the landscape of the NBA, when LeBron James and Chris Bosh landed in Miami, Amar’e Stoudemire joined up with the Knicks and fans everywhere started burning jerseys at an alarming rate. The following two summers lacked the same drama, and honestly, it would be foolish to expect another 2010 summer anytime soon. Those two-to-three months were game-changing. Read More »

Interesting. It says here that this “National Basketball Association” has other teams besides the Miami Heat and Oklahoma City Thunder. Who knew? With Wednesday being a day off from the Finals — albeit not a day off from everybody overreacting to the Finals — some of those other teams were able to borrow the spotlight while figuring out how they can get where the Heat and Thunder are right now … The lowly Hornets and even lowlier Wizards pulled off a trade: Rashard Lewis and a 2nd-round pick to New Orleans for Emeka Okafor and Trevor Ariza. Read More »