With the beginning of every new NBA season, there are a few teams whom we consider to be favorites to win the championship. But as we all know, only one can be crowned NBA champions. And the teams that fall short go home forgotten and pretty much empty-handed.

Some people ask whether it’s worse to make it to the Finals and lose — to come so close to glory and not achieve your goal — or to get eliminated earlier on before the stakes get too high.

If you weren’t under a rock in the ’90s you know that Michael Jordan alone ruined the chances a lot of great players and teams to get a ring. Read More »

“It’s a fun one. That’s all I have to say.”

This is what award-winning filmmaker Dan Klores said right before the screening of his upcoming film, “Winning Time: Reggie Miller vs. The New York Knicks,” Monday night at the 57 Screening Room in Manhattan. Part of ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary series, the film explores how Reggie Miller proudly built his legend as “The Garden’s Greatest Villain,” in a battle of teams and cultures as big as Sodom and Gomorrah. Read More »

For six weeks leading up to this NBA season, I ranked and filed the League’s go-to guys. Using the rationale that even the most harmonious, balanced team has one if-all-else-fails alpha male that they look to in crunch time, I picked one player per squad for a final list of 30. (A concept that went over a lot of people’s heads; I can’t tell you how many “How is Ray Allen not on the list and Boris Diaw is?” e-mails I got.) Read More »

Are you ready for the dumbest NBA feud since Cheryl Miller and Scot Pollard got into a deathly intense, impromptu pissing contest in the “NBA Gametime” studio a few months ago? This one’s between Shaq and Steve Nash, and it started over Shaq’s reality show that nobody we know is currently watching. As the story goes, sometime last year when they were still teammates, Nash told Shaq about an idea he had for a reality show where he’d take on famous pro athletes in their own sports — a.k.a. the exact same concept of Shaq’s new show. (Which totally sounds like something Nash would do. He might even take a crack at some of those X-Games guys, and could play hockey with no danger of breaking the ice.) Read More »

Even more than in last week’s Orlando summer league, we’re seeing a trend develop in Vegas: The star rookies aren’t just getting the green light to fire away, they’re having the entire offense run through them. Guys like Tyreke Evans, Stephen Curry and DeMar DeRozan are getting 20-plus shots a day, and consider these are shorter games where almost everyone else on the court is trying to earn an NBA job … In yesterday’s big head-to-head matchup, Steph and Tyreke were like Allen Iverson and Steve Francis circa 2001: Curry put up 29 points (8-22 FG, 10-11 FT) and six boards, while Evans had 25 points (8-19 FG, 7-12 FT), 10 boards and five assists. Read More »

To clarify: Our NBA Fantasy Finals have nothing to do with the stat-driven “fantasy basketball” you play online. We’re taking NBA Finals teams throughout history and pitting them against each other to see what you think would happen. Assume both lineups are healthy, and the older team gets homecourt. Today it’s Ewing vs. Big Ben in their primes … Read More »

Phil Jackson isn’t a yell-and-scream type of coach. So in lieu of a remixed Al Pacino “Inches” speech or some outright Bob Knight-ish threats, whatever books Phil passed out to his Lakers leading up to last night’s Game 5 got the job done. Sparked by a 20-4 run in the first half, L.A. looked like a totally different team than the one that got smashed on Mother’s Day: They were getting after it and flying all over the place on D, executing their stuff crisply and efficiently on O, and letting their two All-Stars set the tone. Read More »