Sport

NBA play-in tournament: Tuesday’s matchup preview

It’s play-in tournament time, and now that we know all the participants, let’s look at Day One, which will be the seven vs. eight seed in each conference. We have intriguing matchups here and two teams that weren’t expected to be dealing with the play-in when the season started back in October. Read more…

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The Rockets didn’t win much, but they were a blast to watch towards the end of the season

Once the NCAA Basketball Tournaments come around, the rest of the NBA season can feel like a slog. If you were already upset about players missing games, the volume gets ratcheted up on that, and at that point it’s fairly clear which teams are the best in the league. It’s also hard to muster excitement […]

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Evan Mobley has been great all season, but he’s been outplayed by Scottie Barnes for Rookie of the Year

The NBA Rookie of the Year vote has gotten even more complicated. Yesterday, ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reported that Evan Mobley sprained his left ankle and is out for the next three games. This comes at an especially difficult time for the Cleveland Cavaliers, who have lost four of their last five games and have not… […]

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The Cavs have again swept up the ashes left by LeBron’s departure, and built something impressive

They did it again, damn it. The Cleveland Cavaliers have somehow avoided the hellish purgatory typically levied against small-market teams in between superstar stints. The first time LeBron James left, after an initial seven-year stretch with Cleveland, it only took four seasons and four top-four Lottery picks in a… Read more…

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NCAA prospects who could turn into NBA All-Stars

As March Madness kicks off in a few days, the next class of NBA regulars will play in their final college games before transitioning into pre-draft prep, doing everything they can to hear their name called higher on June 23. Most of the top prospects for this summer’s draft will display their talents in the […]

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Jaylen Brown injury speaks to the fragility of Boston’s makeup

I almost wrote about the Celtics on Tuesday because I heard about these projections that had them with heavy title odds , but when I went to FiveThirtyEight to try to find them, it felt like I was trying to decipher binary code. So We held off to wait to see if anything came of […]

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Get ready for the next bunch of NBA bigs

Glance around the basketball landscape and you’ll see skyscrapers cast a shadow over the courts again. A whole new host of bigs are on the verge of challenging the convention that the NBA is a guard’s league. Read more…

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The biggest NBA bandwagon fan base at the midseason mark

As someone who is loyal to a fault, people who hop team allegiances never cease to make my brain hemorrhage. I don’t know how the LeBron James cult does it. “He’s my favorite player” is what a child says when they first discover what sports are. Yeah, I loved Penny Hardaway, too, but when I […]

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Cleveland has hope — and a pretty good basketball team

If there was a way to slyly tell you that Cleveland has the second best scoring defense in the NBA behind the Warriors, I would do that. But me doing the whole, “I bet you couldn’t guess who the second best scoring defense in the league is” bit isn’t clever, because Cleveland is in the […]