0 comments by Matt Zemek on 3/16/2016
It’s been a very long and taxing campaign — no, not the presidential primary race, but the NBA season. This journey to the NBA playoffs has been cleaner and clearer in the Western Conference, where the Golden State Warriors and San Antonio Spurs have lorded themselves over the rest of the conference and the league […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
For the San Antonio Spurs, it’s hard to be troubled by anyone or anything other than the Golden State Warriors right now. The Spurs have just dispatched the Oklahoma City Thunder and, more recently, the Los Angeles Clippers. More precisely, they’ve dominated the fourth quarter in each home game over the past five days. They […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 3/12/2016
Michael Beasley is, in a sense, the quintessential Houston Rocket, even though he’s been with the team for only four games. Beasley fits right into the Rockets’ overall pattern of being… well… largely free of patterns. Houston is just about impossible to neatly slot into any kind of pattern or category other than one: It […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 3/10/2016
The buzz in the Eastern Conference might revolve around the Toronto Raptors, the team with the best chance of knocking off the Cleveland Cavaliers. Buzz for coach of the year is primarily focused on the Western Conference, but in the East, Brad Stevens has done the most with a given set of resources. One could […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 3/9/2016
The Utah Jazz needed the Washington Wizards to defeat the Portland Trail Blazers Tuesday night in Oregon. Know who else needed the Wizards to beat the Blazers in the Northwest? The Wizards. It was a bad night for two teams trying to chase down one of the final playoff spots in their respective conferences. Tipping-point […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
Remember the month of January, a time when the New York Knicks knew how to play basketball? The calendar, on March 10, says January existed 40 days ago. It might as well be 400 days, because the Knicks’ season has become interminably long. Since that point in the season when the future of this organization actually […]
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It wasn’t the day the music died — Tuesday was the day the Magic died. Many California dreams have been born in Los Angeles, but for an Eastern Conference team on a late-season West Coast swing, visions of an NBA playoff berth came to rest against the Lakers. It’s time to think about the future […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 3/7/2016
College basketball teams — not being as responsible as NBA teams — blow big leads all the time. Over the past week of zany conference tournament action, Austin Peay overcame a 19-point second-half deficit to win the Ohio Valley Tournament. Northern Iowa led Evansville by 17 in the second half of the Missouri Valley Tournament […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 3/6/2016
It is an immutable fact of NBA life: The team with LeBron James on it will always be a team drenched in drama. That the palace intrigues attached to any LeBron team are often created externally — by the press — is its own discussion. The business of sports blogging is such that high-profile figures […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 3/5/2016
The 2016 NBA season has been marked by a small cluster of teams at the top, a few especially bad teams at the bottom, and a broad, mushy middle that has not decided what it wants to be. That mushy middle was epitomized by the Memphis Grizzlies’ 94-88 win over the Utah Jazz on Friday […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 3/3/2016
In 2011, the Butler Bulldogs defeated Billy Donovan’s Florida Gators to reach the Final Four. That evening in New Orleans, the winning coach said that Donovan outcoached him. Brad Stevens enjoyed a victory celebration with his Butler players, but he said that he didn’t get the better of Donovan in that day’s coaching clash. A […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
It’s not wrong to be extremely concerned about the Oklahoma City Thunder following Wednesday night’s ugly loss against the Los Angeles Clippers. The unvarnished truth of a Grade-A gack attack offers more than enough reason to question the future of this franchise. Facts – presented simply – represent the best editorial commentary about the wayward […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 3/2/2016
Coaches, sports psychologists, executives — anyone invested in seeing athletes perform better — would tell you: Basketball is basketball. It’s the same game anywhere you play it. The court’s the same. The basketball is the same. Free throws are still 15-foot shots. Three-pointers are still 23 feet and 9 inches, except in the corners. Switching, […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
DeAndre Jordan. Andre Drummond. Dwight Howard. These and other NBA big men aren’t failed basketball players by any means. They are, however, failures as free throw shooters. It’s a pretty big deal when — under NBA rules that are likely to be revised in the coming offseason — Team B can purposefully foul so that […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 3/1/2016
When the 2015 Houston Rockets completed an all-time comeback in Game 6 of the Western Conference semifinals, the death-defying feat turned around the series and led to a substantial, tangible result. Houston, you’re not in 2015 anymore. It’s true that the 2016 Rockets recalled their 2015 escape from the clutches of the Los Angeles Clippers […]
