OK, yes. It turns out the Los Angeles Lakers needed more than LeBron James to be relevant in the 2018-19 NBA season. With 18 games to play, the club is 30-34, having lost seven of its past 10, including a game to the Phoenix Suns, owners of the worst record in the NBA. Before they […]

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Those of us who grew up with the UCLA basketball of John Wooden … and serial NCAA basketball championships … well, we were ruined for life. After 10 national titles in 12 seasons, including seven (!) consecutive through 1973, and an 88-game winning streak, unrealistic expectations became the norm. I distinctly remember listening to UCLA’s […]

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Stephen Curry, the Golden State Warriors standout, on Monday declared that no one has stepped on the moon, setting off a bit of agitation that one of the most prominent and successful players in the NBA would actually espouse that belief. Curry’s ridiculous notion is just this side of the bat-sh*t-crazy position Kyrie Irving of […]

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I saw the high school basketball debut of California native Tyson Chandler. Not many people can say that, because among the material I filed on deadline that night, December 2, 1997, is a note about how the Compton College gym was pretty much empty. Chandler was a 15-year-old freshman and, more importantly, already 6-foot-11. But […]

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Have I done this before? After 10-plus years I must have. But know what? I’m not going to check because the 10 teams I love to hate changes a bit, from year to year. This list would probably be unlike any other I might have done. For instance, most of my life I have wished […]

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No need to be an international NBA fan to guess the answer to that one. The top-two selling jerseys, at the least. That would be LeBron James, No. 1, as he should be, and Stephen Curry, three-time NBA champion. The NBA recently posted lists on the top 10 jerseys sold in Europe, during the 2017-18 […]

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Hmm. Not sure it was supposed to work out like this. Well, then again, maybe it was, once unrestricted free agent Paul George re-signed with Oklahoma City. If the Lakers were intent on providing LeBron James with a superstar-level wing man for his debut season in Los Angeles, and they were trying, it was going […]

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We have at least three more games in the 2018 NBA playoffs to mull this, but over the past weeks and months I have come to believe that LeBron James is the league’s GOAT — greatest of all time. Is he better than Kobe Bryant, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Bill Russell? Absolutely, I am […]

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I don’t spend a lot of time watching the NBA’s Toronto Raptors. For the longest time they were reliably awful, then they were good in the regular season before tending to run into LeBron James, who tended to run them over. Like this season, when James and the Cleveland Cavaliers swept the Raptors in the […]

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In the U.S., sports fans must be talking about the top-seeded University of Virginia losing tonight to a 16 seed in the NCAA basketball tournament. A No. 1 seed losing to a 16 had never happened, not in 135 previous encounters, until Virginia succumbed to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMDC) by 20 points […]

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