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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That’s what it is — a “scandal”, yes? By definition: “An action or event that is regarded as morally or legally wrong and causing general public outrage.” It is not a “problem”. It is not an “issue”. It is one big, fat, ugly scandal that is the shame of the National Basketball Association: Teams choosing […]

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I knew this was coming. I read the stories in which the spineless commissioner Adam Silver said it was on the way … and shook my head. And now it is here, and most of Season 1 of The New Thing is done … and I hate the advertisements that appear on the left shoulder […]

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Two things I believe about sports autographs. 1) No one past the age of 12 should ever ask for one. Adults don’t ask for the signatures of other adults — unless they plan to sell them on for more money, which is vile, and another good reason why adults should not ask for autographs. And, […]

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