Normally, I don’t pay much attention to the Cleveland Cavaliers. Certainly not before LeBron James, and presumably not after. But I’ve been looking at the Cavs for a couple of weeks, before and after The Decision, and … Things are going to be horrible there. The night of The Decision, Cavs owner Dan Gilbert famously […]

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The day after The Decision, that contemporary monument to bad ideas (New Coke, anyone?), I offered to write a commentary/analysis on LeBron James’s decision to commit to Miami and abandon Cleveland. I ended up trashing LeBron and The Decision … in a column I linked to a few days ago.  But before I realized I […]

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I couldn’t help myself. I was going to approach this as a commentary, a think piece. I spent an hour researching other three-player groupings of stars in NBA history … making charts and compiling stax … my explanatory-journalism approach to LeBron James and the Miami Heat fiasco … and then I just went off, instead. […]

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LeBron James for the first seven years of his NBA career has been an interesting case. It would be easy to dislike the guy. So very, very full of himself. So in our faces, commercially. That whole “global icon” hubris. He is almost inescapable, but not in the “aw, heck, we love the big lug” […]

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It’s chaos over there in the States, right? Owners and general managers ricocheting around the country chasing LeBron James and the other NBA free agents as of 12:01 EDT Thursday, trying to bundle up enough cash to sign Bron-Bron and all those other guys. We here at The National, in the United Arab Emirates, are […]

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I celebrated, two weeks ago, while traveling in Italy, the fact that I would not be able to see the Lakers and Celtics on live television in the NBA Finals. Because 1) it would agitate me and 2) these things usually end so badly for the Lakers. That does not mean I haven’t kept close […]

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As we mentioned earlier, it’s a good thing we’re not watching the NBA Finals live. Too stressful. Anyway, it starts at about 3 a.m. local time, and that’s late, even on vacation. However, we have one observation about Game 2 that may be some encouragement for glum Lakers fans: And it is: 11-for-16. That is […]

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After traveling all day down the mountain-spackled length of Italy — and no, you can’t find a dozen places flat enough to plow 40 acres anywhere south of Rome — finally some time to do my tiny bit on UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, the most important sports figure in Southern California over the last […]

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Thank goodness I won’t be able to see the Lakers and Celtics. Not that I don’t care. Oh, on the contrary. I care scads. Tons. Oodles. It’s just that I come from that generation of Lakers fans/followers who remember the 1960s … and far too well, when it comes to the Lakers and Celtics. Does […]

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Just sayin’. No baseball team ever had come back from a 3-0 deficit in games to win a playoff series … until the Boston Red Sox memorably did it against the New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series in 2004. But six years later, fans in Boston may not be celebrating that precedent-setting […]

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