Not a headline we could have written often over the past 30 years. The Los Angeles Clippers look to have been asleep at the switch as the Dallas Mavericks pursued center DeAndre Jordan and said he would sign a four-year, $80 million contract with them. The Clippers were pummeled by media, and even by one […]

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Well, this is embarrassing. Not that the Los Angeles Clippers are strangers to embarrassment. The best team the Clippers have had, the team that fell one victory short of the Western Conference finals, just saw their third-best player, 7-foot center DeAndre Jordan, leave for the Dallas Mavericks. –For $20 million less than the Clippers presumably […]

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When deciding which team to support with my negligible psychic energy, I tend to make a choice based on geography. The hometown team over the guys next door. The guys next door over the guys further away. The regional guys over the ones from the other side of the country. If we sort it out […]

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Stephen Curry may not be the shortest or the lightest NBA MVP. But he seems the Most Likely to Break. He seems the most fragile. Which makes his current mastery of the game even more impressive. OK, little MVPs. Let’s consider them.

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It was a week ago that the Los Angeles Clippers, the city’s eternal “other” team, looked bound for the Western Conference finals. Much to our surprise. Up 3-1 on the Houston Rockets after a blowout victory in Game 4 … it was going to happen! The Clippers in the conference finals for the first time! […]

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Relegation would be a handy thing to have in U.S. sports. Most Americans, I think, understand the concept, by now. In nearly all global soccer leagues that aren’t Major League Soccer, two or three teams at the bottom of the standings go down to the next-lowest league. Which is pretty much a disaster. (And the […]

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When we left Southern California for Abu Dhabi, in October of 2009, the Los Angeles Clippers sucked. They had always sucked. They would always suck. It was in the stars. They were poorly run, under slum lord Donald Sterling, and unlucky as well, as the injury to their top draft pick of 2009, Blake Griffin, […]

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ESPN’s president yesterday told the New York Times that the network will not offer a new contract to Bill Simmons, the most prominent sports journalist in the U.S. now and, perhaps, ever. Simmons’s current deal, agreed to in 2010, runs out later this year and is thought to have been paying him $5 million a […]

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The Grantland sports website has a story that pretty much cuts to the heart of the lockerroom “relationship” between athletes and media. Deconstructing a rude comment Russell Westbrook of the Oklahoma City Thunder made to a hometown newspaper columnist. The relationship between jocks and hacks was never good, not when I entered the profession in […]

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In the “emperor has no clothes” category, boxing division, we have Manny Pacquaio, elite pugilist, apparently being told by so many fawning people that he can play professional basketball … that he is attempting to do so. This, when anyone paying attention knows that the 5-foot-6, 36-year-old fighter is, at best, a decent pickup-game player. […]

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