I watch/cover a lot of sports, but I don’t often have a strong opinion on how an event will turn out, before the fact. This is an exception. The Los Angeles Lakers and Denver Nuggets meet in Game 7 of their first-round NBA playoffs series tomorrow night, and I want to get on record with […]

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The Rams moved to St. Louis and became dead to me. Never appreciated the Raiders gangsta thing, and then they went back to Oakland. The Dodgers fell under the spell of the necromancer Frank McCourt. Never was an Angels guy. (I still consider them the Johnny-come-latelies who play 10-man ball.) Don’t care about hockey. Major […]

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An advantage to working at a morning newspaper on the west coast of the United States: Pretty much the whole sports day was over by the time we reached our deadline. We had complete news packages. Not much terra firma is behind California in the time-zone map, aside from Alaska and Hawaii. So the total […]

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I am astonished, from the other side of the globe, at the determination of Kobe Bryant. The man suffered a broken nose and an apparent concussion in the All-Star Game on Sunday … and three days later he scored 31 and played 33 minutes. While wearing a mask to protect his nose and while admitting […]

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I was reading a piece about quarterbacks and the NFL draft, and the name Art Schlichter came up. In, of course, a negative light. Schlichter was a quarterback who came out of Ohio State 30 years ago, and now is remembered pretty much only as a train wreck of a football player and person. And […]

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I cannot remember the last time I was paying such close attention to the NBA. And not just the Lakers. The whole league. (And yes, I am the same guy who three months ago wrote on this blog that the locked-out NBA could take the season off, for all I cared.) I am more interested, […]

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I’m as amazed by Jeremy Lin as anyone else. Coming from pretty much nowhere to ring up five consecutive 20-points-plus games and lead (yes, lead) the New York Knicks to five consecutive victories. His also is a story of multiculturalism, and demonstrates the global reach of the NBA. Thus, I decided to write about Jeremy […]

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The things you learn on Twitter. Well, from links posted on Twitter. With 140 characters, you can’t divulge much information on the site. In this case, it was a link to a site ranking sports teams globally by the number of their Facebook followers. And guess who was No. 4. (Did the headline tip that, […]

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It struck me as a bit odd to see a photo of Kobe Bryant hugging a teammate on the home page of espn.com. Kobe had passed Shaquille O’Neal to take fifth place in the NBA all-time scoring list, but the Lakers lost the game to the 76ers in Philadelphia, 95-90. And doesn’t losing the game […]

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I have seen pieces of NBA games, this season, over here in the UAE, and the whole of the Lakers-Bulls game on Christmas Day. I have seen all of the scores, however. Some former colleagues and I are in about the third decade of an NBA fantasy league (I have both LeBron and Kobe; feeling […]

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