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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Sports injuries have become a “thing”. Seemingly not a day goes by without some fairly prominent athlete going down with a prominent injury. I remember when none of us were quite sure what an oblique was, but straining/tearing it would put a guy on the shelf for weeks. Those were the good old days. Now […]

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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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Elfrid Payton is a point guard drafted out of Louisiana Lafeyette by the Orlando Magic with the 10th pick of the 2014 draft. Last week, the Magic traded him to the Phoenix Suns in a move from one bad team to another. Payton is best known for one thing: His comically long hair. Which is […]

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No one rides high forever. We may think we will, but it never quite ends that way. Life and/or death humbles us. That notion hit me again tonight, as the Cleveland Cavaliers offloaded guard Isaiah Thomas to the Los Angeles Lakers. Eight months ago, Thomas finished fifth in the NBA’s Most Valuable Player voting, just […]

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That was reality that slapped the Los Angeles Lakers in the face. Magic Johnson and Rob Pelinka, the duo responsible for the club’s roster, apparently have been disabused of the notion that a free-agent superstar or two is keen to join their team this summer. According to espn.com, the Lakers no longer are banking that […]

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Goodness, the NBA is awful right now. Lots of bad teams. Scads of nearly unwatchable games. Good teams unable to produce a genuine effort. Apparently, it is so difficult to win consecutive games on the road, or back-to-backs anywhere, that we should go back and worship the 2015-16 Golden State Warriors — who somehow went […]

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If you live in France and get a batch of English-language programming on your TV deal … you can watch a ton of NBA games. There are the ESPN nights, and the TNT nights and whoever has the weekends … and it feels like I can count on an NBA doubleheader at least four nights […]

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Here are the kickoffs for the NFL’s conference championship games tomorrow. That is, if you live under the umbrella of Pacific Standard Time. New England at Jacksonville, 12:05 p.m. Philadelphia at Minnesota, 3:40 p.m. Convenient, as a viewer, no? Well, yes, and you should know it is not like that everywhere. If you have lived […]

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