When we last lived full-time in the U.S., the Lakers were good and the Clippers were awful. Same-ol’ same-ol’, that is. Now, the Lakers are awful and the Clippers are … pretty good. Not as good as some thought they would be, certainly not champion contenders, but the best team in Los Angeles and a […]

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The NBA’s election for All-Star Game starters is silly. Any system that can overlook Russell Westbrook, he of “averaging a triple-double” fame, clearly is screwed up. That’s what happens when the league allows fans to account for 50 percent of the vote, players 25 percent and media “only” 25 percent. Let the media pick the […]

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Americans hate floppers in sports. It’s one reason that it took soccer so long to establish a toehold in the U.S. — all the guys who go down, writhing, grabbing at a knee or an ankle, after little (or no) contact. Dark forces in the NBA have tried to bring those vile tactics into basketball, […]

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At 11 a.m. yesterday, Derrick Rose of the New York Knicks joined his teammates for a shoot-around in Westchester, N.Y. Sometime between 1 and 2 p.m., the onetime MVP flew to Chicago without telling anyone in the Knicks organization. Which was a problem because the Knicks had a home game that night. Knicks coach Jeff […]

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We concluded most of our holiday activities on Christmas Eve, aside from getting a photo of “hanging Santa” (above, info below). So that left me free to eat a lot of turkey and watch NBA December 25th games till tryptophan and hoops overload knocked me out. I saw the whole of the game of the […]

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If you had told me, when I left the Inland Empire in 2008, that a high school basketball team from that area would be ranked No. 1 in the country within a decade … I probably would have laughed at the idea. And if pushed to declare which school might have become nationally relevant in […]

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Two remarkable events occurred this month involving major North American sports leagues. The NBA and Major League Baseball agreed to new collective bargaining agreements with their players. Before the old CBA ran out. No weeks or months of acrimony between deadlocked players and management. No games lost to a strike or a lockout. No seasons […]

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It was a rough three seasons for Los Angeles Lakers fans. Not long after the conclusion of a five-titles-in-10-years run, those fans saw their team become an NBA afterthought … if not a laughingstock. After the Lakers went 45-37 and made the playoffs, in 2012-13, the decline came hard and deep. To 27-55 in 2013-14 […]

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I belong to a fantasy basketball league made up of a half-dozen former co-workers, a competition we have been contesting for two or three decades now. The SHL (Sun Hoops League). Our league was developed independently of others, but it turns out we use pretty much the same stats as more formal leagues: Scoring, field-goal […]

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The Cleveland Indians have been not-winning things for a long time. No World Series championships since 1948. Last appeared in a World Series in 1997 and lost Game 7 in excruciating fashion. But we must thank them for an important something already this October:

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